Is Lockyer/Stevenson letter real?
p2pnet.net News:- The controversial Lockyer/Stevenson letter has so many factual errors that P2P United, the trade group repesenting the major commercial p2p operators, is wondering if it’s a fake.
The group’s concerns are expressed in a letter hand-delivered to Lockyer’s office.
The Lockyer/Stevenson missive “purportedly” comes from California attorney general Bill Lockyer, who’s also president of the National Association of Attorneys General, and is headed:
Draft Attorney General Letter to Peer-to-Peer file Sharing Software Manufacturers and Distributors
“As a P2P software developer and distributor, we believe you have the ability and responsibility to better educate consumers about these known risks, and to design your software in a manner that minimizes the risks,” it says, going on:
“We view with grave concern reports that at least some P2P software developers may be adding features deliberately designed to hinder law enforcement in its prosecution of crimes using P2P software. Companies that engage in such conduct, and fail to meet the important responsibilities referenced above, harm the interests of consumers in our States.
“It is widely recognized that P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies, software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly becoming a means to disseminate computer worms and viruses. Nevertheless, your company still does little to warn consumers about the legal and personal risks they face when they use your software to ’share’ copyrighted music, movies and computer software. A failure to prominently and adequately warn consumers, particularly when you advertise and sell paid versions of your software, could constitute, at the very least, a deceptive trade practice.”
However, “It’s one thing for the MPAA to come up with a theory like that,” EFFÂ (Electronic Frontier Foundation) senior attorney Fred Von Lohmann is quoted as saying in a Wired story here.
“But it would be quite another for a state attorney general to adopt it. The principle has no limit – you can use Internet Explorer to violate the law or unintentionally access pornography, so does he want to suggest that Microsoft is also breaking the law? Why stop at the Internet – should Ford be held liable for failing to warn drivers that exceeding the speed limit will expose them to citations?”
The P2P United letter from executive director Adam Eisgrau to Lockyer and copied to the National Association of Attorneys General, and the MPAA’s Vans Stevenson reads:
Dear Attorney General Lockyer:
P2P United is the Washington, DC-based trade association of the peer-to-peer technology and allied industries. Its five principal members developed and make available to the public the popular Morpheus, Grokster, BearShare, Blubster and eDonkey programs. I write today in the hopes of either exposing an inauthentic letter bearing your name or – should the information we have received regrettably prove accurate – of seeking an immediate opportunity to provide you and your fellow Attorneys General with accurate information about our industry that appears lacking.
Specifically, late in the day on Friday, March 12, P2P United was informed of and provided with a copy of the attached draft letter purportedly circulated by yourself to other state Attorneys General on the eve of your organization?s Spring Meeting in Washington. I use the word ‘purportedly,’ for three reasons:
- First, the letter contains so many factual errors concerning peer-to-peer technology and the allegedly disproportionate ‘danger’ that it poses to the public relative to other popular means of accessing and searching the internet (e.g., Google or AOL) that it would seem unlikely to have been produced by your office;
- Second, the ‘metadata’ associated with the document identifies its author as ’stevensonv’. (Such data, I?m informed, is automatically created by MS Word and viewable through the ‘Properties’ and ‘Statistics’ tabs accessed from the ‘File’ menu.) Curiously, Mr. Vans Stevenson is the principal state affairs lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America. An e-mail sent to ’stevensonv@mpaa.org’ on Friday evening was not rejected by the MPAA server. Indeed, I received a personal reply on Saturday afternoon. For your convenience, a printout of the metadata screen at issue also is attached and an electronic copy of the draft letter has been e-mailed to Ms. Lynne Ross of your organization so that you may access the metadata directly if you wish to do so.
- Third, the legal predicate for action by your office and those of your fellow AGs articulated in the letter would constitute an extraordinary expansion of product liability law: a) by applying it to a neutral software ‘tool’ and; b) by seeming to create for all product producers a duty to warn the public about – or even to redesign – an inherently beneficial product if it is merely susceptible to misuse by parties wholly outside the knowledge or control of the producer. As the draft letter itself notes, and federal courts have found, peer-to-peer software is “a means to facilitate a wide range of project management, business planning, and academic/education activities.”
For all of these reasons, P2P United suspects the veracity of the attached draft letter and felt obligated to call the potential misuse of your name and office for political purposes to your immediate attention.
In the event that an early morning news report today is accurate and the attached letter does appropriately bear your name, P2P United respectfully requests the opportunity to brief you and your fellow Attorneys General on the important matters raised in that correspondence, particularly on the nature of peer-to-peer technology and the many constructive steps within their power that its developers have taken to address your concerns. You will find immediately verifiable evidence of our efforts online at www.p2punited.org, particularly by clicking on the large ‘Copyright’ icon and the equally prominent ‘Parent 2 Parent Resource Center’ icon constructed to assist parents in protecting their children from all internet-facilitated dangers.
We further respectfully request that you defer circulating or sending your letter until such a meeting can be arranged and our input and materials deliberately considered. Should the structure of your Spring meeting permit it, we would be pleased to be consulted at your convenience and upon little notice.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
March 16th, 2004 at 2:27 am
While I agree with the staments of fact presented in the P2P United counter-letter, the tone and questioning of veracity makes them look like a bunch of idiots. Hire a PR firm and get back to coding.
March 18th, 2004 at 11:26 am
I respectfuly disagree. The tone adopted by the author bears the subtle mark of one familiar with the ploy of feigned incredulity in the face of disingenuous conduct.
In the prototype, an individual receives a letter full of threats, personal attacks, and abusive language from a well known bully. He then causes the letter to be made public and appends to it this comment: “Dear Bully, I received this letter which said it was from you, but one look told me no man of intellect and integrity could ever have written such a mass of baseless, rude and foul garbage. If you would like my help in finding the lowlife who is signing your name to such disgusting swill, you shall have it.”
I believe, and have no proof whatsoever, that P2PUnited knew darned well the letter was real when they got it. I’d bet my dollars to your doughnuts it wasn’t until after some clever team member thought to look for metadata that they were able to come up with the idea. Instead of sitting around and planning their dull, legally-competent response in anticipation of the eventual arrival of the official version of the letter, P2PUnited was able to take the initiative by publicly embarrassing the schnook for collaborating with the MPAA on the letter just prior to lending it his law enforcement imprimatur.
Personally, I think it was a very good move and — probably — the best that could have been made in the circumstances. Will it cause the other attorneys-general to give some thought to what might (given Lockyer’s position as their association head) have otherwise been a rubber-stamp item? Maybe. I just hope it stays in the news as long as it can, so any potential signatories who carry the letter home from DC have a chance to find its dotted line less and less appealing as time passes. The chief law enforcement officer of a given state does not sign his name all that freely, especially if the industry maneuvering to get it is a less-than-meaningful presence on his boss’s tax rolls.