RIAA: P-to-P vendors must filter content

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. recording industry called on peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software vendors to filter out copyright content and a U.S. senator pressed the distributor of the popular Kazaa P-to-P software to cut off users who violate its end-user license agreement during a Senate hearing on file trading Tuesday.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, asked Alan Morris, executive vice president of Kazaa owner Sharman Networks Ltd., in Sydney, why his company couldn't shut down users who violate the Kazaa license agreement not to share copyright files.

Morris, testifying at a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said it was technically impossible to cut off users of the software who trade copyright files or to filter content to ban copyright works from being traded by Kazaa users, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) called for.

The hearing on file trading featured two popular rap music artists, LL Cool J and Chuck D, debating on the opposite side of the issue, and a college student who told how she had to raise money on the Internet to pay a settlement after the RIAA brought a file-trading lawsuit against her. Levin and the RIAA called for the P-to-P vendors to make reforms while two Republican senators questioned the RIAA's tactics of suing hundreds of P-to-P users.

When Levin asked about shutting down customers who misuse software, Morris disagreed with witness Chris Gladwin, chief operating officer of FullAudio Corp., who told Levin it was technically possible. After the Kazaa Media Desktop is downloaded, Sharman Networks has no control over its users, Morris said, much like Microsoft Corp. doesn't have control over how people use the Outlook e-mail software package.

"If you had the power to enforce it, would you?" Levin asked.

Morris answered: "If a court of competence stated that there had been an infringement, then we would certainly look at it."

Earlier in the hearing, RIAA chairman and chief executive officer Mitch Bainwol called on Kazaa and other P-to-P software vendors to institute three reforms: change the default settings so users aren't unwittingly sharing private documents, include "meaningful" warnings about trading copyright content, and filter unauthorized copyright works off P-to-P networks.

"The file-sharing business must become responsible corporate citizens ... moving beyond excuses," Bainwol said. "If the Kazaas of the world can institute three common-sense reforms, lawsuits can be avoided, the record industry will be healthier, there will be more jobs, consumers will get the music they want."

Kazaa and other P-to-P services say they're already following the first two recommendations, but Morris said it would be impossible for Kazaa to filter content based on whether it's copyright. Kazaa's adult filter can catch pornographic phrases in titles or meta-tags in files, he said after the hearing, but Kazaa has no way to filter the actual content of files.

"If you're going to block the titles of every song, every word in every copyright song, every copyright movie, and every copyright book, you might has well input the whole dictionary," said Philip Corwin, Sharman's lawyer, in an interview after the hearing.