It’s getting pretty difficult for file sharing these days. With the RIAA and MPAA suing everybody and their grandmothers, sharing files on peer to peer networks such as eDonkey and Kazaa can be dangerous and expensive.

This guide is going to teach you how to keep from getting caught and sued by the RIAA and MPAA and whoever else might be interested in taking a peek at what you’re doing online.

This guide is not meant to condone illegal activity, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.

File Sharing Background

It all started with people hosting files on personal bulletin board systems and later, FTP servers residing on either their campus computers, or for the more fortunate, their personal computers. Putting the legal risk aside, this method was ground breaking for its day, but was limited by the fact that if you wanted a file, you would have to know where to look in order to find what you were looking for. This information was spread by word of mouth or by advertising the servers on other bulletin boards.

Enter Napster… Napster changed the rules. Napster created a network that allowed millions of users personal shared files to be spread and propagated by the network. The ability to search the network for a file was the true breakthrough in file sharing.

However, with popularity comes a price; unwanted attention. Napster’s success was its own downfall. The music industry wasn’t just going to sit by and watch millions of people download their music for free, so they set out on a course of legal action that leaves us where we’re at today: Lawsuits.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) successfully proved that copyrighted material was being hosted by servers owned by Napster and that Napster knowingly allowed this material to be disseminated by its users. The monetary judgment against Napster immediately sent it into bankruptcy and Napster was forced to close its doors. For the time being anyway…

Enter Kazaa… The Kazaa system worked much the same as Napster, with one exception; none of the copyrighted material is ever actually stored on servers owned by Kazaa. Its users host the material and Kazaa just facilitates the connections between the peers so that the users can trade away. The legality of the Kazaa system is still being hotly debated, but for now Kazaa has triumphed, mostly from the fact that it is owned by a company that resides outside of the United States and inside a country with less stringent copyright laws.

The users however are not afforded such protection. The RIAA began filing lawsuits directly against the users hosting the files. At first it was only for blatant violators of copyright laws, those sharing thousands of illegal files. This represented a very small portion of Kazaa’s user base due to higher bandwidth connections being at a premium.

Enter the age of the cable modem… With more and more households having access to the high bandwidth connections provided through cable and DSL modems, the hunger for more and more content was insatiable. People were now able to download (and upload) bigger and bigger files. This meant that not only could you have all the music you could ever want, you could also enjoy movies and other large downloads.

Kazaa could no longer sustain the need for the larger files due to the user’s ability to limit sharing, or not share at all, through the software. This lead to the creation of the eDonkey/Gnutella networks which pretty much forces you to share in order to get anything in return.

The result was that the trading of not only single music files but entire collections by any given artist and movies, movies that are still in theaters, were readily available to anyone with an internet connection and a copy of the P2P client of choice for free.

Again, with popularity comes attention, this time it was the attention of the MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America). The MPAA wasn’t satisfied with taking down the big players, they want everybody. They began suing users for sharing or downloading just one file. Now this is alarming isn’t it?