The peer-to-peer community is joining law enforcement to crack down on child pornographers who might be using popular file-swapping networks to distribute child porn. And they're taking a page from one of the most famous children's welfare campaigns as part of their effort.
KaZaA is said to have been cooperating with the FBI for several months to flush the child porners off their network, while P2P interest group P2P United wants to develop a program comparable to the famous milk-carton campaign for finding missing children, according to executive director Adam Eisgrau.
In remarks to the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, which held a May 6 hearing called "Online Pornography: Closing The Doors on Pervasive Smut," Eisgrau said his group's idea is to post pictures of those wanted for child porn on the home pages of the P2P networks. P2P United calls it Operation Milk Carton, though the campaign has no official name as yet.
"Quite a number of [subcommittee] members, while clearly concerned about the exposure of horrible material to children, also understood and asked questions regarding the fact that P2P technology is an outgrowth of the Internet and it is the Internet that creates this exposure," Eisgrau told AVNOnline.com following the hearing. "We are not only not the problem, we are instrumental elements of the solutions."
Eisgrau said P2P United members - which include popular networks Grokster, Morpheus, and eDonkey - are in active discussions with the FBI about the Operation Milk Carton idea, an idea he said all the P2P networks who are P2P United members are enthusiastic about.
"That concept is just that," he said. "And we are happy to continue to brainstorm with the bureau and other law enforcement agencies and child welfare organizations or anything else about how to put the power of the technology to work protecting children."
Critics in the recent past have accused the P2P networks of taking a careless attitude to the prospect that child porn and adult porn alike were being transmitted over their networks. Those critics have included gay adult production company Titan Media, whose vice president Keith Ruoff sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week supporting a bill allowing the Justice Department to crack down on Internet pirates.
Titan has fought a low-key battle against P2P swapping of its titles by approaching suspected swappers' Internet service providers and working to get the swappers to cease and desist without identifying the swappers publicly or taking them to court in public litigation. That strategy is a striking contrast to the music industry's controversial policy of subpoena and sue suspected swappers of copyrighted material.
"This act," Ruoff wrote May 3 about the so-called PIRATE Act (Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Exploitation), "has a two-fold importance to all Americans. Not only does it strengthen and protect the rights of copyright holders, it also helps to punish those that make adult materials available to children in the peer-to-peer file trading networks.
"As a copyright holder and producer of adult materials," he continued, Titan is "appalled by the rampant and carefree distribution of adult materials by users of P2P file sharing networks. Through the irresponsible actions of millions of adult file sharers, millions and millions of adult oriented movies and images are being freely distributed with no concern for the welfare of children."
The P2P networks usually deny that they deliberately facilitate distribution of adult materials or child porn over their networks, though they often said in hand that there was little enough they could do to stop it.
"If your next-door neighbor gave your 13-year-old son or daughter an adult DVD, you would be outraged! Yet, this is exactly what is happening in the online world of P2P file sharing," Ruoff said in his letter to the Judiciary Committee. "Hundreds of thousands of adult movies have been ripped, stolen and copied from DVD and VHS by users of P2P. They then freely and without impunity trade, share and distribute these adult films via P2P, making them freely available to children."
Five Senators - Democrats Patrick Leahy (Vermont) and Barbara Boxer (California), and Republicans Orrin Hatch (Utah), Ted Stevens (Alaska) and Gordon Smith (Oregon) - have written the Federal Trade Commission, saying the P2P networks "unwittingly" turn kids and adults into porn and pirate distributors.
The FTC itself send a representative to the House subcommittee hearing. Howard Beales, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the subcommittee the P2P networks offer "some type of filter" to keep unwanted content - presumably including adult material and child porn - out of the loop.
"KaZaA and LimeWire provided filters that blocked access to materials that contained offensive or otherwise adult-content related words in the description of the file," Beales said. "In addition, all four services gave users the ability to create their own filters by manually entering all the words that they wanted blocked from the search results."
But those filters, Beales continued, work only by "examining language found in the title or the descriptor of the file, rather than the content of the file. Moreover, these filters may not be effective when users label files inaccurately, which can result in the transfer of files with pornographic or other unwanted content."
Eisgrau said those sponsoring what he called "rather overbroad" legislation aimed at cracking down on P2P programs or on online content are "clearly well intentioned and very concerned" about children being exposed to all manner of porn but to child porn and child pornographers in particular.
"There does appear that [they] did not fully appreciate, and perhaps does not fully appreciate, that P2P producers are not Website operators; they are not people who produce what Hollywood would call content, and do not maintain any kind of database of actual information that is made to the public. Rather, P2P services simply provide software that users use to talk to other users. And that does create unique challenges and opportunities for both criminals and law enforcement as well as parents and software developers.
"To hold P2P software producers accountable for what their software is used for. in the same way Internet service providers and Web producers are held accountable for content they actually can control, misses a very fundamental difference between what P2P networks really are, relative to more common or more familiar parts of the Internet. We hope the hearing was helpful to [any] sincere other critics of P2P software."
