My good friend and ex-colleague from way, way back, Andy Stothard, is currently on holiday in Vancouver. He loves the place and last time he came back he raved about it.

He’s just posted an article that struck me as an interesting take on file sharing. He’s sat down in front of his laptop, found a nearby computer sharing iTunes and decided to have a listen. It may be that “Gareth” didn’t intend for that to happen, or maybe he did.

What fascinates me about this is that there is an added context to the file sharing given by geography. It’s only people on the same immediate network you can see, and if Andy had really wanted to, he could have found Gareth and had a chat about his music collection (and maybe IT security) whilst he was there. What if it was “Gillian” instead of “Gareth” and Andy had really liked her taste in music. And she had found his iTunes collection to be interesting as well. And they’d made an effort to find each other?

File sharing has been criticised because it allows for an anonymous, amorphous mass on opposite sides of the planet to steal copies of music easily. What Andy was engaged in there didn’t take anything away from the publishers (he didn’t have a copy of the music, if he wants a copy he’ll need to buy one himself), added to his sense of the people around him in a foreign city, and potentially could have allowed for interesting conversation to break out between two previously unconnected people.

There is a lot to think about in the future with relation to the economics of creative works and the rise of ubiquitous digital access, but we need to realise that it’s not “File Sharing” that is the problem but “File Copying”.