My individual proposal deals with peer to peer file sharing in regards to how it helps society and how it can hurt society. This topic sparks my interest because it began as a great way to transfer information from one to another, and now a big portion is used to obtain copyright information for free. This is a topic that affects so many of my peers including myself. Last spring here at Purdue, many students were receiving letters from the university explaining that they must stop illegal downloading or they will be forced to release their information to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Some students were fined exorbitant sums of money while others were not bothered at all. I would like to discuss how P2P file sharing affects the economics of the entertainment industry. It must be frustrating as a musician seeing album sales plummet due to this phenomenon.

The illustrious days of Napster have long gone. Even Lime Wire “Napster part 2” is on its way out. Industry professionals now fear the power of a new client named BitTorrent, and for good reason. BitTorrent is a client created with an architecture that allows incredibly large files to be shared in a matter of minutes. How does having a DVD quality version of “24” in fifteen minutes on your hard drive sound? All 24 hours in fifteen minutes. A $50 DVD set for free, and much quicker than you could have gotten it from best buy. The fact of the matter is this is illegal. On the other hand, many software companies insist on using BitTorrent for the distribution of their software so that they do not have to invest in their own server power. Are P2P networks something that should be shut down by the government? I don’t think so. Can society do something to make paying for intellectual property more appealing? Maybe…

I have included some interesting websites dealing with this topic.
http://blog.namics.com/archives/2004/bittorrentecon.pdf written by BitTorrent’s creator
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9282/EU+Invests+15M+Euros+in+P2P+TV+Project
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/02/01/pirate.sue.ap/index.html?iref...