Steal This File Sharing Book: What They Wont Tell You About File Sharing

Overview

We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

—Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, in 1962

Chances are good that there’s an empty storefront near you that once housed a major music store. With sales of new CDs dropping every year, music companies have been shutting down shops across the country, and the few remaining stores continue to struggle. The music industry immediately identified the culprit: file sharing networks.

Although people had been trading files through newsgroups and websites for years, 1999 introduced the first major file sharing network in the form of Napster, which suddenly made copyrighted files available in mass quantities to anyone who could turn on a computer. Given a choice between paying for a CD just to hear one decent song or copying that same song for free over the Internet, guess which option most people choose?

With the music industry declaring file sharing piracy as the number one reason for declining CD sales, they’ve taken a variety of approaches to halt piracy. They’ve sued file sharers, placed anti-copying technology on their CDs, and even uploaded sabotaged files disguised as ordinary music. Will any or all of these methods halt piracy? Probably not, but it’s still interesting to see how the music industry keeps trying to protect itself and fight against technological changes that make piracy even easier than before.