House Hearing Will Address Bill on Inadvertent File-Sharing

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 5, 2009 - 11:59am.

Washington - The U.S. House Energy subcommittee will hold a hearing tomorrow on a bill that would require distributors of peer-to-peer software to provide repeated notices to users about the sharing of files from their computers, CNET News.com reported.

Introduced by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), the bill would require P2P software to ask users -- every time they launch the software -- whether they want to share files.

CNET notes, however, that the bill is so broadly written that it could be taken to include non-P2P software, such as instant messaging, Web browsers, and the basic FTP client included in copies of Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

The bill stems from controversy that erupted after an unknowing user accidentally shared plans for the Marine One helicopter used by the President on a file-sharing network.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee responded to the incident with a letter to Mark Gorton, the chairman of file-sharing firm Lime Wire, asking what the company has done to protect users from inadvertent file-sharing.

Lime Wire chairman Mark Gorton told Congress in a letter earlier this week that the newest version of the application does not allow for any sharing of typical document formats, and in fact will un-share documents if a user attempts to mark them as available for sharing with others via the application.

Published in DMW Daily, May 5, 2009

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Comments

You'd be suprised...

Submitted by Manda (not verified) on May 11, 2009 - 7:50am.

You'd be surprised at what gets shared inadvertently. People's private data can be found on peer 2 peer systems all over the place. The most frequent is the Windows My Documents folder which can contain personal and private documents. We share files at my work on the online backup site http://www.myotherdrive.com so we can specify the privacy level of our documents and who can access it.