PEER PRODUCTION IN THE INTERNET AND UNAUTHORIZED COPYING OF AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE BIT-TORRENT NETWORK

This paper deals with the phenomenon of peer production in the context of unauthorized copying of information goods. Acc. to Yochai Benkler, it is a form of production operation based on a community. It is widely applied in the Internet and consequently, such information goods as GNU/Linux and Wikipedia have been established. Although the peer production has promoted growth in importance of, among others, free software or an open source initiative, it is also related to unauthorized copying of an intellectual property commonly called Internet piracy. The huge scale of this phenomenon, which is nearly 24% of entire Internet traffic, must not be ignored. In the paper a hypothesis has been put forward that low efficiency of counteracting of intellectual property unauthorized copying results from that fact that, to a great extent, it is generated in a process of the peer production. In turn, the goal of the paper is verification of the thesis in the progress of considerations regarding the nature of both the peer production and the unauthorized copying. A research field was limited to a P2P file exchange network based on a BitTorrent protocol.