L.L. Bean Sues Other Marketers for Claria Pop-Ups, by Pamela Parker, ClickZ News, May 18, 2004. http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3355321

The Company You Keep: Child Porn goes P2P. On Friday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced 65 child pornography arrests of people using P2P networks like KaZaa to share the illicit files. P2P networks were among the first to associate themselves with the pirates who run spyware networks, no doubt since the two groups clearly recognized each other as kin. So this new association shouldn't come as much of a surprise. People say that you can tell everything about someone by the company they keep, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that pedophiles have found a home amongst the P2P networks. In a statement, KaZaa said that they are working to provide "technological solutions like our family filter to protect their families." (Ahoy, Kazaa! If you can put filters in place to detect child porn, why can't you put filters in place to detect copyright violations?! Savvy?)

The P2P networks started as a vehicle for copyright piracy, and now they find themselves a vehicle for the exploitation of children. The entire P2P economy is built on unsavory behavior, and now, not surprisingly, it's reached the bottom. Let's hope the time is not too far off that the government can get this entire seedy underworld under control.

Addition to our Hall of Shame. Canadian Justice Konrad von Finckenstein is SPN's latest edition to our Hall of Shame, due to his ruling against the CRIA's (Canadian Recording Industry Association) desire to get individual P2P user info from Canadian ISP's. Putting privacy ahead of law enforcement, von Finckenstein's ruling is akin to letting a thief go because the right to keep his ski mask on apparently trumps the right of the shopkeeper to get restitution for stolen goods. Shame on you, Justice von Finckenstein.

In response to the ruling, the P2P "industry" couldn't be happier, of course. For an alternative point of view, see "Big Music's Cdn file share case fails."

Is Google Adsense Clicking Piracy the Next Wave? India's secret army of online ad 'clickers'. Look, everyone's got the right to make a buck, er, rupee, but do these particular folks in India, and elsewhere, think that they are anything other than pirates? Frankly, this kind of thing has been going on since the dawn of affiliate programs for search results, long before nations outside the U.S. got involved, but we still want to know what makes anyone, anywhere, think that this could possibly be acceptable human conduct? Better yet, what makes Google think that their adsense program will suffer any fate different from other search affiliate programs that were overwhelmed by pirates into non-existence?