It’s never been very clear to me why we should believe an infringing P2P network that enables illegal transport of copyrighted works when they say they want to protect their users from identity theft. They have a financial motive to ensure users don’t become victims, thus getting angry, deleting the program, and badmouthing it to friends. But by default a darknet fails if people aren’t sharing.

A report on The Today Show by national reporter Natalie Morales focused on a U.S. Secret Service report about the identity-theft risks of using infringing P2P software. Morales focused on a couple who had their tax returns copied to computers around the world — and had their tax return diverted by an identity thief — because their teenage daughters installed an infringing P2P program on their computer.

Morales and her staff did a search of LimeWire and quickly found 150,000 tax returns in New York alone. (One disappointing thing about the report — Morales says kids love the programs because they let them “share” files at no cost, and then says “[t]hey could also have a dark side.” I think artists and creators would say the “sharing” is a dark side.)

Meredith Viera introduced this as a “new” threat, but it has been around as long as P2P has been around. Earlier this decade the House Government Reform Committee had hearings on the subject and commissioned a report. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office also published a report, showing the ways P2P providers make it difficult for their users not to share; it makes sense, again, because of the needs of a darknet. Last year, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) introduced bipartisan legislation requiring the Federal Trade Commission to regulate P2P to protect the identities of users, and that legislation should be introduced in this Congress any day now.

On Monday Washington Internet Daily (subscription required) reported on two members of the Distributed Computing Industry Association and their efforts to comply with a set of DCIA principles on file-sharing. Greg Piper wrote:

Installing LimeWire 5.0 won’t share anything on a user’s hard drive that hasn’t been shared in previous client installations, the submission says. Users can see how many and which files they’re sharing through a status bar and “P2P Network” icon. The “My Library” screen in setup prevents users from sharing entire folders, and gets rid of the all-in-one “shared folder” designation. “Recursive” sharing of subfolders in a larger directory, a prime vehicle for accidental sharing, has also been disabled. But previously shared files would appear to remain so after installation. All files downloaded through LimeWire will remain shared by default, though the submission emphasizes
users can right-click files on any screen to turn off sharing.

Note that the couple violated in Morales’ report likely would have been violated even if their teens had upgraded to 5.0. The parents had to hope that the teens would pro-actively disable sharing by using menu options and right-clicking. Were their daughters focused on protecting files on their folks’ computer, or focused on getting free music?

At the end of the report, Morales says Lime Wire claims 5.0 “prevents your personal files from being shared,” although as Piper reports and Morales doesn’t, such blockage doesn’t happen by default. But Viera responded by saying “I’m not sure I would trust any of them any more.”

I’m with Viera.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:05 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under FTC, creators, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.