New P2P Restrictions

October 19, 2004 —

In case you weren't looking, California just passed a new law trying to stamp out peer-to- peer file sharing. I thought the privacy-minded Californians might resist such attempts by the record and other media companies, but I guess not. After all, most of the media companies are in California, and they have now attached criminal penalties to downloading known "commercial" works (look for Penal Code Section 653aa).

This law is about two years late, and they are outlawing the old Napster model which has been poisoned by the media companies anyway. For the past year the media companies have been dumping tainted files on all the various P2P services in order to frustrate filesharers.

Next time you check your firewall ports, pay particular attention to ports 6881 up to 6889. Those are the ports of choice for BitTorrent (.com), the refuge of those filesharers scared of legal consequences such as mentioned earlier ($2,500 and a year in jail per violation are pretty serious consequences).

Not being a lawyer, I can't tell you whether the BitTorrent model sneaks through the loophole of the new law in California as some claim. I can tell you these attempts will possibly ruin BitTorrent for legal uses, which is likely the agenda for the media companies anyway. The copyright cartels have shown no appreciation for legal uses of P2P technologies and I doubt they'll change anytime soon.

Should you shut down BitTorrent if you're using it? No, even if you're in California. Should you scan your servers once again for the latest Brittany Spears albums? Yes, and run that script regularly and save the log file.

If you or your company uses BitTorrent legally (there are many wonderful examples of efficient file transfer in the BitTorrent community), CYA with log files and document there are no infringing media files on your servers. Some poor company, probably a mid-sized enterprise headquartered in California big enough to have a name but not big enough to fight the media companies lawyer for lawyer, will become the test case next year.

Keep your logs current and your servers clean, and that scapegoat won't be you.

James

ITworld.com, Enterprise Networking