file sharing battle has not gone away you know

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday January 28, 2003 22:56 by Declan

I'm not joking. A obscure law called the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act that former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed in 1997 makes peer-to-peer (P2P) pirates liable for $250,000 in fines and subject to prison terms of up to three years. (You may want to read it, since you'll likely be hearing more about it soon.)

Perspective: The new jailbird jinglee
By Declan McCullagh
January 27, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

WASHINGTON--If you've ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped
copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you're guilty of a federal
felony.

It doesn't matter if you've forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and
now are eagerly padding the record industry's bottom line by snapping
up $15.99 CDs by the cartload.

Be warned--you're what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted
federal felon.

That's a long time to spend cooling your heels in Club Fed.

Yet something strange is going on here. So far the Justice Department
has made precisely zero prosecutions of peer-to-peer users under the
NET Act.

[rest snipped, available at