NYT and NBC on porn filesharing
From last Saturday's New York Times: Aiming at Pornography to Hit Music Piracy.
The recording industry, struggling to curb music piracy, is shining the spotlight on another demon lurking on the Internet: pornography.
The industry is trying to enlist broader public support with a campaign intended to show that its nemesis the peer-to-peer networks for swapping files like KaZaA and Morpheus are used not only to trade songs but also pornographic images, including child pornography.
"As a guy in the record industry and as a parent, I am shocked that these services are being used to lure children to stuff that is really ugly," said Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment.
Give the Times credit for recognizing that this "shock" might just be a cynical ploy, expressing some skepticism and tracking down some facts. That's more than NBC could be bothered with in this clueless scare piece which might as well have been ghostwritten by music industry flacks.
The recording industry this week decided to file lawsuits against more than 250 people, charging them with illegally downloading music over the internet. But something else is finding its way into music files hard core pornography and the music industry is calling it a growing problem.
No one is claiming that there's pornography in the music files (how would that work exactly?), but rather that filesharing networks can be used to download pornography in addition to music files.
Jackie and Catie, like many 12-year olds, are going online for music and finding porn instead. . . . A kid wanting a Britney Spears song often finds her name connected to hardcore sexual content. Many parents dont have a clue.
The filesharing software I've used (Grokster and WinMX) allow you to search for specific types of files: audio, video, images, software, documents, etc. Even if you don't specify the type of file, you can see that information before you start downloading something. The possibility of searching for mp3s, thinking you're downloading an mp3, then discovering that you've accidentally downloaded a porn image or video instead is extremely remote.
