Welcome to the ipoque Corporate Blog. In this space ipoque bloggers and guests are commenting on what happens on today's Internet. We aim to convince our readers with interesting tidbits on all topics around networking technology, Internet and sometimes a short insight on what we are planning next.
Since the successful days of Napster, file sharing of copyright-protected material — particularly in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — has been a serious threat to the established business models of the content industry. There have been numerous discussions about the real impact. Scientific papers show the whole range from negative to positive effects, or no effects at all. In my opinion, there are effects, indeed. Some of them are positive as file sharing can expose new music groups and authors to an audience. And some effects are negative as existing copyrights are definitely infringed to a huge extent in the net.