Ethical considerations of using information obtained from online file sharing sites: The case of the piratebay

Since the creation of Napster back in the late 1990s for the sharing and distribution of MP3 files across the Internet, the entertainment industry has struggled to deal with the regulation of information sharing at large. From an ethics perspective, the practice of file sharing over the internet presents an interesting value conflict between the protection of intellectual property on the one hand (Von Lohmann, 2003), and fairness on the other (DeVoss and Porter, 2006). On the one hand, the entertainment industry wishes to uphold their exclusive copyrights of the content, to maintain their business model and their distribution methods. On the other hand, users are demanding easy access to music, television and movie files, and will resort to file-sharing when it is not available at a fair price, or at all. Corresponding to the initiative of responsible research and innovation (RRI) in ICT, this paper aims to explore ethical issues in the use of data collected from online file sharing sites. To do so the authors develop a novel approach for the ethical analysis of data collected from an online file sharing site known as ThePirateBay (TPB). ThePirateBay was founded in Sweden in 2003 and facilitates peer-to-peer file-sharing of movies, music, television programs and more. In different countries the entertainment-industry lobbying organizations are taking different approaches to combat this issue. For a variety of European countries, access to TPB is blocked but users are finding ways around this. In the Netherlands, the entertainment industry has successfully won a court case against TPB forcing them to block users from the Netherlands. The website, however, has not recognized the ruling and has not taken action to block any users in the Netherlands from accessing the site. As a next step the Internet service providers (ISPs) have been taken to court to force them to block access to TPB website. This situation has provided a unique opportunity to study the effects of a website blockade on the file sharing behavior of consumers. It seemed common knowledge for Dutch Internet users that there were ways around the blockade, but the net effect was never measured objectively. A study to this effect is relevant for the Internet Society Netherlands Transparency Working Group, but also for both sides in the court cases (the entertainment industry as well as the Internet providers). To that end, van der Ham et al. (2012, 2013) began to measure whether preventing access to these sources of links (e.g. ThePirateBay) has an impact on file sharing behavior of users in the Netherlands. To accomplish this goal the researchers created a tool to measure file sharing activity resulting from links shared through TPB website. The measurement tool takes advantage of the fact that file sharing users use a peer-to-peer sharing mechanism, where part of this mechanism is 'gossiping' IP addresses of other users. 1 Ethics Adviser for CTIT (Center for Telematics and Information Technology), University of Twente; [email protected]; www.aimeevanwynsberghe.com 2 Senior Researcher, System and Network Engineering research group, University of Amsterdam; [email protected]; http://staff.science.uva.nl/~vdham/ This uniquely identifies file sharers and impacts the privacy of these users. Thus, aside from the value conflict when one considers the use of file sharing sites like TPB there exists an additional value conflict when one considers the development of a tool to collect and use the data obtained from such a site. Only after developing this tool and performing the measurements did the researchers realize an ethical analysis of this approach may have been in order. With this, they sought the advice of an ethics adviser (van Wynsberghe). The aim of this paper is two-fold: 1. to conduct an ethical analysis of the collection and use of data obtained through online file sharing sites and 2. to explore the role and utility of ad-hoc ethics advice as a means for promoting future developments in RRI. Both goals use the example of this TPB research as a case study for analysis. For the former, the data collection described here is closely in line with the collection of data from online social networking sites. Thus, to address the ethical issues we will use the framework developed by van Wynsberghe and Been (2013) for the ethical analysis of the collection of data from online social networking sites. This framework entails an analysis of decision variables and choices of the researcher rather than a study of the ethical intentions (Chen, Y-C et al. 2008) or decision making choices of file sharers (Shang, R-A, 2008). As such the framework is concerned with: the context of use and the privacy concerns for this context; the type and method of data collection; the intended use of information and the amount of information collected; and, analysis of values (e.g. to make explicit and scrutinize designer values). Questions pertaining to the use of the information collected in this research revealed that the stakeholders have a vested interest in proving the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of a file sharing block. This information concerning (non-)effectiveness can be used for different purposes depending on the stakeholder. For instance, the entertainment industry can use the measurements to identify file sharers in support of their copyright infringement case. Alternatively, the Internet Society Netherlands is an organization that sees the censoring of Internet traffic as a threat to the core of the Internet technology itself. Research regarding (non-)effectiveness is important for their lobbying activities. Consequently, the researchers are left asking who should have access to this information and what are the limits to such access? These questions are in line with those asked by security researchers in cases where vulnerabilities are discovered and a responsible disclosure procedure is ineffective or unavailable. As such the approach presented by van Wynsberghe and ven der Ham shows promise for assisting in computer security research as well. Alongside the ethical analysis described above, this paper aims to show the utility of an ad-hoc ethical appraisal as a means for steering future research of a similar nature along with pointing out areas of concern for improvement.