Sharing Encrypted Data on the Internet – A Grey Area Between Privacy and Intellectual Property Law

Online piracy is a current issue, which accompanies file-transferring technology. This problem is magnified by the application of encryption to hide pirated contents. Besides that, encryption is a tool to protect information of Internet users from data breach. The aim of this paper is to describe the role of encryption in file sharing networks, related to Privacy of Internet users and Intellectual Property rights of content owners. This article proves that both right to Privacy and Intellectual Property rights need to be respected and therefore, the conflict between encryption users and copyright owners is difficult to solve. From this approach, some careful solution will be given to against copyright infringement on file-sharing networks.