Congress: Is p-to-p an enemy of privacy?

"There is a copyright issue here, and designers are safer sharing everything than they are trying to share just a type of file, because then it'd be easier to accuse them, 'this is only about sharing music'," he said. "One of the defenses is, 'Oh, no, you can share anything.' That drives the trade-off in the wrong direction."

Congress should look at legislation that requires p-to-p and other Internet-based businesses to protect consumer privacy, Davidson suggested. "There's a growing realization there may be a need for baseline, narrowly tailored legislation," he said.

But Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, said he was concerned about how p-to-p services use information obtained through spyware or adware, but he questioned the effectiveness of a law. "At this time, I think we need legislation, but I'm fearful that whatever we write up in Congress will be obsolete within one year," he said.

A spokesman for Davis said the committee chairman has no plans for p-to-p legislation at this point. "The chairman's goal was to inform other members of Congress and the public about the potential dangers of peer-to-peer networks and to prompt a private-sector fix," the spokesman said.