File Sharing: IP, BitTorrent and More

File sharing surrounds us every day. If you have a presence online, you've likely downloaded a publicly shared file. I'm not implying that you've stolen a song through a bit torrent aggregation website like PirateBay. Instead, you've likely viewed a document online, or a music video. This all falls under the general umbrella of file sharing, and is the principal use of the internet in this day and age.

We've come to use our computer to store all means of information. Movies, books, to-do lists, you name it. With the proliferation of the use of internet services, all this data is finding it's way to semi-permanent storage on the web. What does this mean? First, it means business for those who see opportunity in storing and sharing people's valuable data. More well known services like YouTube help us share our videos, while sites like Scribd let us share our documents. Simply put, we are hit with advertisements, and they earn revenue. These websites offer other services such as premium accounts, with perks like enhanced bandwidth. This is more prevalent among the file sharing websites like FilesTube, 4shared and MediaFire  The business of offering people a venue with which they can share their files is booming, and will only continue to grow.

For the last few years there’s been seemingly infinite buzz about the cloud and bit torrent. The MPAA has been battling websites like Demonoid that aggregate torrent files, while big companies like Apple and Google have been providing means for users to legally store and share their files. However, these large companies will never be able to provide users what sites like FilesTube, 4shared, and the departed Megaupload do. 

These sites operate in a seemingly legal gray area, where content restrictions aren't enforced on upload. That is, no one is checking what you upload onto their servers. As a result, illegal media piles up on their servers, opening a sort of underground in which users can find whatever files they want. This includes full movies, textbooks, illegal documents, and cracked software. In my opinion we will never see a large company like Google take their share of business. Those large companies operate under a lot of scrutiny, and are generally obligated to copyright holders to enforce automated take downs. It's because of this that as long as these companies are allowed to exist, they will hold a market share that Google or Apple will never get. That is unless these companies are held to the same standard as Google and their ilk. We will then have seen the passing of an age of the internet.