Legal and illegal file sharing has to do with the copyright owner. Copyrights are one of the most important things in the entrepreneur’s life. This is because intellectual property is one of the biggest things an entrepreneur can own. If the entrepreneur owns anything that can make money, then it is their ideas. These ideas are what make inventions, services, and products. Therefore, an entrepreneur must be very careful about how they protect their ideas and, therefore, their copyrights.
Therefore, the advent of peer-to-peer sharing or file sharing has caused a major rift as it relates to an entrepreneur’s intellectual property. An entrepreneur used to be able to get a copyright and that would be enough to protect their works from most people. However, the new age of the Internet has made it too easy for people to share files across the Internet. Therefore, many entrepreneurs are finding that their intellectual works are being shared across the Internet without them being fairly compensated for that work.
This is why there is so much litigation about copyrights in the Internet. This is also why so many congressional representatives are trying to regulate the Internet because of the widespread pirate activities of the users of the Internet are engaged in at this current time. People with copyrights usually have a little bit of money to influence the way the laws work. Therefore, they are trying to tighten the screws to people who engage in online piracy.
Whether or not this has been effective, it remains to be seen because there are so many people actually doing this activity that is hard to catch them all. The response to this problem has been to attack the file sharing program owners themselves. This is been done with some success as there is a major file sharing owner now in jail based on the pirating activities of his users. This is an unfortunate situation, but it is going to continue to happen until pirating becomes an activity that is rarely engaged in the future.
However, there is legal file sharing and that is sharing of information or products that a particular user actually owns the copyright to presently. This kind of file sharing is allowed by the law and is at the discretion of the user. There is nothing wrong with a user sharing their knowledge as long as it is a product, service, or intellectual property that the user owns themselves.
The real problem is when a user does not own the copyright to the product, service, or intellectual property that they are sharing. This is illegal in considered pirating by the local and national governments. Therefore, this type of file sharing will always be illegal and will always be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because this type of pirating should not be allowed to happen.
As stated before, if an entrepreneur has anything it is their ideas and their copyrights. If these things are taken away from the entrepreneur, then they really do not have anything else. Illegal file sharing will always be frowned upon now and in the future. Therefore, the user should always be careful about what types of information they share and whether or not they own the information that they are trying to share.