James Delahunty
19 Jan 2005 4:33
Written by state Senator Kevin Murray, A bill introduced to the California Legislature last Friday seeks to outlaw the selling, advertising, and distributing peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software. Mr. Murray has close ties to the entertainment industry. The legislation takes aim right at the business plans of file-sharing companies. The bill would make it a crime to sell file-sharing software without taking reasonable care to prevent copyright infringement and pornography swapping. "It’s another edge of a sword that the entertainment cartel is attempting to use to gut the P2P application," said Matthew A. Neco, general counsel and vice president for StreamCast Networks.
The entertainment industry has long being complaining that file-sharing software allows its users to break the law every single time they download a song or a movie. Others say that it makes pornography easily accessible to children. One might argue that the Internet alone makes pornography easily accessible to children. In August, a federal court in California ruled that file-sharing companies are not violating copyright law when customers use their programs to trade copyrighted music, text, or video. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case in March. The Entertainment Industry went into panic when BitTorrent was discovered about three years late by their hired "experts", who realized that BitTorrent allows users to share large files at very high speeds.
Mr. Murray said he wrote the bill because file-sharing companies have the legal responsibility, to monitor the ways their networks are used. "Even if you aren’t selling crack, you can’t have a crack house," said Mr. Murray. He said the law would not require major investments from file-sharing companies: "We are asking for filters, not perfect filters."
Source:
Red Herring