Open Access and Sharing

One of the reasons that Web 2.0 is considerably improving the experience for the user is that the emphasis of Web 2.0 is making content highly accessible. Also, Web 2.0 is encouraging sharing among users, further solidifying the social nature of these new Web applications.

What Web marketers have discovered over the years is that people are highly reluctant to pay for information online. The strong popularity of music and video piracy is a testament to this. An entire generation has grown up on the idea that music, movies, and TV shows should be free and openly available to anyone. The Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) begs to differ. This was the organization that began suing people, including children and grandmothers, for downloading music for free off of the Internet.

Why do people who pirate music matter? In essence, piracy is one of the best current examples of open access and sharing available online. There would be no piracy of copyrighted material possible if people weren’t sharing with each other. There are no websites that host pirated files for others to download. They would be immediately sued and their websites would be taken down. However, by decentralizing the process and creating software that allows easy access and sharing to others’ files, pirating files has become the greatest triumph of sharing online.

Sharing isn’t just for pirates, however. New software protocols like BitTorrent, and the software created to handle these software types, has allowed users to directly share files with one another over great distances. BitTorrent allows users to stop and start downloads at their own pace as well as set the speed of their downloads. Though BitTorrent files are most often used for pirating music and video files, they have also been used by nonprofit groups to transfer files. Since the files are shared directly from user to user, the nonprofit doesn’t have to pay a lot of money to buy a server to store the files, or pay the cost of bandwidth so that many people can visit that site and access those files.

Sharing and open access is spilling into other areas of the online world. For example, the site Hulu recently went live. This site works much like YouTube in that people can visit this site and stream video files. The difference is that Hulu was created as a partnership between the NBC and FOX networks and both companies have put official clips and episodes of popular TV series on the site. Users can watch their favorite TV shows whenever they want and the site is supported by the ad revenue generated by the visitors who go to that site. The shows are freely open and can be accessed by anyone, though the website is supported by ads.

Some Web experts suspect that open access and sharing will improve in the future to include more than just pirated copyrighted material. Hulu is one example of major copyright holders understanding the wants of Web users. When they provide open access to their TV shows online, they can generate ad revenue and users will always know that the files they watch will be quality and complete. If those files are primarily pirated, though, the networks generate no money off of these shows. In the future, record companies, software companies, and more may start using this model to distribute and advertise their products.