Byline: David McGuire
Online file-swapping services would be required to get parental consent before allowing children to use their software under a new bill to be introduced today in Congress.
The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is intended to prevent children from downloading pornographic material, which is widely available for free through file-sharing services like Morpheus and Kazaa.
Besides requiring parental consent, the bill would allow parents to install "beacons" on their computers that signal their desire to not have file-sharing software. If a child tries to download the software, networks would have to refuse when they see the beacon. The beacons would be developed by the Federal Trade Commission with assistance from the Commerce Department.
It also would require file-sharing networks to warn users about the dangers of file sharing. Several studies have shown that the networks are rife with pornography.
There are 57 million Americans who swap files, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. Forty percent of them are children, according to the bill's sponsors, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) and Chris John (D-La.).
Morpheus, Kazaa and other services have attained notoriety in the past several years for allowing widespread music swapping, but they can be used to trade documents, images, videos and any other kind of digital file. A recent study by Ames, Iowa-based Internet security firm Palisade Systems found that users of the Gnutella file-sharing network searched for pornography more often than they searched for music.
Pitts drafted the bill after reading a General Accounting Office (GAO) study showing the high availability of pornography on file-sharing networks, said spokesman Derek Karchner. GAO investigators in a test of the Kazaa network entered search terms including Pokemon, Britney Spears and Olsen Twins. More than 40 percent of the returns for those searches yielded child pornography, and another 30 percent returned adult pornography.
"He couldn't sit by and let that happen unregulated," Karchner said.
Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said he is skeptical about the viability of the beacons.
"I'm a little flabbergasted. I have no idea how you would even begin to build such a thing. The reality is that parents have to supervise their kids online and there is no government provision that is going to replace that supervision," he said. "Undergraduate computer science students can write these [file-sharing programs] in under a week. There's a [mistaken] notion that there might be a company and if there's a company, federal regulators can grab them."
Wayne Rosso, president of West Indies-based file-sharing network Grokster, said children also can find pornography with popular search engines like Google.
Peer-to-peer "should not just be singled out," he said. "There's no more or less of a pornography problem on [file-sharing networks] than there is on the entire World Wide Web. Pornography's only there if you're searching for it. It's not something that just pops up in your face like 'spam' on AOL."
The GAO study noted that there is far more pornography available on the Internet through normal search engine services than on peer-to-peer networks.
Greg Bildson, the chief technical officer of New York-based file-sharing firm LimeWire, said he has no problem forcing users to confirm that they are adults before downloading LimeWire, but said anything more complicated than a simple question with a yes/no answer would be difficult to administer and could compromise customer privacy.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) supports the bill, according to a spokeswoman for the group.
The association has sent out hundreds of subpoenas to Internet users suspected of using file-sharing networks to illegally swap copyrighted digital music files.
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