An Australian copyright specialist has come out in support of propose US legislation to offer legal protection to record companies allowing them to gum up peer-to-peer networks.
The US recording industry, presently lobbying Congress to support the bill has deployed a range of tactics to prevent peer-to-peer music file swapping, including blocking transfers and flooding the network with dummy songs. However, their representatives promised a House of Representatives subcommittee that they would not disrupt the Internet or reach into individuals' computers.
"Those sort of proactive steps we have to consider, in many cases they're legitimate steps to protect the unprotectable," Leif Gamertsfelder, a copyright specialist lawyer at Deacons told ZDNet Australia. "Otherwise we'll get people taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the record companies."
Some of the tactics used by American record companies to discourage illegal peer-to-peer file sharing include flooding networks with decoy songs that do not play and "interdiction", which closes off a users hard drive to others on the network.
Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender, a company that deploys the techniques, said the industry has used the decoy service heavily, to the point where nine out of ten versions on a peer-to-peer network may be empty shells. However interdiction has been less popular, he said, as it may run afoul of anti-hacking laws.
Gamertsfelder believes Australia should follow the US lead or see a diminution of the music industry because of lost revenue streams. "There is so much activity, and it's an area we're not familiar with, so you need to upgrade it periodically," he said. "The government is in the process of triggering that review procedure and the outcomes of that will be played out over the next 12 months."
"I think the timing was absolutely perfect. The current review will be done in an environment which will give us time to look back over 2-3 years. The review period was a very astute decision," said Gamertsfelder. "The proposed amendments coming out of the review process will be, in my opinion, extremely well adapted to the environment we find ourselves in today."
He said there are some questions about intrusion and monitoring, but a balanced approach was needed. He also pointed out it's not just a music industry issue.
"People are sending files from one organisation to another," said Gamertsfelder. "They're chewing up bandwidth and infringing at the same time, you can't get much worse, and they may not be as productive."
A better approach for the record companies would be this: http://www.pico-pay.com/musicpaper.html