File sharing advocates

August 24, 2009
Intellectual Property News and Interesting Facts

The ethical issues come mostly from the concern that practitioners of file sharing may infringe property rights. File sharing is not necessarily illegal, even if the works being shared are covered by copyright. For example, some artists may choose to support freeware, shareware, open source, or anti-copyright, and advocate the use of file sharing as a free promotional tool. Some advocates claim that sharing helps the affected industry by allowing the consumer to sample the product before spending the money to purchase it. This, they claim, in turn generates a new fan base as many discover artists that would be virtually impossible to discover otherwise, thus generating more album sales. Once the consumer is allowed to “sample” a lower-quality version, they might decide to buy, whereas they might never have bought it had they not been allowed to sample the media on their computer first.