Kwansei Gakuin University - School Of Policy Studies

2002 Research Fair Project

To put it bluntly, copyright infringement is a major problem with this technology. Most of the files shared by WinMX such as animation and music have a copyright. Because you’re able to receive the files for free, the opportunity to buy the product will become needless. From this, music releasing companies will receive a great damage on the sales. As a fact, you’ll be able to find the songs which are ranked on the Oricon chart on WinMX. To prevent this, CD companies released a copy protect CD’s, but this didn’t work out for so long.

Recently, the way to de-protect the copy guard is going around and become shared on WinMX as before.
Copyright isn’t the only problem by law. In WinMX, bunch of porno movies and pictures are shared. These files could be searched and downloaded by teenagers. This is a terrible problem and it’s definitely against the law.

Other problem is users moral. WinMX is used for sharing file but in the users, there is DOM (Download Only Member). DOM just download the files but they don’t share files. This could collapse the file sharing community near future.