11/17 Ares and P2P File Sharing Programs: How Do They Work, and Are They Legal?
If you love music, you’ve probably heard about P2P (peer-to-peer) filing sharing programs such as Ares, which allow you to share all sorts of files, including music and video files. But how exactly do they work, and more importantly, are they legal to use? To answer that, let’s take a look at how P2P programs work, and how copyright laws fit in.
The first mainstream P2P program (and the most infamous) was Napster. Created in 1999, the Napster program was designed to help people all over the world share music files. Anyone who was signed up with Napster could go to the central Napster server and search for a certain music file. The server would then search all the Napster user’s computers for that file, and present a list of matching files to the user doing the search.
From there, the user would choose a file to download, and his or her computer would then “talk” to the computer where the file was located. The file would be downloaded from one computer to the other, and the file share would be done. So if you wanted a certain music file, you would have access to thousands of other Napster user’s computers, any one of which might have it. The trade off was that thousands of other users could also search for the music they wanted on your computer.
This is basically how all P2P file sharing programs work. But if you know anything about Napster, you know that it was shut down in 2001 for copyright infringement. And that’s how copyright laws fit in. P2P file sharing programs like Ares and Napster are perfectly legal, because they are just computer programs. The problem comes when people start using them to share music that is copyrighted. Napster went down because it was using a server, which made them responsible for what their users were doing (or at least that’s what the judge said).
Of course, Napster was up and running fairly quickly after it was shut down, but these days it is a pay service. But other P2P file sharing programs have come out since then, ones that are free, and that have found a way around the copyright issues that Napster faced. Ares, for example, doesn’t have a central server. Instead, it is “decentralized”, which means that the user’s computers “talk” directly to each other, instead of through a server. This makes Ares completely legal, and the makers immune to copyright lawsuits.
So if you love music, and would love to be able to share your collection with other people (and would like to be able to share their library too), Ares download is a great, legal option. But be careful! Just because the program is legal to use and the makers immune to copyright lawsuits, doesn’t mean you can’t go down for copyright infringement. To use Ares in the most legal way possible, only download music files that aren’t under copyright. To get those files, go to a pay service P2P program (like Napster), and support the artists by buying their songs – legally.