House IP Leader Endorses P2P Blocking

Technical Writing Geek points out an Ars Technica report on comments from Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), who sits on the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. In a recent editorial, Coble attempts to discourage P2P file sharing among young people, and praises Ohio University for its ban on P2P applications last year. Coble also suggests that identity theft is a great danger from file sharing. Public Knowledge is running a similar analysis, which argues against the main points from the editorial.

Re:ID Theft?

[KublaiKhan]

Yes, it's called the "voting box". If you don't like 'em, then vote 'em out.

Re:ID Theft?

[thewils]

how is P2P an ID Theft risk

'cos the idiot users don't realize they are sharing their entire disk.

They did this

[Jtmoney528]

At my university and it did not stop anyone from using P2P programs ... they just blocked certain ones and everyone just used different ones ... waste of time and money if you ask me.

No surprises here

[Enlarged to Show Tex]

Follow the money - Coble's just taking care of his patrons [opensecrets.org].

Hrm, who do I see here? The RIAA, ASCAP, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the American IP Law Association, all in his top 10.

The only surprise here is how long it's taken him to get around to taking care of them...

Contact him

[Anonymous Coward]

mailto:[e-mail] [mailto]

Re:ID Theft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those same users would have the same problem, if they ran ftpd instead of limewire. So it's not "all thanks to P2P," it's all thanks to users serving all their files.

Blocking is USELESS

[CodeBuster]

Unless they want to disallow encrypted traffic (i.e. any traffic that they cannot decipher) entirely or squelch the amounts then what are they going to do about it? Probably nothing. It is also useful to look at the whole P2P blocking issue from an economic standpoint. What are the interests of the ISPs in this? They would like to preserve, to the extent possible, the perception of "good speed" for all of their users which might imply some mitigation measures merely to improve that value proposition for their customers...up to a point. However, the mitigation measures will have increasing marginal costs as more and more detection, protocol analysis, and monitoring hardware and software is purchased and installed until it gets to a point where it is cheaper to add more bandwidth (i.e. network capacity) than it is to invest in ever more expensive mitigation and monitoring equipment. The ISPs would also like to be protected from liability for what happens on their networks (or at least they should want this if they are smart...the MAFIAA lawyers would LOVE to be able to sue AT&T and Verizon for "allowing" P2P to continue on their networks) both as a hedge against expensive copyright infringement lawsuits AND even MORE burdensome government regulation of their business (i.e they are regulated already but additional regulation and the attendant costs would be unwelcome indeed to the ISPs and their investors). Finally, they would like to increase their customer base and if "content" is what brings in more paying ISP customers then secretly (although these companies would never admit it publicly) they would probably prefer to preserve the status quo of P2P if that keeps their subscribers coming back each month with those fees.

Re:ID Theft?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Where I work we have a separate, open, WIFI network with 100Mb/s bandwidth to the Internet. Download an ISO in minutes. This attracts a lot of people who park around the campus. It's amazing how many people have read/write access open to their entire hard drive. It's amazing how much personal information, such as what type of adult movies and mp3 they enjoy, is left wide open.

Most of these people have some sort of P2P client installed such as Limewire.

Windows should warn you if you have your entire C: drive shared read/write to guest and open through the firewall. In fact, I think they should remove that capability all together. Guest never should have full read/write access to c:\.