The Global Ethical Perspective of Peer-to-Peer File SharingIntroductionThis article is an analytical essay on global ethical issues related to peer-to-peer file sharing -peer (P2P). -sharing. A history and history of peer-to-peer file sharing will be presented, as well as how this became a problem. This article will explore what aspects of file sharing are ethical and when it becomes unethical. An explanation of the laws will be described and whether the laws differ from region to region in the world. The article will include personal experiences with file sharing, as well as an in-depth analysis of the topic with high-quality industry and academic references to argue for a particular moral/ethical position. Background The Internet is a shared resource, a cooperative network built of millions of hosts around the world. By the year 2000, the network model that had survived the enormous growth of the previous five years was upended. Thanks to the music-sharing app called Napster and the broader peer-to-peer movement, millions of Internet-connected users began connecting directly with each other, forming groups, and collaborate to become user-created research engineers, virtual users. supercomputers and file systems. The original Internet was fundamentally designed as a peer-to-peer system. Over time, the system became increasingly client/server, with millions of consumer clients communicating with a relatively privileged set of servers. Today's peer-to-peer applications use the Internet as it was originally designed: as a means of communication for machines sharing resources with each other on an equal basis. The Internet was designed in the late 1960s as a peer-to-peer system. The purpose of ...... middle of document ......erspace: Dealing with law enforcement and the courts. November 1999 in Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services: High Expectations.[8] DK Mulligan, J. Han, AJ Burstein: Copyright and Access Rights: How DRM-Based Content Delivery Systems Disrupt Expectations of “Personal Use.” October 2003 in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management.[9] D. Clark: The Future of Intellectual Property: How Copyright Became Controversial. April 2002, in Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Computers, Liberty, and Privacy.[10] N. Garnett: Digital rights management, copyright and Napster. March 2001 in ACM SIGecom Exchanges, Volume 2 Issue 2.[11] J. Evers: The fight against file-sharing goes global: The recording industry says P-to-P users in Canada and Europe could face legal action. March 30, 2004 in IDG News Service.