File Sharing is Controlled or Controllable by the Law of Copyright Coursework

File Sharing is Controlled or Controllable by the Law of Copyright - Coursework Example The negative side of this picture is that the file sharing technology has destabilized the inducements of the authors, producers, manufacturers, entertainment companies, publishers, and recording firms to make and distribute new works (Harrison, 2006). The empirical studies on the impacts of the incentives for the authors and publishers reveal that the file sharing of music is responsible for the decline in the sales of the industry. However, the reduction in the sales is not solely responsible for the reduced incentives for the authors, producers and entertainment companies to come up with novel efforts (Zentner, 2006). File sharing is has also become an enigma for the markets for concerts, communication infrastructure and electronics industry, for instance the file sharing technology has caused the augmentation of the concert prices. This in turn induces the artists across the world to organize concerts and tour different destinations frequently thereby raising the overall income o f the artists (Borland, 2003). Copyright and P2P File Sharing The file sharing technology described above has such a nature that the implication of the copyright law becomes inevitable. It is worth mentioning that each digital file, text, video or audio, is fixed with the purpose of protecting intellectual property rights no matter it is present on a hard drive, DVD, CD or only present in the RAM (Hall, 2006). The files shared between the two or more users mostly come under the category of copyrighted sharing. The result of file sharing from an end user to another person is categorized as the imitation, redistribution, or a public performance. In terms of copyright law, the word ‘public performance’ refers to the representation of a work to public which is protected by copyright law. According to copyright law, every activity in P2P file sharing involves some type of reproduction, public performance or distribution, thus file sharing technology is suspicious from its be ginning (Boorstin, 2004). Copyright Law and Control over File Sharing It has been more than two centuries that many countries developed unidirectional copyright laws. The intellectual property rights of the authors, publishers, producers and inventors were strengthened over and over again. This trend led towards the increased prices of these commodities for the general public, it also discouraged the consumption of these commodities on the end user level (Varian, 2000). The unidirectional development of copyright laws across the globe widened the gap between the protection of the intellectual property rights and advancement in the technology. Keeping in view the above discussed background, the advent of file sharing has weakened the protection of the copyright laws. Although it is claimed that file sharing has disturbed several creative industries including the music industry yet the empirical studies show little evidence on the disruption of these industries due to file sharing, in stead it seems that the weakness in the copyright laws have benefited the music as well as other creative industries (Zentner, 2006). In order to understand the limitations of the copyright law to control the file sharing, it is essential to know the nuts and bolts of the file sharing. The technology has experienced revolutionary changes in the recent past and this has led the manufacturers of the file sharing software towards the most complicated legal challenges of the date. File sharing is based on computer networks which provide the facility of transfer of data. In these networks, each computer,