Chapter 1: Finding the Files

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Overview

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

A computer file can be anything from a single song to a photograph, a full-length motion picture, the complete text from a book, or a computer program that sells for thousands of dollars. Because a computer file is made up of electronic data, all it does is fill up the space on your hard drive. And large hard drives are really cheap today, which means you can fill them up with many, many files at relatively little cost. Storing this stuff is just not an issue.

Computer files can also be copied with perfect accuracy and transferred flawlessly to nearly any computer in the world. In most industries, such qualities might be admirable, but in the computer industry, those same qualities spell trouble for copyright holders. If someone can make multiple copies of a song, a book, or a computer program at no cost, what will stop people from blatantly copying everything they own and passing it around to all their friends?

The answer is simple: nothing. And that’s spelled trouble for the computer industry. Of course, people have been illegally copying music with tape recorders and CD burners for years, but cassette tapes and CDs aren’t as easy to distribute as a single file that you can email or post on a file sharing network for millions of people to copy at once.

Similarly, photocopying has threatened the copyright on books, but photocopying an entire book is usually more trouble (and more expense) than it’s worth. Plus, most people like their books bound, rather than in loose sets of not always perfectly copied pages.

The same can be said for the video cassette recorder, which spawned the copying of videos. But as with audio tapes, each copy of a video cassette loses some of its original quality. It’s also simply too troublesome for the average user to duplicate videos on a mass scale and distribute them.

But once you store something in a computer file, copying suddenly becomes easy and fast for everyone. Instead of asking, “Can it be copied?” people ask, “Where can I find it?” And the answer is usually somewhere online where people can copy and distribute files fast.

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