Conflation and Deflection

The RIAA, which apparently knows no shame in its pursuit of bludgeoning the nation into submission – 12-year-old Brianna Lahara’s family has already settled for $2000 – is attempting to poison the P2P well further by conflating it with child pornography:

On Tuesday, one day after filing the landmark series of lawsuits, RIAA President Cary Sherman cautioned the U.S. Senate that Kazaa could be a tool for adults to lure children into having sex. A pedophile could send “an instant message to the unwitting young person who downloads an Olsen twins or Pokemon file from the pedophile’s share folder on Kazaa,” Sherman said.

A government report released in March, Sherman said, concluded that “a significant percentage of the files available to these 13 million new users per month are pornography, including child pornography.”

….Operators of P2P networks angrily dismissed charges of rampant child porn swapping as an attempt by the major record labels to smear a useful and popular technology.

Alan Morris, executive vice president of Sharman Networks, which distributes the Kazaa software, claimed the RIAA was on a “deliberate campaign to try to smear P2P technology itself” after it lost a key legal battle in April when a federal judge in Los Angeles rejected a request to shut down P2P networks.

“We are dedicated to the eradication of child pornography from P2P networks and will continue to cooperate with Congress, law enforcement agencies and dedicated nongovernmental agencies in support of that shared goal,” Morris said. [CNET]

The RIAA certainly doesn’t want any attention paid to its draconian tactics and unconstitutional use of subpoena power – this is called deflection.