The Dallas Morning News published an article on Child porn and P2P. The piece does a nice job of covering a variety of valuable perspectives from law enforcement to industry associations to P2P developers. It also has a snazzy photo of yours truly where I put on my serious child porn fightin' CEO scowl.

Ernest Miller has a strong response in Corante called "Hollywood Could Help Fight Child Porn, But They Don't". His key points:

• If you make P2P illegal or have obvious tracking, the child pornographers will only move to distribution means that are harder to track. Police should be thanking P2P companies for making it easier to catch child pornographers.
• It is Hollywood that has the tools to track file-sharing; they've sued over 10,000 people. So, why don't police ask Hollywood to help them fight child porn?
• Why aren't they [government] asking for ISPs to run filters to identify child porn files? Seems if you really wanted to stop all these methods, there is only one place to go: the ISP.

My objection to the article is more fundamental. It buys into the propaganda generated by Hollywood. Child porn on P2P was never a controversy until RIAA (not the government) said it was. The propaganda results in lies that are accepted as truth in the article like:

The companies don't want to appear to have too much control over what users trade.

Uh, not quite. It is not a matter of appearance. It is fact. P2P developers have NO control over what users trade.

The propaganda permeates the article starting with the title.

"Child porn tests file-share firms"

That simply is not true. There is no P2P industry litigation or lawsuits regarding child pornography. It is not a threat to our business or products. What child porn tests is law enforcement's ability to track its perpetrators across multiple avenues, from web sites to IM, IRC, and P2P.

P2P developers do not in any way support or tolerate child porn. The P2P industry voluntarily cooperates with law enforcement. The P2P PATROL was formed by the DCIA for this precise purpose. P2P companies including RazorPop regularly meet with and talk to law enforcement to help their investigations. RazorPop in particular has a Child Protection Guide and enables its users to report suspected files.

The only thing about child porn that tests file-share firms is the intentional fabrication of a controversy, which is then propagated by the media.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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