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Welcome to the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and thanks to everyone who's just subscribed! Please invite friends and colleagues to sign up and help us to help grownups stay informed about children's safe, constructive use of the Internet. Email us anytime!

 
September 12, 2003

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this second week of September:


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Family Tech: Lawsuits, amnesty offer, porn warning for file-sharers young & old

Announcements from the Recording Industry Association of America buried us under a mountain of media this week. The RIAA found no less than three high-profile ways to send its anti-piracy message to file-sharers in a matter of days: 1) 261 lawsuits; 2) a controversial amnesty offer; and 3) a warning about child porn.

Parents of people who swap music, movie, and software files need to know about these fresh developments, which make for some meaty family discussion. "It is just such discussions, not legal action against ordinary Internet users, that many Internet and family experts argue will be crucial to stamping out online piracy [and protecting kids, we would add]," according to the New York Times.

Here are the RIAA's latest battle tactics...

  1. The 261 lawsuits: Announced this week, they're the first wave resulting from the 1,300+ subpoenas (to identify individual file-sharers) the RIAA filed weeks ago (see our coverage). "'Criminals' caught up in the dragnet include a 12-year-old New York girl who lives in a public housing project, a woman whose grandson might have used her Internet account to share music, and a California businessman who says he doesn't even know how to download music," writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid in his latest column. The Register's (sarcastic) coverage focused on the 12-year-old, Brianna LaHara, who (according to The Register) thought that - because her mother had paid Kazaa $29.95/month - her file-sharing activities were legal (Wired News zooms in on the $29.95/mo. question). A coalition of file-sharing networks, P2P United, later offered to pay Brianna's settlement costs, CNET reports.

    Tuesday there was a Senate Judiciary hearing with the RIAA's president in which Sen. Dick Durbin (D) of Illinois asked Cary Sherman if his organization was now targeting junior high schools in its campaign. Here's more on the Senate hearing from the Associated Press. The Washington Post describes the experience of another defendant, who told the Post it was only after she was subpoenaed and had her local computer club erase her MP3 files that she found out Kazaa's software allowed others to see songs she had on her hard drive. (So far the RIAA has targeted "people who make their music collections available for others to download," Larry Magid explains.) The Los Angeles Times and Fox News have stories on families' reactions to being sued.

    The settlements for these lawsuits are expected to be about $3,000 each, according to Wired News, down some $9,000 from those paid by four college students the RIAA sued last spring. "Am I next?" is the question CNET asks (and attempts to answer), saying the odds are on your side. The Washington Post has prepared a very useful FAQ, answering questions like, "How can they find me?" and "But I'm not sharing songs - it's my kid."

  2. Amnesty offer: The RIAA on Monday said it is offering an amnesty program to "P2P pirates who send in a notarized affidavit declaring that they've wiped all copyright-infringing materials from their disk drives and who vow not to file- share again," Slate reports. That is, to those the RIAA hasn't already identified in its investigations.

    On the day of the amnesty announcement, Sen. Norm Coleman (R) of Minnesota raised questions about it in a press conference. "The newly proposed 'amnesty' is clearly a strategy by the industry to address some of the concerns I and others have had [about the RIAA's subpoenas last summer]," Coleman said in a statement. "But, it raises new issues that require careful analysis and review. An amnesty that could involve millions of kids submitting and signing legal documents that plead themselves guilty to the Recording Industry Association of America may not be the best approach to achieving a balance between protecting copyright laws and punishing those who violate those laws." Here are Senator Coleman's statement and coverage in Internet News.

    The EFF went a step further with its Web page on "Why the RIAA's Amnesty Offer is a Sham", warning, for example, that "the RIAA's offer only protects you against RIAA lawsuits," and "signing an RIAA affidavit may expose you to criminal liability."

  3. Anti-porn campaign: Some media outlets have sensationalized this news, as if it's the first they've heard of porn on file-sharing networks. It's an important problem for parents to be aware of, and members of Congress have been trying to get the word out as far back as mid-2001 (see our 8/3/01 report). Whatever its motivation (maybe it's partly about protecting children?), the RIAA has certainly brightened the spotlight on this part of the file-sharing problem parents face.

    The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children focused on the illegal child porn part of the adult content available on these networks, testifying before this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about "how pedophiles are turning to peer-to-peer file-sharers in an effort to avoid law enforcement programs that have been put in place to free the Web of child pornography." In its coverage, the New York Times cites sources as asking "whether [the RIAA's] raising this issue is more than a little cynical from an industry that heavily promotes music with sexual and violent themes."

In sum, the RIAA has a ways to go in educating the public, which it says is the goal of all this activity. About half of 12-to-22-year-old Americans with Net access have downloaded music from file-sharing networks, the New York Times reports, and there are some 57 million file-swappers in the US, the Washington Post reports. The RIAA's biggest battle, of course, is not against people so much as a deeply rooted belief: that everything in cyberspace should be free. Fighting that "will not be easy," the Times suggests. "The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers." Plus, file-sharers talk about being used to copying and sharing their favorite records, tapes, and CDs, and ask how file-sharing is different. Clearly this is sharing on a much bigger scale, having much more financial impact on writers, musicians, and record companies, but this fact fails to ease file-sharers' confusion.

The high-traffic women's site iVillage ran a poll this week, "Should parents be legally responsible for their kid's illegal music downloads?", and the fascinating discussion that followed voiced what seems a very representative sample of people's views (and confusion).

The RIAA says 52% of the US public supports its position, the BBC reports. It surveyed 800 people two days before announcing the 261 lawsuits, the BBC adds.

Our question for the RIAA is, What about other Net technologies children use to share music? We know of one group of teens that uses its own music server - a private server one of the members of this small but nationwide group set up to share tunes via Internet relay chat. Perhaps IRC will be the next focus of RIAA lawsuits, but at what point will the costs of litigation (and wielding a stick instead of a carrot) outweigh the benefits for the RIAA?

We would love to hear your comments and stories about file-sharing kids - especially discussions you've had, solutions you've come up with, etc. The address: feedback@netfamilynews.org. Questions are always welcome too!

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A subscriber writes: Taking responsibility online

In response to our item last week, "More on alleged teen worm writer," subscriber Will in Iowa emailed us:

"Here we go again, and I'm so tired of hearing it.... 'It's not my fault,' 'Even though I messed up, I shouldn't be punished,' ... 'the government is trying to make an example out of me,' etc., etc., etc.

"What I'm tired of is the lack of personal responsibility that I see in the world these days. Here in Des Moines, Iowa, it's no different than anywhere else. Kids are being taught that nothing is their fault, and if they get caught messing up there's someone else to blame it on. I call it the 'victim syndrome.' This teen that appears to have modified the malicious worm and then sent it on into the Internet is a classic example.... He seems to consider himself a victim of government persecution, even though he modified a worm/virus and thought nothing about sending it off to infect other computers. Sure, he messed up and caused harm to thousands of computers, but, darn it, the person who wrote the original code is really to blame. Catch the other person and leave him alone so he can get on with his life! What a stupid, idiotic thing to say! And what I find even more disgusting is that his parents are backing him up on this. Where will it all end?

"I personally hope that the government sends [him] somewhere for at least enough time to really understand that he was an idiot, and deserves to be punished for his actions. I'm suggesting that some sort of boot camp would hopefully straighten [him] out a bit. Then he should also be prepared to start paying any companies or home users compensation for the damage he did with the coding he used. Sure, he might not have written the original code, but when he modified the code and sent it out again, he blew any chance at the 'normal life' that he wants.

"After reading his comment, 'I am extremely concerned that the government is trying to make an example of me. I understand that the government needs to catch someone for these crimes. I'm not the one they need to get!', all I can say is, 'get a clue'! Thanks for letting me vent."

Comments are always welcome - and, with permission, often published. Email us any time.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Pennsylvania's unusual child-porn case

    It's a bit complicated, but an important experiment in the fight against online child pornography, as well as in Internet law. Last year Pennsylvania passed a law that allows its attorney general to order Internet service providers to block access to the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of Web sites suspected of providing child pornography. There are two problems with that, according to two civil liberties organizations and an ISP that this week filed a suit challenging the law: 1) thousands of Web sites can share one IP address, so the attorney general is likely to be causing many legitimate sites to be blocked in shutting down the IP address of a child-porn site; 2) when the attorney general sends orders to ISPs like Earthlink, Terra Lycos, and Verizon, it affects Net users throughout North America, not just Pennsylvanians. No other state appears to have enacted such a sweeping law, and this is the first time it is being tested in court, CNET reports. In filing suit, the basic message of the civil liberties organizations - the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology - was that the goal is fine, but the method of reaching it flawed. The other news about the case this week was the state attorney general's announcement that he would agree to stop sending the notices to ISPs "but vowed to use the state courts [obtain court orders] to achieve the same result," the Washington Post reports (the ACLU and CDT had wanted the courts to be involved in the process).

    Both the Post and CNET cite a study released last winter by Harvard University's Berkman Center. "It said the practice of Web sites sharing IP addresses is so commonplace that Yahoo hosts 74,000 Web sites at one address and Tucows, a Toronto-based registrar of Web domain names, uses one address for 68,000 domains," according to CNET. The case filed by the ACLU and CDT will be heard in late November.

  2. Kids' easy access to cigarettes online: Study

    Four children aged 11 to 15 used the Web to buy 33,000 cigarettes as part of a study published this week by the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the Durham Herald-Sun, the study, conducted by the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health, provides the first scientific documentation of "the ease with which cigarette buyers can use the Internet's anonymity to skirt minimum age requirements" (it's against the law in all 50 US states to sell tobacco to minors). "After identifying 88 Web sites that sell cigarettes, the researchers arranged for the volunteers - two boys and two girls - to start buying. The children were given credit cards for purchases requiring that form of payment, and were taken to local businesses to buy money orders when those were required." The Herald-Sun adds that 165 cartons were delivered to their homes, mostly of the Marlboro brand. (Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this item out.)

  3. Google's 5th birthday

    Hard to believe it, but Google's five already - and one very big five-year-old at that. The search engine that was fielding 10,000 queries a day while still operating out of a garage in Menlo Park, Calif., now handles 200 million queries daily in 80 languages, the BBC reports. And of course now it supports comparison shopping, blogs, news, and pop-up ad blocking, and "google" is a noun, adjective, and verb (right up there with kleenex now!). Read the BBC piece to find out what the "Google dance" is and how blogs have affected Google results. Here's the Washington Post's birthday report.

  4. Interactive reference 'books'

    Using a Web search engine to find facts can leave you swimming in them - complete with plenty of contradictions. "Free reference works are hard to come by online - there's the basic Encyclopedia.com and an evolving "free content" project, Wikipedia.org," the Washington Post reports. Which is why encyclopedia CD-ROMs survive. Of the four most popular - Britannica, Microsoft's Encarta, World Book, and Grolier - only Grolier did not release a 2004 upgrade. The Post piece looks at the pluses and minuses (in terms of features and user age levels) of the three upgraded products.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 


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