Again with the Peer-to-Peer
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 by Patrick RossYes, I know peer-to-peer technology allows remarkable things. I spoke in favor of legal use of the technology at CES in January. But how many times do we have to hear about people having their identities compromised because of the sharing features of infringing P2P networks?
Accomplished WashingtonPost.com reporter Brian Krebs made the front page of the paper today with a piece on how some employee of a McLean, Va., investment firm compromised the identities of about 2,000 clients, including names, dates and Social Security numbers, by opening up a LimeWire account on his work computer. It was six months before the breach was identified. One of those victims was US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
While at the US Patent and Trademark Office, current PFF senior fellow Tom Sydnor joined with U. of Virginia Computer Science professor John Knight and U. of Utah Computer Science Professor Lee Hollaar (a Copyright Alliance Academic Advisory Council member) to write a compelling report on the continuing privacy dangers of infringing P2P sites, despite protestations by these software engineers that steps have been taken to protect users. These risks clearly continue today.
If people won’t leave these networks because it is illegal to share copyrighted works without permission, at least they should leave because of the risk to themselves and others. I wonder if the investment firm employee feels the movie or song he obtained was worth it.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Unfortunatly you cannot stop the users from sharing, they choose to share copyrighted material, even if it is against the law, they do not realize they are breaking there countries laws. however, due to the fact that the internet is global, you would have to push for a “global internet laws”, inorder to stop piracy, it will not stop in america. it has spreaded far and wide to the ends of the earth. P2P Sharing is a very hard thing to stop. Just like drugs, there could be many laws and large fines but it will never stop regardless of corporations. Unfortunatly, you put more time and effort in stopping piracy then you put time and effort into looking for cures or preventing drugs to enter the country. Multi-billion dollar corporations aimed to stop p2p, yet none of that money goes to aid poor countries or none of it goes to prevent drug dealers from selling to children and adults.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Great blog, subscribed to your rss feed. Thanks.