In Kavita Philp’s article What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property, Philip brings up the legal case MGM v. Grokster, which concerns a file-sharing dispute between MGM and p2p company Grokster. She speaks to the effect which the ruling in the case had on the general public:
Although the Grokster case is represented by film studios as a war of survival against rogues, thieves, and pirates, it is seen by a (largely western) technologically-imbricated public as a threat to emerging parameters of individual creative authorship, in amateur, educational, and entrepreneurial contexts. Thus a broad middle-class consuming population appears on the verge of being classified as inherently criminal.
I do not profess to have a strong knowledge of U.S. law (admittedly I know relatively little of it), but at a surface level the issue of online file sharing appears to cause an unbridgeable rift between the right to private property and some combination of rights to personal privacy and freedom of speech. In its current form, I do not think the internet can be reasonably policed in a manner that will eliminate (or even drastically reduce) online privacy while preserving any semblance of basic online rights. Philip’s remark that “a broad middle-class consuming population appears on the verge of being classified as inherently criminal” seems accurate, and is quite concerning. The free exchange of information is an absolutely critical aspect of the internet; limiting the ability to transfer this information in any manner would be quite problematic. Additionally, it is important to note that different sorts of files are all shared in exactly the same way (at the most basic level any given file contains the same kind of information as any other file – what differentiates one from the other is simply how that information is encoded/decoded); you cannot limit or monitor the sharing of a specific type of file – movies, for instance – while ignoring any other traffic.
Yet it is also important to acknowledge that intellectual property in digital form should not be treated in a fundamentally different manner than intellectual property in any other form; the rights of the individual or group that created a given piece of digital content must be protected as well. There is no obvious way to reconcile this requirement with the preservation of free exchange of information over the internet.