According to this story posted on Broadcasting & Cable, the US Senate is still full of baffled, bewildered, and bollixed lawmakers seething at the thought of unregulated peer-to-peer file sharing.
The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday issued a stern warning to operators of file-sharing networks and Internet service providers that Congress will impose penalties on them if the industries don't do more to stop illegal downloading of music, movies and TV shows."We are going to be watching," said panel chairman Ted Stevens, adding that he is disappointed file sharing companies haven't done more in the wake of the Supreme Court's Grokster decision holding P2P liable for copyright violations if they encourage copying without compensation of the artists, record labels and studios that produced the content.
"We've got to find some way of protecting our intellectual property. We can't expect people abroad to protect our intellectual property if we can't protect it at home," he said during a hearing on the impact of the Grokster case. ...
Reading this made me wonder a couple of things. First, why haven't the lawmakers gotten this upset about roads? Our highway system is used by far more people than P2P networks, and I'd bet that as much, if not more (I'm too lazy to look up figures), stolen property (dollar-wise) is transported on highways each year than on P2P networks. Why aren't they threatening the state transportation departments with added oversight and regulation unless they police their roads more effectively (e.g., mandatory searches on every trip, signed agreements by motorists who want to transport something on the roadway, etc.)? Other than the digital/corporeal difference, why aren't P2P networks and a roadway networks subject to the same standards?
Second, Senator Stevens obviously has no clue about technology, innovation, or world commerce, but how can he believe that our development of P2P networks, one of the most powerful concepts overlaid on the Internet, is somehow encouraging people in China and India and elsewhere to pirate content? Does he really think the guy standing on a Shanghai street corner selling low-quality DVD copies of Revenge of the Sith is doing it because he thinks "well, the Americans use their P2P networks, so this must be OK"?
If the senators are so concerned about this copyright violation problem, why don't they worry about enforcing the copyright laws we already have instead of adding new regulation that will only stifle technological innovation?
I agree with your intent, but I'm not sure the analogy quite holds. The ISPs are probably similar to state transportation departments (not being US, I'm not sure). But P2P operators are more similar to transport companies. And you can bet if 90% of a given transporter's cargo was illegal, they'd get investigated.
Of course, then there's the question of whether it's actually possible to regulate P2P networks. But it's definitely possible to monitor and prosecute ISPs, so the expected outcome is ISPs banning P2P. But this might just drive users to offshore ISPs. Not sure what the regulation situation would be there.