Piracy Evolvd

The legal issue that will be analyzed in this essay concerns the idea of Piracy or Copyright Infringement. Copyright infringement can occur in a variety of different ways but the way that will be analyzed in this paper will be through "file sharing" via computers. There have been several cases dealing with file sharing in the last few years and the legislation now says that file sharing is illegal. The road to today's legislation has been a bumpy one; at first the courts facilitated the production of machines that could potentially be used for copyright infringement purposes [1], then the courts tried to say that all people who take part in copyright infringement via file sharing were criminals [2], then the courts ruled all file sharing is illegal and even the people who produce the software are liable [3]. The progression has gone from facilitating piracy to shooting it down so hard that no company would even want to produce the software to be able to do it. The software producers are paying for it greatly; the last case that was decided made the file sharing company Kazaa pay out $100 million in "damages."[4]

The original landmark case dealing with copyright infringement, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. 464 U.S. 417 (1984), basically stated that manufacturers could not be held liable for copyright infringement that consumers could use their products for [5]. In 1975 Sony produced a primitive tape recorder, the Betamax, which could be used to record programming off of a television and also off of other tapes. Universal City Studios claimed that the people