Sharing When I First Discovered File Sharing,

¶ … Sharing When I first discovered file sharing, Napster was still around in its original free form. Napster had an excellent graphical user interface and was easy to use. When Napster was shut down, file sharing became gradually more of a chore. Soulseek was the only viable means of sharing music and other files, but the application does not work on Mac operating systems.

Since the crack down on file sharing, which is unfortunately supported by the government without much input from recording artists themselves, the software used for file sharing has stagnated and become the greatest deterrent. Sharing files using bit torrents is proof of how annoying the file sharing process has become, thanks to the big media tycoons. I have seen great ironies when it comes to file sharing. Those who are true audiophiles, who love music and are even musicians themselves, love and support file sharing.

Those who have no taste in music, who listen to it as background fodder or for ring tones only, are against file sharing. The former, the audiophiles, are the ones most apt to purchase concert tickets. Concert ticket sales are arguably more lucrative than the sales revenues from albums or individual song rights. Moreover, audiophiles would much rather see their favorite bands in person than listen to studio recordings through their inexpensive headphones.

According to Tschmuck (2010), "record companies bear almost all of the negative effect [of file sharing], whereas artists rather benefit from it, since royalties are often the smallest amount of their income, whereas "piracy" tends to boost live performances." File sharing, record sales, and demand for concert tickets are all interrelated in ways that can be a boon to recording artists but which might hurt the bottom line of the media conglomerates (Dewenter, Haucap & Wenzel 2010).

The same is true for movies, software, and other media that can be distributed for free using peer-to-peer file sharing software. In my personal experience, artists and musicians are the ones who support file sharing most vigorously. Those who do not support file sharing have never attempted it or have rigid sets of ethics that have no place in an enlightened society. The ethics of file sharing show how ambiguous morals are in general, and many people -- Americans especially -- have trouble with the concept of moral ambiguity.

Not every situation is black and white. There are usually shades of gray that prevent an absolute ethical framework from being valid. Although I have nothing against file sharing, I am also an avid user of iTunes and regularly purchase both songs and movies from the service. This highlights one of the ironies in the file sharing debate. Just because file sharing is easy does not mean that people will never spend money on creative media.

File sharing has its place, and that place is relatively limited when it comes to the quality of downloads and the availability of a file at exactly the right time. Sometimes, the files I download from Limewire and other peer-to-peer services are of such poor quality that they are useless. However, they can be used as a test drive if I do not want to risk spending money on a song I might hate.

The songs and films I download from iTunes are of comparably good quality and come properly tagged with album art. Files from peer-to-peer software are usually tagged wrong, and many have blips and other irregularities. It can also be difficult to find whole albums at once. Movies are even more difficult to share using Limewire, but alternative methods such as bit torrrents are useless.