So many people do it everyday. Downloads are going on every minute. Are they legal downloads? You may be wondering how legal is file sharing? We all remember when Napster was shut down for allowing users to trade thousands of illegal files a day. At one point, the problem with Napster actually got so bad that, at several college campuses, a whopping eighty percent of internet use was going towards swapping MP3s back and forth.

We can always put forth excuses to try and rationalize the unauthorized trading of copyright protected content. Amongst some of the more popular arguments are:

1. The Artists Are Already Rich

A lot of people claim that there’s really nothing wrong with taking music for free, because the artists have already made millions of dollars off of legitimate sales. This argument doesn’t really hold up from an ethical perspective, though. Whatever your view on theft, it should probably hold true regardless of context. Stealing music online is literally no different from stealing a CD at a music store.

2. Downloading To hear It Before Purchasing

Well most websites that sell music will actually let you listen to the entire album online before making a purchase. And come on, we all know that most people who illegally download music haven’t actually bought a real CD in years.

3. I Won’t get Caught

Whether you ever get caught or not isn’t really the issue, from an ethical perspective. Piracy is still piracy.

File Sharing

What a lot of people probably don’t know is that file sharing is one hundred percent legal. The act of trading files back and forth, be it music, software, or movies, is not against the law in any way whatsoever. This is why programs like Limewire and Bearshare are completely legal and have not been shut down by the US government.

What is not legal, however, is the act of swapping copyright protected content back and forth without permission from the copyright owner. This is really what sank Napster. Napster never issued a disclaimer or a warning to its users to not trade pirated software and music. As such, the people who ran Napster wound up being charged with the uncountable acts of copyright infringement committed by the people who used the program.

Technically, Napster never really did anything that was directly illegal. Napster was only ever a channel through which users could trade songs and other files back and forth, on a massive scale. The problem was that Napster was basically endorsing the behaviour of the users who were swapping illegal content back and forth (which, let’s be honest, was probably most of them).

But the act of actually trading files through peer to peer networks or websites and so on is one hundred percent within the boundaries of the law, just so long as you are not infringing upon any copyrights when you do so. That most of the people who are using Limewire and Bearshare and The Pirate’s Bay are probably trading pirated content is kind of beside the point.

Yes, these programs do allow their users to commit copyright infringement, but really, so does a telephone. Using any telephone in the world, the person on one end can hold their phone up to their stereo and hit play, while the person on the other end can hold their phone up to their own stereo and hit record on the tape deck. That’s piracy. But, it would be completely absurd to ban the use of telephones, even if that became the primary thing they were used for.

The problem is that stopping programs like Limewire and Bearshare would be stomping on the rights of the many law abiding citizens who only use those programs to trade content that is not protected by copyright. For example, there are silent films in the public domain, and the former copyright holders are long since dead. It is completely legal to sell, buy, trade, remake, or manipulate these movies in any way you please. But if you take a walk to your local DVD rental shop, you’re probably not going to find a single one of them, simply because silent films really don’t sell all that well. File sharing makes these movies available where they otherwise might not have been.

This is really the tricky part when it comes to policing the internet: How do you stop software and music pirates without also punishing innocent citizens?