Fergie's Tech Blog

RIAA Double-Speak

Ray Beckerman writes on The Recording Industry vs. The People blog:

While the RIAA has been going around trying to villify P2P end users as "pirates" and "downloaders", we have learned that on November 15, 2004, in testimony before the Federal Trade Commission, the RIAA admitted that most P2P end users don't even know that their files are in a shared files folder.

"As an initial matter, P2P software may, upon installation, automatically search a user’s entire hard drive for content. Files that users have no intention of sharing may end up being offered to the entire P2P network. Continued sharing of personal information is hard to avoid and is facilitated by confusing and complicated instructions for designating shared items. A study by Nathaniel S. Good and Aaron Krekelberg at HP Laboratories showed that “the majority of the users…were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive.”

posted by Fergie @ 2/06/2006 04:34:00 PM