File-sharing Technologies Research Articles

China’s New Developments in Crackdown on Criminal Copyright Infringement in the Digital Era

Abstract Under the external pressure mainly in the frame of the TRIPS and out of the intrinsic motivation to strengthen intellectual property protection from the height of national strategy, China raised the protective level under criminal law and introduced punitive damages in all intellectual property infringement cases. Rulemaking activities enlarged the scope of criminal offences of Internet piracy, and law enforcement became more active than before. Specifically, tricks for pirating online games, including setting up a private service and hacking games to cheat can be crimes. Additionally, the unauthorised dissemination of copyrighted works through information networks (peer-to-peer file-sharing technology or leeching websites) and circumvention or disability of technological protection measures have been criminalised. The Internet service provider may face a criminal sanction when it fails to delete or block pirated content. The commercial scale, a constructive element of criminal copyright infringement, gained a measuring standard in online piracy cases.

Creativity in Virtual Teams: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

Abstract As communication technology capabilities have improved and the globalization of the workforce has resulted in distributed teams, organizations have been shifting towards virtual teams and virtual meetings over the last decade. This trend has been accelerated with current work-from-home orders due to COVID-19. Even though virtual collaboration has, in the past, been the focus of multiple studies, there are some surprising gaps in our knowledge. For instance, there are few empirical studies examining the impact of virtual devices and tools on creative problem-solving. While there is a substantial body of research on electronic brainstorming and the use of virtual tools for idea generation, less is known about earlier processes such as problem construction or later processes such as idea evaluation and idea selection. Furthermore, as a dynamic process, creativity and innovation is heavily influenced by the people engaged in the process and their collaborative environment, yet there is a gap in the literature regarding the type of virtual tools used in the process (i.e., audio + video vs. audio alone, or the use of file-sharing technologies). In this paper, we will review the current literature on virtual teams, virtual meetings, and creativity. We will then explore theoretical frameworks such as media richness theory that can help us understand how virtuality and virtual tools may influence team creativity across the dynamic range of the creative problem-solving process. Finally, given the limited research in the domain of virtual team creativity we provide questions to help guide future research. Research questions will help identify those areas where virtual teams may be beneficial for creativity and areas where virtual teams may be likely to perform less effectively on creative tasks.

Songwriting with digital audio workstations in an online community

Digital audio workstations and online file-sharing technology may be combined to create opportunities for collaborations among many groups, including performing ensembles, music technology classes, professional songwriters and preservice music teachers. This article presents a model for a digitally mediated online collaboration that focuses on popular music songwriting activities in school and higher education settings. Using an example from a high school music production class that collaborated with an undergraduate music education course through Google Docs and a file-sharing platform, the author outlines steps towards facilitating partnerships that focus on creating music in an online community. Such collaborations may help remove barriers between our classrooms and our communities as music teachers leverage technology to develop relationships with creators and performers of popular music everywhere.

Can Piracy Increase Innovation? The Software Industry’s Response to Online File Sharing

Existing theory predicts two possible and opposing competitive responses by firms to digital piracy, resulting in an ambiguous impact on innovation. We resolve this tension by using a natural experiment stemming from a shock to file-sharing technology, which led to a sudden increase in piracy in the early 2000's, to analyze the impact of piracy on innovation in the software industry. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental-variables estimators to compare a treatment group of consumer-focused software firms with a matched control group of enterprise-focused software firms, we find that piracy led to an increase in subsequent R&D spending, copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent firms. However, we find that firms decreased their rate of new product releases following the rise in piracy. We conclude that piracy pushes firms to develop new products that are superior to those available as pirated substitutes, but this innovation may reach the public at a slower pace. Our findings have implications for managers pursuing value appropriation in knowledge-based industries while faced with the threat of digital piracy.

Anti-Market Research: Piracy, New Media Metrics, and Commodity Communities

Over a decade after Napster’s introduction, file sharing programs still shoulder much of the blame for music and other media’s declining sales. Although labels and industry associations point their fingers at the harm digital piracy and file-sharing cause, they are less likely to admit the extent to which these anti-markets inform everyday decisions. File-sharing technologies create networks of users that serve as profitable data for ratings and metrics agencies. Using a case study of BigChampagne and its relationship to Napster, this article considers how the look, structure, and function of file-sharing software helped turn an economically threatening community into a commodity and how piracy’s disruptive potential is always in tension with processes of commodification.

Napster and the press: Framing music technology

Fifteen years ago, a new file-sharing technology called Napster provided college students and adults alike with a novel way of engaging with both the Internet and popular music. In this paper, we examine how the media framed Napster for an audience that largely was not Internet savvy at a time when listening to music was still tied to physical media. We conducted a textual analysis of stories regarding Napster appearing in both the specialized music press and the general mainstream media. We found that the mainstream media devoted considerable coverage to Napster and the file-sharing issues surrounding it while the music press barely mentioned the technology. Multiple themes emerged, some familiar to our ongoing conversation regarding the impact of new technologies, that place Napster at the nexus of cultural struggles over technology and power.

Digital File Sharing and Copyright Law in Lithuania. The Comparative Perspective.

The Internet is a shared resource, a cooperative network built out of millions of hosts all over the world. Its popularity is unquestionable and the necessity is enormous. However, the Internet is becoming a headache for intellectual property right holders. The advent of file-sharing technology has allowed consumers to copy music, books, video games and other protected works on an unprecedented scale at minimal cost. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology allows people to exchange information over the Internet via many equal or ‘peer’ machines linked across a network, rather than on a central server. The problem is (as some copyright holders claim) that this kind of easy copying may destroy the incentives to create and 'kill' copyrights. The sharing trend indeed is vastly used to copy protected works. During the years the copyright law has been negotiated among the representatives of copyright-owning and copyright-using industries while the public, which is expected and encouraged to use copyrighted works (and thus to generate revenue for copyright owners), have been left apart. The rights of the public were not clearly expressed and today it has become a problem. The holders of copyrights by making use of the strict copyright law and with the help of national courts are suing peer-to-peer technology providers as well as individual users. But while copying of copyrighted materials is illegal, sharing and exchanging information is not. And the same sharing trend on the other hand, may advance various legal goals. This paper is asking is it really true that digital sharing is only a tool for intellectual property law violations or can it possibly be used for legal purposes? If both are true, where does the border lie and when does the digital sharing is the copyright infringement? This thesis actually deals with the peer-to-peer technology while focusing on the Lithuanian peer-to-peer practice and its copyright laws. The case of the Lithuanian sharing site Linkomanija is presented and scrutinized, while comparing other national courts' rulings in the digital sharing field. The national legislation is also explored and some criticism is expressed. The question whether copyright laws as they stand today are sufficient in the digital age is raised.

The Managing of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Technologies’ Network Effect: An Adaptation of Actor-Network Theory

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technologies have impacted the music industry, including its strategies for the distribution of the musical products, for more than a decade now. As a result, music labels have delayed full digitization of their industry in fear of “online music piracy”. The present paper reviews the historical context of the evolution of the music industry from 1999 to 2012. Using Actor-Network theory, the paper examines the strategies that helped the music industry to translate new actors’ effect in order to sustain music labels’ business on their path to digitize music distribution. I will discuss the impact of new digital policies and methods of governing online behavior including the business concept of “entrepreneurship” as they may potentially affect the future of public domain within the framework of consumer rights.

Competition against peer-to-peer networks

In this paper, we consider the competition of a monopolistic provider of information products against a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that offers illegal versions of the products. We focus on the role of direct externalities caused by the P2P file-sharing technology rather than the indirect consumption externalities studied previously in the literature. In our model the market structure is endogenous and we characterize three possible scenarios where the firm uses monopoly pricing, network-deterring pricing, and network-accommodating pricing, respectively. We make a full comparative-static analysis of prices, quantities, profits, consumer surplus and total surplus for each of the scenarios as well as a comparison across scenarios. We show that in the case of network-accommodating pricing, the firm sets a higher price when facing a lower generic cost factor of downloading. Furthermore, in all scenarios, profits for the firm unambiguously decrease when the generic cost factor of downloading declines; total welfare unambiguously increases, however, a result that has implications for intellectual property rights enforcement policy.

The perils of sharing

Filesharing technologies, using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, are shaping up to be one of the major threats of the coming year. They're being exploited to spread malware, through deliberately infected or modified versions of proprietary software and by the use of P2P mechanisms for botnet command and control systems. Filesharing networks are also rich hunting grounds for data thieves looking for personal information, in order to commit identity theft, or for confidential files. Attempts to limit or eliminate P2P networks - for example, through laws restricting their use - could just drive the problem underground, with filesharers adopting VPN and other encryption or masking technologies. Filesharing technologies, using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, are shaping up to be one of the major threats of the coming year. They're being exploited to spread and control malware and steal data. And attempts to limit or eliminate them could just drive the problem underground.

Primary-Backup Access Control Scheme for Securing P2P File-Sharing Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems have gained large interests among the internet users. However, wide-scale applications of P2P file-sharing technologies are constrained by the limitations associated with the sophisticated control mechanisms. Moreover, the decentralized and anonymous characteristics of P2P environments make it more difficult to control accesses on the shared resources, especially for using traditional access control methods. To overcome these limitations, we propose a role-based access control architecture for P2P file-sharing systems that supports autonomous decisions and centralized controls. The architecture integrates policies of credential, identity and role-based access control models to provide scalable, efficient and fault-tolerant access control services. Furthermore, we employ the primary-backup (PB) scheme to preserve P2P decentralized structure and peers' autonomy property while enabling collaboration between peers. In particular, we propose a method for setting up interoperating relationships between domains by role mappings and resolve two kinds of interoperability conflicts while mapping roles from foreign domain to local domain without centralized authority. We believe that the proposed architecture is realistic, efficient and can provide controlled communications between peers. Index Terms—P2P, role based access control, credential, primary-backup

Solutions to P2P Copyright Crisis in Hong Kong

My research question is how to fashion an appropriate legal solution to critical copyright problems created by the advent of P2P distribution technology in Hong Kong. My approach is to recommend revisions to copyright law in order to achieve a balance between various interests. The proposed legal solution will be designed to be implemented together with other non-legal solutions.To be specific, my research is to examine whether it is appropriate to hold P2P users criminally liable for P2P pirate usage, whether the copyright of Hong Kong should be amended to introduce a new legal liability for ISPs in the fight against Internet piracy, and if so, under what circumstances the liability of ISPs will arise.The theoretical framework of balance of interests will be the central theme of my research. Balance of interests is the underlying principle of the intellectual property law, especially in this digital environment. The main purpose of intellectual property laws is to strike a reasonable balance between authors' right to protect their works and the public interest in the free flow of information.As Associate Professor Li Yahong stated, P2P copyright infringement challenged balance of interests, a classic, eternal dilemma of copyright law. New copying technology is always disruptive to old copyright market where works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms. As one of the copying technology innovations, P2P has broken the balance of interests which demands to be rebuilt immediately.My research will examine the balance of interests in three perspectives, the historical, market, and comparative institutional analysis, and then draw a conclusion that to what extent the legal solution should involve in solving this P2P crisis. Based on this conclusion, my research will compare the domestic legal system with others in foreign jurisdictions, in order to design a feasible legal solution to rebuild the broken balance of interests. P2P piracy is one of the greatest challenges faced by the copyright law today, and has been proven to be a true hydra for the entertainment industries, including recording, publishing, television, and motion picture industries. As every proposed solution has its own limitation, the outcome of my research will lead to a optimized combination of these solutions including a well-designed legal solution to rebuild balance of interests in P2P copyright crisis.One thing more significant is that the legal revisions in P2P solutions will serve as an important part of the new legal frame work of copyright protection in digital era. P2P technology is a good representative of the internet file-sharing technologies in the digital environment. With the fast technology development, more and more advanced file-sharing technologies will come out in a short time. The outcome of my research will not only provide solutions to P2P crisis, but also reform the copyright law to prevent future crises of up-coming file sharing innovations. The principles and methods set up in this research, like market analysis and comparative institutions analysis, can be utilized to examine other new internet services. Liability scope of the uploading and downloading activities will be determined and rules to pursuing secondary liability of ISPs will be figured out in my research.

The Exclusive Rights of 'Distribution', 'Communication to the Public' and 'Making Available' Under the WIPO Copyright Treaty: Lessons for Other Jurisdictions from the Hong Kong BitTorrent Case

Articles 6 and 8 of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty prescribe minimum standards for the distribution (or making available) and public communication of copyrighted works, with resulting national implementations that have been varied and inconsistent. This article examines the state of current copyright law in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore, in light of the 2007 landmark BitTorrent criminal copyright case from Hong Kong, and concludes that the lack of international norms and uniformity remains a cause for concern in the digital age, where online activities blur the line between physical and intangible distribution and communication. This concern is illustrated by the current spate of ongoing litigation in the United States regarding the distinction between reproductions and distributions by users of peer-to-peer filesharing technology.

Online music piracy's controversy: pay sites versus free, who will prevail?

Online piracy may substantially undermine intellectual property rights of digital goods. There is much controversy concerning the issue of music piracy over the internet and the implementation of new information technology in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with the rebirth of Napster and other pay sites. In particular, the exchange of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) electronic commerce is fast gaining acceptance in the user community. This paper concentrates on the music industry. In recent years, with the rapid growth of the internet, the situation of music piracy has become increasingly serious. File-sharing technologies have created new market dynamics and posed a great challenge to the music industry to try and retain customers. Consumers have created anonymous online networks to exchange audio files at little cost. This has led to millions of shared, illegal copies of music files and related sales losses to the industry. Legal efforts to counter this trend have lagged the advances in technology. Factor analysis and related hypothesis-testing procedures of 285 professionals in the service sector in the Pittsburgh, PA have uncovered several interesting scenarios of traditional music store selling with those of online-based strategies.

Music piracy among students on the university campus: Do males and females react differently?

This paper analyzes the role that gender plays on the likelihood and extent of peer-to-peer music file-sharing, a key issue in the debate on copyright protection. We use an extensive data set on university students, a core demographic in the use of file-sharing technologies. The empirical results suggest that male and female students respond differently to risk and economic incentives. Specifically, females tend to react more consistently with expected risk and economic deterrent factors, while males exhibit more sporadic behavior.

In brief: colleges taking file-sharing into their own hands

Colleges and universities have been in the forefront of the US debate over file-sharing technology. College students, heavy per capita consumers of digital music, were among the most active file-sharing network users, angering content providers for not observing intellectual property claims. LionShare combines P2P technology that ties in a user's activity to their network identification. LionShare users could connect to even larger authenticated networks of P2P users, enabling collaborative research over academic and grid networks.

File-Sharing, Sampling, and Music Distribution

The use of file-sharing technologies, so-called Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, to copy music files has become common since the arrival of Napster. P2P networks may actually improve the matching between products and buyers - we call this the matching effect. For a label the downside of P2P networks is that consumers receive a copy which, although it is an imperfect substitute to the original, may reduce their willingness-to-pay for the original - we call this the competition effect. We show that the matching effect may dominate so that a label’s profits are higher with P2P networks than without. Furthermore, we show that the existence of P2P networks may alter the standard business model: sampling may replace costly marketing and promotion. This may allow labels to increase profits in spite of lower revenues.

Imagined MemoriesWebcasting as a "live' technology and the case ofLittle Big Gig

Most discussions of popular music on the Internet focus on the utopian potential ofnew file-sharing technologies, yet applications that reproduce existing inequalitiesalso deserve attention. Webcasting is the streaming (transmission) of digital video tomultiple recipients in cyberspace. Paul McCartney's Webcast from the Cavernwas a landmark case. It was a digital package staged for reproduction, and yet it feltlive; in this article I explore why and offer a two-part explanation. The first part isthat "live'-ness is based on an increasingly false opposition to recording,but, because that opposition still remains, Little Big Gig could seem live by adoptingsome trappings associated with it. The second part is that Internet use is mediatedby daily life and computer users brought their own desire to the Webcast, inparticular desires to see a Beatle play in the Cavern. Webcasting is an unanticipateduse of the Internet that is being used to support corporate interests. With itswidespread publicity, Little Big Gig helped naturalize that process.

Fight for Survival

Webcasting is an alternative to terrestrial radio stations. Online radio allows listeners to swap local radio fare for more exotic programming, turning everyday PCs into world receivers, and offers a large variety of special-interest Webcasts catering to very genre-specific tastes. For independent music labels whose content would never be played on mainstream terrestrial radio, Webcasting has become a major source of exposure. Unlike filesharing, however, Webcasts remain largely ephemeral: no permanent copy of radio content can be created on the user’s computer unless authorised by the Webcaster, or unless users specifically seek out software like Streambox VCR which circumvents such restrictions.

The Economics of Copyright “Fair Use” in a Networked World

The recent success of file-sharing technologies such as Napster has highlighted the economic question of whether copying increases or decreases the market value of copyrighted works. Contrary to Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine (2002), we show that Napster-type services are likely to reduce copyright value. This economic question of the effect of copying on copyright value largely coincides with the legal question of whether copying is use. The primary legal determinant of (or use that does not require authorization by the copyright-holder) is whether the use adversely affects the present or future economic value of the copyrighted work.1 However, given this legal standard, it is unclear why copyright-holders ever disagree with the court regarding use. Our analysis shows that there is no inherent conflict between the court and copyrightholders with regard to particular uses, but why there may be a conflict with regard to a technology that has both fair and infringing uses.