While bills designed to crack down on P2P appear to be on a fast ...

While bills designed to crack down on P2P appear to be on a fast track to passage, Sen. Coleman (R-Minn.) said Mon., “in the end things tend to go slowly legislatively, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Speaking to the Future of Music Coalition summit, Coleman faulted 2 bills, HR-4077 by House Judiciary Courts, Internet & Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chmn. Smith (R-Tex.) and S-2237 by Senate Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat Leahy (Vt.) and Chmn. Hatch (R-Utah). HR-4077, which reduces the criminal threshold for file sharers offering large amounts of files, is a misuse of the FBI, Coleman said, which is “overworked” on antiterrorism efforts. HR-4077, which permits the Dept. of Justice to pursue civil cases against file sharers, would appear more humane, Coleman said, but “there’s got to be a better way” to target P2P file sharing. Coleman’s statements echoed that of Marty Lafferty, a P2P industry lobbyist (see separate item, this issue). “P2P is here to stay,” Coleman said, and the recording industry, as well as ISPs and hardware and software makers, are going to have to work with P2P providers on a solution. The only reservation he had about P2P is that the software providers profit from running monitoring software on user’s PCs, what some in Congress have called spyware; the P2P industry rejects that label. Coleman said he isn’t the only member of Congress concerned about this, and said P2P providers should be wary: “Congress will get involved with things that come into your home.” Last week, House Commerce Committee Chmn. Barton (R-Tex.) vowed that his committee would move legislation targeting spyware, including that provided by P2P networks. Coleman last year held a high-profile hearing in the Senate Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee at which he blasted RIAA for its suits against file sharers. Still, Mon. he said one benefit of the suits is that they did “raise the consciousness of what is right and what is wrong.”