P2P File Sharing: What's Legal and What's Not

Widespread lawsuits filed against online song and movie traders by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have created much confusion about the legality of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking and file trading. It's important to remember that it is an infringement of copyright law to trade copyrighted songs and movies freely on P2P networks, creating a situation where the industries and the artists are not compensated. The P2P networking model and related services themselves, though, are quite legal.

Much of the content traded on P2P networks is not copyrighted, and there are many altruistic and completely legal kinds of P2P networks. One example is IBM's World Community Grid, which links computers all around the world together to share resources for tasks such as drug discovery. There is considerable interest in commercializing the P2P network model to distribute multimedia content, such as copyrighted songs, legally. For example, Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, has started a company, Snocap, aimed at legitimizing peer-to-peer music distribution through P2P networks sanctioned by music labels. After registering songs and copyright information in Snocap's database, the labels themselves will be able to manage peer-to-peer distribution of content by setting business rules for each song. Snocap has already signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to provide for online distribution of its entire catalogue. The services will go live later this year.

Yet another piece of evidence that P2P file sharing may still have legs for sharing copyrighted multimedia content is Grouper, a new content-sharing application (www.grouper.com) designed to let up to 30 family members or friends define a closed group within which they can share photos, music, and other multimedia content. Here's the kicker: Grouper streams music from PC to PC without creating a way for users to save songs being streamed (it's similar to the way you can sample songs at online music services without saving them), and thus the sharing of the music is classified as legal, private performance under copyright laws. (For a look at Grouper and other private P2P tools, read "P2P goes Private".) In the vast majority of cases, though, when it comes to copyrighted music and movies, you need to pay to get them.