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Friday, November 06, 2009
Change Ways To Fight Music Copyright Theft
By Robert Parker
Student, UNM Anderson School of Management
For several years now, intellectual copyright piracy violations via file-sharing have been a public issue for the stakeholders involved. But courses of action legal entities such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have taken recently are not effective against torrent files or bit-torrent sites, which have been the latest technology in file-sharing.
Much like the World Trade Organization began to deal with regulation of trade between countries by establishing a framework for negotiating trade and dispute resolution processes, such a similar entity is necessary to efficiently address this issue that has arisen out of technology and globalization.
Issues that arose out of the “Pirate Bay” trial that took place in Sweden this spring show how technological and legal situations are a transnational issue needing a global solution.
A bit-torrent user in the United States downloads a copy of an artist's album. In order to do this, the user downloads a file that sits on a server in Sweden, where they have differing copyright laws. This file though, does not contain the actual music, it merely points to Internet addresses of individuals that do have the file. The geographic locations of these numerous individuals could be anywhere in the world, where their nations may view copyright laws differently.
A torrent program then quickly downloads the file from several people by retrieving different pieces of the file from all the possible sources listed in the torrent file. The torrent program then reorganizes all the data and the file is complete.
Your local copy, then, becomes one from the many different people sharing this file. It is efficient because it is a quick, reliable, and convenient way to distribute any type of file.
This technology and networking type is here to stay, and from a technological standpoint it is arguably one of the greatest ways to share and host files. Blizzard, the company that produces the popular game World of Warcraft, distributes patches and game updates using torrent file technology.
This type of file sharing is not going to stop, and the protocols of bit-torrents are being used by major industries. The manner in which the sites of information pirates are brought down and arise is like a game of Whack-a-Mole; as soon as the one media industry cracks down on one site, the site is shut down but another one pops up elsewhere using the code and framework of the previous site. The very nature of the technology and dedication of the pirates repeatedly evade legal authorities.
The music industry needs to adapt to a new model of business in the information age. By hunting down one or two individuals in a case, the industry really isn't going to stop the millions of people from downloading. If the industry is going to continue its prosecutions, then it needs to band together better on copyright enforcement, the nations involved and the media industries involved. All these parties need to come together to set standards, supervise and liberalize electronic media trade in order to efficiently address issues relating to copyright infringing bit-torrent downloads.
Perhaps President Obama could use his influence to initiate such an organization.
Other Anderson School of Management students contributed to this column.
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