The Washington Post reports that the House Judiciary Committee has marked up and reported H.R. 4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act (PDEA). The measure is now ready for a vote by the entire House of Representatives. The Senate has taken no action on any companion bill.
The PDEA would impose criminal penalties on those who share more than 1,000 infringing files on a peer-to-peer network. Recent surveys by Ruckus Network show that the average college student who uses P2P file-sharing software shares 1,100 files. The bill would also have the Department of Justice foot the bill for sending warning notices to 10,000 filesharers.
"Tens of millions of Americans continue to use P2P networks," said Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at EFF. "Turning college kids into criminals is not going to change that reality, any more than the 4,000 lawsuits against file-sharing music fans has. This is a business problem, not an FBI problem."
EFF has proposed a collective licensing solution that offers an alternative to criminalizing the behavior of millions of Americans.
Contact:
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
fred@eff.org
