Mike Snider USA TODAY
If a record label hacks into your computer to disable some MP3 music files, have you been ''hacked''?
That depends on your definition of hacking.
What constitutes hacking is expected to be among the hot issues today during a House Judiciary
subcommittee hearing on the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, a potential new weapon to protect intellectual property in the age of rampant Net trading.
The bill, which some say would give the record industry the right to hack into individuals' PCs in search of copyright violations, is perhaps the most radical of a number of proposals in Congress to ease the entertainment industry's alarm over file-sharing. Few expect this bill or others to pass in the current session, expected to end mid-October. But by starting debate now, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., who introduced the bill in late July, hopes for a vote next year.
''There is no question that the vast majority of (peer-to-peer) downloads constitute copyright infringement for which the works' creators and owners receive no compensation,'' Berman says.
But consumer advocates have targeted the bill, saying that it lets copyright holders hack into the PCs of private citizens. Berman says his bill ''in no way allows a copyright owner to hack into anyone's computer. . . . (They) are only allowed to enter or look into a P2P user's computer to the same extent that any other (peer-to-peer) user is able to do so.''
Peer-to-peer networks arose in Napster ( news - web sites)'s wake. In August, more than 2 million users, on average, were logged onto top file-sharing network Kazaa, compared with 1.57 million on Napster at its peak in February 2001, says analyst Matt Bailey of Redshift Research.
Unlike Napster, P2P networks do not host files on a central server, instead listing those files available on individual PCs and connecting those computers directly.
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- js.