Running head: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND FILE SHARING Intellectual Property Rights and File Sharing Erwin Solis Antoine Herve Matt Olsen Nikolai Hart Tim Scott California State University San Marcos MIS 304 – Professor Fang Fang December 13, 2011INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND FILE SHARING 1 Table&of&Contents& Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 1!Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2!Methodology ................................................................................................................................... 3!Findings .......................................................................................................................................... 5!Intellectual Property Rights Definition ....................................................................................... 5!Online File Sharing Definition .................................................................................................... 7!Digital Download Sites ............................................................................................................... 7!File Sharing Technology ............................................................................................................. 8!File Sharing Website Revenue .................................................................................................... 9!Pros of File Sharing .................................................................................................................. 11!Cons of File Sharing ................................................................................................................. 12!Effects on Business ................................................................................................................... 13!Security ..................................................................................................................................... 14!Law Cases ................................................................................................................................. 16!Organizations against File Sharing ........................................................................................... 18!Legality of File Sharing ............................................................................................................ 19!Stop Online Piracy Act ............................................................................................................. 20!Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 21!References ..................................................................................................................................... 22!INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND FILE SHARING 2 Introduction&The topic of this paper is Intellectual Property Rights and File Sharing. Intellectual property rights and file sharing tend to share a negative correlation. As the Internet becomes easier and easier to use and as more information became readily available at lower cost (service providers), the number of user to visit/download file sharing sites increased. This had a negative impact on intellectual property rights because more and more companies (whose rights have been violated) began taking legal actions. As more and more companies began tasking legal actions, the federal government was then involved, and it felt like the FBI was more interested in hunting down copyright pirates than dangerous criminals. However, intellectual property rights are extremely important in both protecting inventions and inventors and giving credits when deserved. After all, no one would invent new things if it were easy for a competitor to “take” the invention and claim it as their own. Online file sharing services and website’s popularity became synonymous with piracy. However, as mentioned later in this paper, file sharing in itself is very legal. It is the content that gets shared that tends to raise some eyebrows. The materials that will be covered in this paper will focus equally on intellectual property rights as well as file sharing. First, the definition of intellectual property rights will be stated as well as anything that is related to intellectual property rights. Also, the definition of file sharing will be stated as well as the two main types of file sharing. Second, the main file sharing websites will be shared as well as their technology, revenue and popularity. Third, the pros and cons of file sharing will be discussed as well as their effect on business. Fourth, security related with file sharing will be discussed as well as some law cases that deal with intellectual property rights violation. Finally, some organizations that exist to protect rights will be listed, and the legality of file sharing as well as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will be discussed.INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND FILE SHARING 3 Methodology&Our research methodology required our group to gather any relevant information related to our topic and present it in a clear and meaningful way. Also, we wanted our questions, even the preliminary ones, to cover not only a broad spectrum of our topic, but also to challenge it as well. On the first two topics, we wanted our focus to be on definitions; specifically defining intellectual property right and all of its components as well as defining file sharing and its components. All of the definitions were based off of a website called World Intellectual Property Organization. The file sharing topic was based off of howstuffworks.com and techopedia.com. The next three topics: Digital Download Sites, their Technology, and Revenue were based off of a variety of websites. The list of the most popular file sharing websites as well as the reason for their popularity was taken off markmonitor.com and P2P blog.com. File sharing technology is based off the actual websites such as rapidshare.com and megupload.com. Finally, their revenue was taken from gigaom.com and torrentfreak.com. The pros and cons of file sharing is a topic that is discussed all over the internet. This is important because people need to know what they can accomplish with the use of file sharing, but
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