Porno for Pirates

According to an article in the Times, the music industry is using the availability of porn (and especially the dread kiddie porn) on peer-to-peer file trading services to garner support for a crackdown from people who might not get quite as worked up over a few bootlegged Britney albums. I'm not sure how one goes about regulating a decentralized system like Morpheus (which is really just a client for the open Gnutella network), let alone, say, Freenet, but I'm sure that won't stop them trying.

I also noted this rather implausible paragraph from the story:

A study in March by the General Accounting Office found that KaZaA would be effective for someone looking for child pornography. The agency searched for 12 terms associated with child pornography, such as "incest" and "underage." It did not actually download the files it found, but it determined that 42 percent of them had titles or descriptions associated with pornographic images of children

To quote the UFO nut from Slacker, there just aren't that many perverts out there. Well, not the sort that get off on adolescents, anyway. I'd wager that 99.9% of these alleged kiddie porn files feature some 40 year old in pigtails and a plaid skirt, not actual children. (Kinda creepy in its own right, but not criminal.) If they were looking for terms like "teen" or "school," they probably also caught a bunch of 19 year old college students. Not to say there's no genuinely awful stuff available out there, but I find it difficult to believe that it's really that prevalent.