Peer-to-peer file swapping isn't going away quietly just yet, even with copyright infringement pressure mounting. And porn isn't out of the cyberswap picture just yet, either. But while a study released March 17 said porn is the single largest P2P swap going, with potential trouble beyond copyright issues, that doesn't mean getting P2P porn is as simple as people might think.
Not if you're looking for the higher-quality, more sophisticated, and more producer-controlled product. For one thing, that kind of cyberporn producer, like VideoSecrets, goes out of its way not to make it easy.
"It's hard to do with us," said Tina, an accounts executive with VideoSecrets. "We track the usage. Let's say they swap content, or they think they'll be able to, well – boom. The only way they're able to swap content is to make a central URL, because all our content is hooked up to a referring URL."
She said that while it's a fair guess that most of the major adult Net players are tracking their content in similar ways, it's the much smaller and mostly less responsible players who may have the largest volume of P2P file pinching. "Maybe nobody tracks it, maybe they don't care, as long as they're selling what they need to sell," she said. "A lot of companies are fly-by-night companies, they're in it to make a lump sum of money, and they really don't care," she said.
Palisade Systems, whose business is helping companies manage and protect network assets from diverse cyberthreats, said 42 percent of all searches on P2P systems went for porn images or videos, based on a Palisade analysis of over 22 million searches. Of those, 73 percent all movie searches involved porn, 24 percent of all image searches involved child porn, and six percent of all searches overall involved one or another kind of child porn, Palisade said.
And the P2P swapping can open up any organization whose workers like to P2P on the job to big liabilities, according to attorney Daniel Langin – and not just those of copyright infringement, either.
"The most obvious risk is from a civil suit for copyright infringement," he said in a statement regarding the Palisade study. "The amount of sexually explicit materials traded over P2P may also open up an organization to discrimination suits as a hostile workplace. Especially dangerous is P2P use associated with child pornography, which is a felony-level offense."
Palisade studied swaps over such systems as LimeWire, Morpheus, BearShare, and Xolox. "Considering that we introduced our PacketHound appliance more than two and half years ago to address risks from applications like P2P file-sharing running on an organization's network, we've long known they pose a significant threat," said Palisade chief operating officer Eric Schnack in a statement. "These study results reinforce how very real and potentially devastating the consequences may be."
