Unsurprising, to say the least.
Unfortunately, it's not the fault of the P2P developers that people are misusing their product. It's the people sharing the copyrighted material themselves, and punishing the software makers for the misuse of its product is both wrong and stupid. After all, have Linux developers been sued because their OS runs an inordinate number of hackboxes and FTP topsites?
This is the full reason copyright violations are so hard to crack down on...
If both the uploading and downloading take place outside the state, they wouldn't even have the authority to regulate that would they?
It won't get past the Supreme Court when challenged.
P2P will simply move off the radar. It will go pc-2-pc. That technology already exists and is next to impossible to find unless they actually search every hard drive. And newgroups will continue.
The elected officials who introduce such legislation don't have a good understanding of technology. This isn't much different than Senator Hatch advocating blowing up pc's that download music.
I always though in a just society, you have to actualy commit a crime to be punished.
What a silly notion. File sharers don't "send" copyrighted work to anyone. The files just sit there on their computers for the taking.
Forget arms manufacturers, this affects real people today.
About three years ago I had a client approach me with a problem. They had about 50 staff members who were constantly drafting and editing documents and were running into all kinds of version control and access problems. They'd tried implementing a file server but ran into problems with people keeping it synchonized. They looked into a professional CMS, but their small company was turned off by the $30k to $50k price tags that most of the markets players seem to want.
My solution was simple. I dusted off an old C++ FTP client that I'd written years ago and added in the ability for it to authenticate against and search multiple servers at once. I then added a simple server client to the application, wrote a rudimentary search and sorting routine, and covered it up with a standard Windows UI.
Now, whenever anybody logs onto the network, their local application uploads a login token to a central server. The other clients automatically see the new token, index the new clients shared folder, and add the new clients files to their "Available Files" list. When a user on another PC wants a file, they simply have to select it from the list without any worries over which client it's located on, or whether another user has it checked out.
It's essentially a very simple network file management system, but under current law it's also a P2P client. Even though the application makes use of some OSS code and I'd like to share it with the public, I can't thanks to the threat of being sued. All it would take is one yahoo adding a distributed directory service to the program, and you'd have a P2P client with functionality rivaling Gnutella. I can't afford to be named as a party to a copyright suit, so a genuinely useful program sits on a CD, gathering dust.
You can buy a 200 million dollar movie for 15 bucks. You can buy a $500,000 CD of music for 20 bucks. We are getting ripped off. Thats why I haven't bought music for a long time. I know, I'm comparing apples and oranges.