Piracy Deterrence and Education Act Introduced

Bootsy Collins writes "Last Thursday in the U.S. Congress, H.R. 2517 was quietly introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee. The bill, authored by Lamar Smith (R-TX) and co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-CA), directs the FBI to develop methods of deterring copyright violation through use of peer-to-peer networks, including efforts to facilitate sharing information about suspected violators amongst law enforcement agencies. It also directs the Justice Department to develop programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad. Berman, you may remember, introduce a bill last year that would give the RIAA and MPAA wide latitude to crack suspected violators' computers. " Update: 06/23 17:03 GMT by S : We also covered a variant of this story on Saturday.

Comments

2.3 billion...?

[jdray]

Did I count those zeroes right? 2.3 billion files exchanged each month?

I wonder what they're considering a "file." If they're counting the gifs and jpegs for smileys, emoticons, ads, backgrounds for the chat clients and whatnot, that doesn't seem like a fair comparisson.

What am I saying? This is Congress at work...

Re:2.3 billion...?

[ToadMan8]

Oh jeez, I don't doubt it. We had direct connect running on a private network... about 1000 users connected on average, 15 or 16 TB of data, and we averaged over two searches per second. Every day. All day. So if each search resulted in only one download (which most resulted in "download everything, I am connected at 100 mbps") that'd be 172,800 downloads a day and thus ~63,000,000 theoretical downloads per year. On our piddly little 1000 (but blindingly fast ;)) network.

Fair bill?

[gnuadam]

Distributing copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal. This is true regardless of what you might think about the fairness of either the behaviour of the copyright owner or of the copyright law itself.

This bill is unique. It seems rational. In a world where senators advocate allowing copyright owners to (without due process) destroy or hack computers in an attempt to halt unlawful distribution of their materials, this seems sane.

It does nothing more than encourage law enforcement to cooperate in fighting crime, and puts the American people on notice that breaking the law is wrong, and that the people distributing many popular p2p programs plan spyware in their programs, and that the use of p2p carries risks for the safety of your computer, especially if they are used unwisely (like shareing an entire drive.)