Politics and Law

Sensitive files like Secret Service safehouse locations, military rosters, and IRS tax returns can still be found on file-sharing networks, according to a report to a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Wednesday.

In many cases, that's because federal government employees or contractors installed peer-to-peer software on their computers without paying attention to which documents would be shared, Robert Boback, the chief executive of Tiversa, told the panel.

Boback said his company found the Secret Service's evacuation plans for the first lady and motorcade routes. (See an interview with Tiversa about Marine One documents found on a peer-to-peer network this spring.)

That led some politicians to announce that new federal laws were necessary to stop inadvertent file sharing.

"I'm planning to introduce a bill," said Rep. Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat who heads a House oversight committee. He said his legislation would limit the use of peer-to-peer software on all computer networks operated by the federal government or its contractors.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission should investigate whether P2P software developers are violating the law, and the Obama administration should "undertake a national campaign to educate consumers about the dangers of file sharing software," Towns said. (In April, Towns' committee informed the FTC it had reopened an investigation into inadvertent file sharing.)

Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, suggested a similar approach. He wanted to know "whether there's some legal action that should be taken to protect intellectual property, to protect kids from pornography, to protect classified medical information, national security information."

The two-and-a-half hour hearing singled out LimeWire, which is probably the highest-profile P2P client in use today. LimeWire is distributed by Manhattan-based Lime Wire LLC (which sells a more featureful version called LimeWire Pro) and it uses the BitTorrent and Gnutella networks.

Lime Group chairman Mark Gorton tried to defuse some of the criticism, saying "the current version of LimeWire does not share any documents by default," and many security improvements were added in version 5 of the software--released in December 2008--that were absent from version 4.

Gorton also tried to make a more subtle point: the Gnutella network is an amalgamation of scores of different P2P clients, many of which may have different default settings, and LimeWire shouldn't be held responsible for someone's decision to share files using a program written by a different company.

It didn't work. "It is chilling what the public now has available to it," Towns said. "The idea that you can look at the first lady's information, where she's going, how she's getting there. Tax records, things of that nature...we need to get to the bottom of this."

Not helping was the fact that Gorton testified at an earlier hearing in July 2007 on the same topic.

"Mr. Gorton, I find your testimony today stunning," said Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat. "You promised us two years ago you were going to fix LimeWire."

Replied Gorton: "LimeWire does not control the computers of people around the country."

He added later: "It's not unreasonable to expect that people who install file-sharing software want to share files."

Other suggestions were more extreme. Rep. Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat who's more technically-inclined than most politicians (he has a doctorate in physics), said "the nuclear option is to block the Gnutella protocol" on a national basis.

But, Foster acknowledged, that wasn't likely to work. Another option, he said, would be to create a new version of the Gnutella protocol that allowed only limited clients--that curbed what folders or file types could be shared--to connect to it.

The magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com has shut down, just weeks after it was compelled by a lawsuit to remove the free digital copies of the popular copyrighted magazines it offered users.

The site, which was launched in July, provided users with free, uploadable copies of many popular magazines like People, Esquire, and Allure. Users of the site could comment on the magazines or articles, leave ratings, and use articles to create their own "custom" magazines.

Mygazines quickly drew the ire of publishers, and a group including Time Inc., Hearst, and Newsweek, filed suit in a New York district court on August 21, asking the site to be shut down in the U.S. A settlement was reached on September 8, under which Mygazines agreed to remove the publishers' copyrighted content and review uploaded content for unauthorized material.

Though the site initially continued to offer a limited number of titles for free, including Today's Bride and Computer Graphics World, the site now simply gives a message saying, "Due to monetary reasons and the state of the global economy, we unfortunately must close Mygazines.com. We simply ran out of funds to support the daily operations".

Just months after its launch, the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com is largely cutting back on the free content it offers, after reaching a settlement agreement in a suit filed by a group of magazine publishers.

Launched in late July, Mygazines allows users to upload and share magazines and originally offered clear, complete digital copies of popular magazines such as People, Esquire, and Allure. A number of publishers, including Time Inc., Hearst, and Newsweek, filed suit in a New York district court on August 21, asking the site to be shut down in the U.S.

(Credit: Mygazines.com)

A settlement was reached on September 8, under which Mygazines agreed to remove the publishers' copyrighted content and review uploaded content for unauthorized material, according to Folio.

The suit was filed against Budd Salveo, run by a Canadian named Darren Budd, which registered the site in the Caribbean island of Anguilla. On September 9, a Toronto court issued an order to uphold the settlement.

Mygazines still offers digital copies of magazines like Today's Bride and Computer Graphics World.

With its tagline, "upload. share. archive.", it may have been inevitable that the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com would face allegations of copyright infringement.

Mygazines, which announced its launch in late July, allows users to upload and share magazines. Digital copies of the magazines on the site are easy to read, and users can comment on them, leave ratings, and use articles to create their own "custom" magazines.

The site is free to join, and there are no advertisements, but that hasn't allayed concerns of magazine publishers.

Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Warner's Time division, told the AP that the publisher is looking into ways to have the site shut down.

Usually, a company encouraging its users to share copyrighted material could be held accountable for infringement. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the file-sharing site Grokster could be held liable for the copyright violations of its users, since the site took "affirmative steps to foster infringement."

There is a hitch in the case against Mygazines, however. Mygazines is registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla and hosted in Sweden, by the notorious PRQ. The Stockholm-based PRQ is owned by the founders of BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay and is known for hosting other dubious sites.

With its domain name registered abroad and its servers beyond U.S. borders as well, Mygazines seems to have slipped around the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law. Even though publishers could pursue legal action against the site for material available in the U.S., there'd be no way to get representatives for the company to court or to collect damages.

So if Time and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16,000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database.

Or, it could look across the Atlantic. It's not an impossible task: in February 2008, a Swedish prosecutor charged four men connected to Pirate Bay with conspiracy to violate copyright law; a week later, a Danish ISP was ordered to block Pirate Bay.