The Global Ethical Perspective of Peer-to-Peer File SharingIntroductionThis article is an analytical essay on the global ethical issues of peer-to-peer files (P2P) - sharing. The history and background of peer-to-peer file sharing will be provided, as well as how it became a problem. This article will explore what aspects of file sharing are ethical and at what point it becomes unethical. An explanation of the laws will be described and whether the laws differ from region to region around the world. The article will include personal experiences with file sharing, as well as an in-depth analysis of the topic with high quality academic and industry references to defend a particular moral/ethical position. Context The Internet is a shared resource, a cooperative network built of millions of hosts around the world. In 2000, the network model that had survived the enormous growth of the previous five years was turned on its head. Through the music-sharing application called Napster and the broader movement called "peer-to-peer," millions of users connecting to the Internet began connecting with each other directly, forming groups and collaborating to become user-created search engineers , supercomputers and file systems. The original Internet was basically designed as a peer-to-peer system. Over time it became increasingly client/server, with millions of consumer clients communicating with a relatively privileged set of servers. Today's peer-to-peer applications use the Internet just as it was originally designed: as a communications medium for machines that share resources with each other on an equal footing. The Internet was originally conceived in the late 1960s as a peer-to-peer system. The goal of......middle of paper......erspace: Dealing with law enforcement and the courts. November 1999 in Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services: High Expectations.[8] D. K. Mulligan, J. Han, A. J. Burstein: Copyright and access rights: How DRM-based content distribution systems disrupt "personal use" expectations. October 2003 in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management.[9] D. Clark: The Future of Intellectual Property: How Copyright Became Controversial. April 2002 in Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy.[10] N. Garnett: digital rights management, copyright and Napster. March 2001 in ACM SIGecom Exchanges, Volume 2 Number 2.[11] J. Evers: File-Swapping Fight Goes Global: Recording Industry Says P-to-P Users in Canada and Europe Could Face Legal Action. March 30, 2004 in the IDG News Service.