Two California lawmakers want to see peer-to-peer online file swappers jailed, fined, or both, unless they provide their names and addresses with the title of the works they swap – even if they're swapping things that are not copyrighted – under a pair of new bills introduced in each chamber of the state legislature.
State Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), co-author of California's $1 million-fine-per-incident anti-spam law, unwrapped a bill to impose up to a year in jail, a $2,500 fine, or both, for noncompliant P2Pers, and state Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) introduced a similar bill in his chamber.
The bills so far have heavy support from the Motion Picture Association of America, though the Recording Industry Association of America had not yet commented on the bills at this writing.
But P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau told AVN.com the bills were unsurprising, considering a recent draft letter – said to have been written by California attorney general Bill Lockyer, though his office has denied his authorship – demanding P2P networks tighten protection of customers from "known risks… [like] pornography, identity theft, viruses, and copyright infringement," as a Lockyer spokesman told a CNET reporter earlier this week.
"The bills introduced in California are just further indicators that it's essential for federal policymakers to increase their efforts to make a functioning of marketplace, for music and other information that consumers clearly want out of peer to peer delivery systems," Eisgrau said.
"Literally, tens and hundreds of millions of what could be transactions, now simply called downloads, are going on every day or every week," he continued. "There are ways to change our laws so that artists, the people the [film and recording industries] purport to speak for, can actually get paid. The word we should be attaching to people who download music is ‘customer,’ not ‘criminal.’”
Both the Murray and McCarthy bills are also under fire from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, with EFF legal director Cindy Cohn saying they are grave privacy threats.
"These California anti-anonymity bills would force everyone - including children - to put their real names and addresses on all the files they trade, regardless of whether the files actually infringe copyrights," she said in a statement. "Because the bills require Internet users to post personally identifying information, they fly directly in the face of policy goals and laws that prevent identity theft and spam and protect children and domestic violence victims."
One adult entertainment company that has had its issues with P2P, Titan Media, isn't entirely enthusiastic about the bill, even though they have pursued online file swappers who have distributed Titan film and video.
"This is moving in the right direction, and their hearts in the right place," Titan counsel Gill Sperlein told AVN.com, "but I think it needs to be polished a little bit. Our first reaction was that this was great, but when you look at it closely, it needs some work."
The bills run counter to Titan's ongoing effort to settle the P2P issue in a quieter way: The San Francisco-based company has approached the Internet service providers of those they suspect swapping Titan product and worked with those ISPs to get the swappers to stop without exposing the swappers publicly.
"I've looked at the proposed legislation," Sperlein said. "We think there are some subtleties that weren't really addressed. One difficulty lies in that, just because something is a copyrighted work, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily against the law to distribute it. Also, because we produce adult material, we're worried about criminal penalties for people trading anonymously if they're doing it within the legal bounds of the law."
Sperlein also said the bills' initial lack of distinction between swapping copyrighted and non-copyrighted material needs to be addressed more clearly. "Without trying to write legislation, of course, we think that a parenthetical could be added in, saying something to the effect of if [P2Pers] were disseminating commercial material without copyright owner's permission, or something similar. It's a delicate process. And, hopefully, the bill will go forward and be cleaned up.
"People have the right to view adult material without everyone knowing who they are," Sperlein continued. "Those rights don't apply to someone who's infringing on someone's copyright. But [these bills] cover both people who are infringing and people who are not infringing. And [they need] to apply only to people who are disseminating copyright works."
An MPAA spokesperson did not return an AVN.com query for comment before this story went to press.
