The chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has called for reduced penalties for peer-to-peer file swappers downloading copyrighted material from the Internet.
Sen. Norman Coleman (R.-Minnesota), whose subcommittee hearing on the issue drew powerful players in the music and film industries as well as celebrities who held differing views on the issue – like rappers Chuck D and LL Cool J, the former supporting and the latter opposing P2P swapping – said the current penalties are "excessive and scary," forcing the innocent to settle litigation.
"I can tell you," the senator told reporters, "that $150,000 per song is not reasonable, and that's technically what you can put in front of somebody." The actual range is between $750 and $150,000. "That forces people to settle when they may want to fight, but they're thinking, 'goodness, gracious, what am I going to face'." But Coleman, who has acknowledged himself a former Napster user, has yet to suggest what a reasonable penalty range might be.
Coleman has also called for federal law to be changed to cut back the music industry's subpoena power. A fellow Senator, Sam Brownback (R.-Kansas), has introduced a bill aiming to do that, though the bill is somewhat controversial because it suggests P2P networks are deliberate conductors of porn and other "objectionable" material.
Coleman doesn't exactly have an ally in the Recording Industry Association of America, which wants no change in current law for fear of weakening copyright holders' rights and losing the battle against copyright piracy. But P2P United, a group formed over the summer to challenge the RIAA's subpoena and litigation campaign, praised Coleman for acting quickly enough to hold hearings and propose changes.
"(His) willingness…to protect the public in these two critical areas is commendable," said P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau in a statement.
P2P United unwrapped a code of ethics for the online file-swapping community a day before Coleman's hearings began. Among other things, the code calls for P2P networks rejecting installing spyware on user computers, requiring users to conform shared files to prevent "inadvertent designation of the content of the user's hard drive," prominent information of copyright infringement and prohibiting users from using the networks for copyright infringement, and "appropriate" links to sources of information on copyright law.
The RIAA welcomed the code of ethics but criticized it for not even beginning to redress copyright infringement fully.
