• What is P2P United and why was it formed?
• What kind of organization is P2P United and how is it funded?
• Does P2P United lobby Congress and other federal officials?
• What are P2P United’s most important public policy issues?
• What federal legislation has P2P United taken a position on?
• What are the lawsuits against peer-to-peer services about?
• Isn’t peer-to-peer software really just a "burglary tool" to steal music and movies used by people who just don’t care about copyright laws?
• Won’t using peer-to-peer software make me more vulnerable to identity theft?
• How do I protect my children from downloading pornographic or other inappropriate files through peer-to-peer networks?
• Is KaZaa a member of P2P United?
• How can I help P2P United get its messages across to policy-makers?

P2P United is a non-profit trade association which has been granted "Section 501(c)(6)" status from the Internal Revenue Service. The organization is privately funded by member dues and contributions. P2P United also accepts donations through its website. At the present time, P2P United does not receive government or institutional grant funding.

P2P United is a non-profit trade association with "Section 501(c)(6)" status from the Internal Revenue Service. The organization is privately funded by member dues and contributions. P2P United does not currently receive government or institutional grant funding.

Absolutely. One of the principal reasons that P2P United was formed was to work constructively with members of Congress and their staffs, as well as other key federal policy-makers, to fully understand peer-to-peer technology and its tremendous positive potential. Active lobbying is one significant means by which the association conveys its messages. P2P United also hopes to involve thousands of members of the public in that process. Click here now to Get Involved!

P2P United's members believe strongly in the positive potential of peer-to-peer technology to enhance education, commerce, entertainment and science. To realize that potential, however, policy-makers first must have confidence that the possible and actual misuses of peer-to-peer technology do not require either its over-regulation or, as some have proposed, its de facto abolition. Accordingly, P2P United has and will continue to take strong stands on issues concerning the intellectual property protection of copyrighted material, personal privacy and data security, the fair compensation of individual musicians and other artists, and regulations of all kinds affecting P2P technology and its use.

Landmark litigation involving two of P2P United's member companies (the developers of Grokster and Morpheus software) is now before the Supreme Court. Members of the current 109th Congress reportedly are awaiting the Court's decision, expected in June or July of 2005, before introducing P2P-targeted bills. Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia, however, has re-introduced legislation (H.R. 1201) wholeheartedly endorsed by P2P United to protect the core legal principle for which P2P United's members are now fighting in the Supreme Court: that the developer and/or marketer of a neutral technology should not be subject to copyright infringement liability based on what others outside the developer's control might do with it, so long as that technology is capable of "substantial non-infringing uses."

For details of Mr. Boucher's bill and others introduced in the current Congress that may affect the future of P2P technology -- and its availability to consumers, educators, businesses, individuals and researchers -- please see P2P United's Legislation page. You'll also find a link there to bills introduced in the previous (108th) Congress which directly or indirectly concerned peer-to-peer technology.

In what could well become a landmark decision, the Supreme Court is now considering whether the P2P United member companies who develop and market the popular Grokster and Morpheus peer-to-peer software should - as major movie studios, record companies and music publishers claim - be held "secondarily" liable for copyright infringement because some users of the software may employ it to make unauthorized copies of movies and music. Thus far, two federal courts have held in this case, known as MGM v. Grokster, that the developers of Grokster and Morpheus should not be liable but Hollywood and the music industry are hoping to reverse those rulings and, with them, the Supreme Court's own longstanding principle that the developer of an essentially "neutral" technology that is "capable" of "substantial non-infringing uses" will not be held liable for the misuse of that technology by someone outside the developer's control. Ironically, this principle was established 20 years ago when major movie studios asked the Supreme Court to hold Sony liable merely for producing and marketing the "neutral" Betamax video recorder and, fortunately for the studios, lost the case! More than a score of briefs have been filed in support of Grokster and Morpheus in the current suit. For details and links to all of the filings made with the Supreme Court and in the courts below, please explore P2P United's Litigation page.

No, but the question is entirely reasonable. P2P United was formed in large measure precisely because most of what has been written about peer-to-peer technology and its uses has focused on false and flawed claims, like the one above, by major entertainment companies. Those claims and the attention paid to them, however, ignore several important facts:

a) peer-to-peer technology can be and is used to make information of all kinds (not just entertainment content) readily and efficiently available to students, teachers, businesspeople, researchers and just-plain-folks. In other words, baseball bats are used as weapons by some, but the law doesn't bar the Louisville Slugger company from selling them or subject last year's MVPs to fines for possessing or using them;

b) consistent with the Supreme Court's 1984 decision in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, the many "substantial non-infringing uses" of peer-to-peer software described above already have been found by some courts to mean that the technology itself is and should not be unlawful and that those who distribute it are not contributing to or otherwise guilty of violating copyright law; and

c) the claim that an individual who simply makes a copyrighted work like a song that he or she has purchased available to others in a peer-to-peer community is violating copyright law by doing so, even though he or she hasn't affirmatively sent that file to anyone, is now being tested in court.

No. Absolutely nothing about peer-to-peer software itself, or its responsible use, increases the odds that a user's personal information can or will be accessed by some unknown person. This misconception is based on the well-intentioned, but ill-informed, belief that it is easy for a peer-to-peer software user to accidentally and unwittingly make the entire content of his or her hard drive available to other users. In fact, this is not and has never been easy to do inadvertently. Moreover, to further guard against such a result, all P2P United members have committed themselves in a new industry Code of Conduct to making it even harder.

Just as parents must be vigilant about how, when and where children use e-mail, instant messenger technology, surf the internet or participate in chat rooms, they also must monitor what files their children access through peer-to-peer networks. As always, setting limits on what kind of material children may actively search for and acquire is important and necessary.

Unfortunately, not all peer-to-peer users will accurately or completely label files available to be shared. (A file called "Cheerleading Cheers," for example, could be made up of or include inappropriate images just as an innocuously named website found with a search engine could include adult material.) P2P United's members are committed to assuring that all parents fully understand these technical realities of the internet and of peer-to-peer networks so that they may decide for themselves whether and under what terms their children may use these tools.

For help and further information, P2P United suggests that you explore its "Parent to Parent" Resource Center.

No. Neither KaZaa, nor any corporation with an interest in it, is a member of P2P United.

Thanks for asking! For the moment, the best and easiest way to lend your voice to the P2P policy-making process in Washington is to use our "Get Involved" page to let us know of your interest and how to reach you. (Of course, we'll never share your contact information with anyone outside P2P United. Period.) As the legislative process heats up, we'll keep you informed by e-mail of what's going on and how best to communicate with your elected representatives. We'll even make it easy to find out who your Members of Congress are and to e-mail or fax them.