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Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law: A Primer for Developers by Fred von Lohmann Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation fred@ I. What this is, and who should read it II. Copyright Basics and the Intersection with P2P File-sharing The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing and related technologies is entwined, for better or The nature of digital file-sharing technology worse, with copyright law. If the early legal inevitably implicates copyright law. First, since skirmishes yield any lesson for P2P developers, every digital file is “fixed” for purposes of it is that an appreciation of the legal copyright law (whether on a hard drive, CD, or environment should be part of any development merely in RAM), the files being shared effort from the beginning, rather than bolted on generally qualify as copyrighted works. Second, at the end. the transmission of a file from one person to another results in a reproduction, a distribution, This piece is meant as a general explanation and possibly a public performance (in the world of the U.S. copyright law principles most of copyright law, “public performance” includes relevant to P2P