As the music industry continues hunting down peer-to-peer file swappers and even their parents, Congress has begun mulling whether to make file swap services get parental consent before allowing children to use the programs. That's the premise behind the Protecting Children From Peer-To-Peer Pornography Act, unwrapped July 24.
This bill is the work of Reps Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania) and Chris John (D-Louisiana) and would also require P2P networks like Morpheus and Kazaa to warn users about the dangers of file swapping, like porn, viruses, and inadvertent sharing of spyware or adware, according to the Washington Post.
But porn seems to be the main target, with the Post saying "several studies" show P2P networks "rife with pornography," including one saying Gnutella users searched for porn more than they searched for music. The paper also said Pitts began drafting the new bill after he read a General Accounting Office study where seemingly innocuous search terms on Kazaa brought over 40 percent child porn and over 30 percent adult porn.
The Pitts-John bill would also allow parents to put beacons on their computers that say file swap software isn't wanted, the Post said, even if their children try downloading and installing the programs without their parents' permission. P2P networks seeing the beacons would have to refuse the download requests, the paper said.
But those beacons don?t sit well with Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, who said they can't substitute for proper parental supervision. "There is no government provision that is going to replace that supervision," he told the Post. "...There's a mistaken notion that there might be a company and if there's a company, federal regulators can grab them."
In a related development, a Kazaa spokesman told Australian reporters the popular P2P network and its parent, Sharman Networks, had no intention of saying just what kind of customers it normally attracts. The reason for this was they didn't want to give the RIAA another edge in its current campaign of subpoenaing suspected file swappers and their families as an anti-piracy measure.
