File Sharing Forfeits Right To Privacy
Jonathan Krim,
Washington Post,
Apr 25, 2003
The argument accepted by the court is seductive: "If users of pirate peer-to-peer sites don't want to be identified, they should not break the law by illegally distributing music." That sounds fine, but in today's surround-sound world, everyone is a suspect, and so everyone has forfeit their right to privacy. The fact is, the RIAA (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot establish that a person has shared copyrighted materials without already having done a little packet-snooping or hard-drive hacking. After all, a Madonna MP3 looks pretty much like the soundtrack from one of my talks from the outside; you have to actually intercept and read the file to determine that it's contraband. So it's a bit much for them to allege that only the guilty will be punished. Everyone is punished is the suurveillance society.
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