P2P File Sharing

File sharing is a very controversial topic. It would make sense for there to be the option to share what you have with others. In terms of physical copies of books, I can always lend it to my friend. However, things are different when it comes to intellectual property and digital copies. By sharing files, I can essentially make a copy of it and make it so both my friend and I would have a copy each. This leads to the idea of piracy. File sharing is the act of sharing files over a network. Meanwhile P2P file sharing is using peer to peer options which have end users acting as the network in order to share content such as media files, books, ect. Some examples of P2P file sharing would include all forms of torrent and even certain software such as Pando Media Booster. Torrents allow users to share files with one another directly, and many things can be uploaded onto the platform including intellectual property and copyrighted material. Meanwhile Pando Media Booster which is used in multiple applications is used to allow for a P2P download aspect for specific software. It can be beneficial when there are many people uploading the content however, it may operate slowly when there are not much people uploading the content. To really gain a perspective on how popular P2P file sharing has become, The Bittorrent Effect explains, Bittorrent traffic makes up for about 1/3 of all data sent across the internet. It can be much more efficient than other download methods and I feel that the battle against it will always be something that is mentioned. It will be hard finding a right balance between the freedoms and rights that internet users have against illegal usage of torrents.