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Lest we forget who they are and what they do! |
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Written by Daniel
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Friday, 07 March 2008 |
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House IP committee member endorses college P2P blocking
By Nate Anderson | Published: March 07, 2008 - 12:40PM CT
ARS Technica In an editorial for The Hill, Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) took aim this week at P2P file-swappers. If the moral and legal arguments won't convince them to stop sharing, Coble suggests another tactic: scaring kids straight. Identity theft, he says, is a consequence of file-swapping.
Coble's editorial points out that one Gregory Kopiloff has pled guilty to grabbing information over Limewire and using it to commit identity theft. Kopiloff is scheduled to be sentenced on March 17.
While attempting to convince kids that this could happen to them (Kopiloff's victims "appear to have been of high school or college age"), Coble's wider purpose doesn't really concern identity theft at all. His piece is titled "Share your music, lose your identity," but, by the third paragraph, he's already transitioning back to the "file-swapping is illegal and wrong" argument. It's as though he has no real faith in his premise, and most file-swappers are already aware that sharing all of your documents with the entire world is probably a bad idea.
Here's how Kopiloff segues from the "it's bad for you" to "it's wrong" arguments: "This case is not the first time, however, Limewire and other peer-to-peer programs have been implicated in the deliberate theft of valuable property." Translation: Your personal property is valuable, and you'd hate to have it taken, so why are copying valuable property that belongs to others without paying for it? [ARS Technica] [Comments...] |
