P2P File Sharing

What is file sharing? According to the definition from Wikipedia , file sharing is a practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways. One of the common methods of file sharing is P2P or peer-to-peer file sharing. It is a computer network in which each computer that is in the network acts as a client or a server . This allowes shared access to various files such as audio, electronic media , documents and etc. Some of the popular P2P networks is Napster , BitTorrent and Pirate Bay. Some of the advantages of P2P sharing is the amount of data available for free use. Peer-to-peer networking allows people to share different media on the web for free or a fraction of the cost than it would actually cost to buy the product. Although there are many advantages of P2P file sharing to it's customers , there is a also a huge problem with copy right laws. One of the examples is given in The New York Times article , Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios in which the "Dark Knight" movie leaked to the Internet and was shared amongst millions of P2P users all over the world. This resulted in huge profit loss to Warner Brothers . Movie industry is not the only one suffering from piracy, music industry is also struggling to prevent unwanted illegal copies that are shared on the daily basis between peers for free. Of course it is great to be able to download a popular song or movie at no cost but we have to also account to the profit loss of the companies who work hard to bring out entertainment media to society and it does not cost them cheap either. As of now , there is hardly any middle ground between the two and we would have to wait and see how the things unfold .