P2P

File sharing is when one person uploads a files to the internet to make publicly available for anyone else to access online.

P2P (Peer 2 Peer) file sharing is where, instead of uploading files publicly, users connect directly to each other, typically using a program of some sort, so they can share files like music, videos, programs, or various other documents.

The most notorious examples from when P2P file sharing started to initially get very popular was music sharing services like Napster and Kazaa. These days, most people use torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, which give you files that you can open up in a program like BitTorrent and it allows you to anonymously establish a P2P connection with various uses to help share files.

The problem with P2P file sharing is that it is frequently used to pirate stuff like music, films, TV shows, video games, and even books. Companies like the RIAA are constantly trying to find ways to fight against it by aiming to take down sites like The Pirate Bay.

There are legal usages that can benefit these companies that has mostly gone untapped though. The Econsultancy article "Content producers should take advantage of P2P, not fear it" talks about a documentary film that was released several years ago named "Steal This Film - Part One", which looked at the people that set up online P2P and to talk through the negatives and benefits of it. They distributed this film for free through BitTorrent and made their money through donations, which turned out to be a success for them. They ended up discovering that there was a big market for people who would support media monetarily if it was made easily available to them and without advertisements to hinder their experience.

The other major benefit of using P2P to legally share files is that it does not requiring online storage, which typically has to be paid for if the files are big enough. Some MMORPG games have used this when they update their games with major patches that their users all have to download. This reduces their server costs by a very large amount, as these games typically have users in the millions all hammering their servers.