This article sets out to contribute to the discussion about file sharing, analysing the reasoning behind the Italian legislator’s decision to classify this practice in the category of criminally relevant behaviours. The article is argued against the background of Hagan’s proposal in 1994 to classify the practice as a crime and considers the three distinct dimensions of the social harm produced by the crime, of the social reaction generated by it and of agreement about the evaluation of the breach of the law. The resulting analysis questions the arguments about social harm that underpin and justify the criminalisation of peer-to-peer file sharing, while at the same time highlighting the phenomenon’s complexity.
Keywords: Peer-to-peer, File sharing, Crime, Deviance, Social harm