Copyrighted Music & Movies - YouTube, Myspace, etc...

Ever since the Napster rise and fall there has been an on going debate in regards to copyrighted material being shared across networks with peer to peer (P2P) applications and popular social networking websites. I know from my school and work that technology exists that may analyze network traffic and determine what content travels through a connection. The content may be stopped dead in it's tracks if deemed a violation of copyrighted materials. One problem that occurs is what if a student is simply transferring a song or video from home to their email account so they may upload it to their Ipod. Corporations have tons of red tape for it's employees so they may be exempt from many of the free speech debates that arise. University's on the other hand, at least public university's have a large student body to please, and furthermore these students have rights. Also technology can be very expensive if a third party is used to thwart sharing of copyrighted materials.



Another hot topic are the social networking sites such as myspace.com and youtube.com which contains quite a bit of copyrighted material. The content is placed on the sites and shared by the person users but ultimately the site is distributing the music. The music and videos help a lot of newer bands that are just starting gain popularity without spending tons of money on advertising. The same technology that may be used on college and corporate network may also be used on the networks that have web servers that distribute non-copyrighted material in order to find items that shouldn't be shared.



A final interesting note for those who don't pay attention to the news (of any sort), google.com purchased youtube.com. This move for Google is a huge step since they spent 1.85 billion dollars on youTube which is already having issues due to the amount of copyrighted materials that the artists are complaining about.