P2P Software Features Encourage Inadvertent Sharing

Certain distributors of popular file-sharing programs have repeatedly failed to prevent, and may have knowingly caused and perpetuated, inadvertent file-sharing, explained PFF Senior Fellow Thomas Sydnor in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At the hearing today on “Inadvertent File Sharing over Peer-to-Peer Networks: How It Endangers Citizens and Jeopardizes National Security,” Sydnor urged the Committee to refer the matter to appropriate law enforcement agencies.

In his testimony, Sydnor, PFF Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, concluded that inadvertent sharing cannot be remediated by self-regulation by distributors of file-sharing programs because certain distributors have repeatedly violated every set of self-regulations proposed—including a Code of Conduct and a set of Volutary Best Practices that they drafted.

Sydnor then identified three critical defects present in every released version of the LimeWire 5 file-sharing program: (1) every version is dangerously unpredictable and can share all of a user’s personal document, image, video, and audio files just by being installed, (2) every version violates critical provisions of the LimeWire’s own Voluntary Best Practices, and (3) every version contains a feature that LimeWire itself knew to be a needlessly dangerous of means of ensuring that one reasonable mistake by a child could inadvertently share thousands of a family’s most sensitive personal files.

+ Full Testimony (PDF; 629 KB)

Source: Progress & Freedom Foundation

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 and is filed under Info Management and Retrieval, Intellectual Property, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.