You Can Trust Our Reviews
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Buying Guide: File Sharing
Contents
The courts may have shut down the original Napster. The RIAA may be suing people who trade music on Kazaa. And ISPs may be threatening users. But millions continue to use the Internet's much-maligned file-sharing services.
The peer-to-peer file-sharing craze began more than five years ago when Napster first allowed computer users to swap audio files at no charge. In March 2001, Napster was shut down. (The Napster name is now used by Roxio for a legitimate pay service.) Still, by the middle of 2003, according to research firm Ipsos-Reid, over 60 million Americans were using similar file-sharing services.
The Napster ruling was the result of lawsuits by the major record labels. They continued to file suits—with varying degrees of success—against the copycat services. Then, last September, the RIAA started suing the individuals using the services.
Many pundits felt this would finally put an end to file sharing. But overall traffic may have increased. BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks Internet file sharing, says that at any given moment 8.3 million people were online sharing files this June—up from 6.8 million in June of last year.
Many users have simply moved on to newer services like BitTorrent and eDonkey. "There's no question that the lawsuits have caused some people to stop sharing," says Evan R. Cox, a San Francisco intellectual-property attorney. "But in many cases, people are merely migrating away from some of the networks that are the focus of the suits and on to some of the other networks that haven't been targeted."
The new services aren't always bundled with spyware, and they tend to offer far more feature films. "People are going to BitTorrent and eDonkey because that's where the movies are," says Trey Bowles, a former Morpheus executive who now runs a digital-download consultancy.