Weekly task one: File sharing networks

In this task we are considering file sharing networks from the viewpoint of business. It is very well known that piracy is a huge problem in ebusiness and now we are going to speculate about different aspects related to it.

File sharing networks could get money from advertising. This is usually the easiest choice: place advertisements on your website and hope to get income from them. Swedish music service Spotify also uses advertisements between playing songs in their service: this way the customer has to listen to the music (or pay to get rid of them).
Another way to gain money could be making user accounts and entry fees to the system. This, however, is a problem for some customers: they are not willing to pay this entry fee and the service provider does not get income or customers.
A third possibility could be that if the desired customers are working for a company, that company purchases accounts (or some material) for all the employees in that company. It is not exactly selling to a specific customer, but income is still gained.

We consider file sharing to be classified in business to consumer, since usually larger service providers purchase rights to sell music from labels and then sell the data forward to the customer. mCommerce is also possible, since some provides offer solutions to only mobile devices (iPhone, Android etc). If we consider file sharing as a larger concept including software, movies and games for example, the connection seems clearer: usually a single person does not have access or the possibility to sell data in such large scale, so peer-to-peer and consumer to consumer are outruled. Business to business could be possible, as we already mentioned above.

Is the record/movie/x-industry justified in their attempt to shut down file sharing networks? If the question is about illegal file sharing networks, yes. If considering all file sharing networks (for example linux-distribution, open source material), no. The people making the material should get paid, so the illegal-non-profit systems should be shut down, but the problem is how. All networks should not be shutdown, since some people do not want any money from their work, so therefore free sources of material should be always available.

In our opinion illegal downloading will not disappear totally, unless some brand new technology and inventions are introduced. 100% is very hard to get to, so very likely some illegalities will be going on. The rise of systems like Youtube (software scans for copyrighted material before letting it public), Spotify (free for customers at least in some depth), last.fm (same as Spotify) are decreasing the need for illegal systems, but they still do not cover all the needs of users, which leaves a spot for illegal networks.