Have you ever thought of why college campuses forbid students to use file-sharing programs on their networks? Piracy over the internet is clearly illegal; but there is much more to this than that.
If you have a computer/laptop, some kind of place to store your media (aka iTunes), and have a portable music player of some sort (i.e. iPod Touch, Zune, etc...), you have probably heard of LimeWire. Now, what is LimeWire my friends? LimeWire is a file-sharing program that is used all around the world, in which people exchange music, videos, images, programs and other documents over the World Wide Web. This program may look pretty simple at the surface, but as you examine each specific layer, it gets just that much more complicated. At the forefront of all conversations about this program and others, like Napster and Kazaa, are copyright laws and copyright infringement. What does it mean to pirate media? If you are downloading music from LimeWire, does that mean that you are breaking copyright laws?
To make sure that the answer to the question I posed makes sense, I have thoroughly outlined the background information in the pages of this website.
This all factors into my research to delve into the unknown and present information as to why college campuses do not allow such behavior over their WiFi networks. Be aware that I probably have not covered all of the literature on this enormous topic and there may be some blind spots here and there. I have done my best to throw together an accurate representation of the information that is available today in as clear and concise way as possible.
