In a letter released today, Chairmax Waxman, Ranking Member Davis, and 18 other members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called for the FTC to investigate the recurring problem of inadvertent filesharing.

As someone who has personally investigated this problem, I suspect that when the FTC does investigate, it will be justly outraged. In fact, I suspect that the FTC will discover that during its 2004 investigation of this issue, distributors' misrepresentations and material ommissions led the FTC to perpetuate--or even exacerbate--the very threat to consumers that it intended to remediate.

In short, I suspect that we will learn that when researchers and Congress identify particular features in filesharing programs as causes of inadvertent sharing, it is a really bad idea for corporations distributing those programs to concoct a self-regulatory Code of Conduct to prevent inadvertent sharing, violate it routinely by deploying equally (or more) aggressive versions of features previously shown to cause inadvertent sharing, and then represent to the Federal Trade Commission that their adherence to their Code had made inadvertent sharing a mere "urban myth."

The letter to the FTC should also lead state attorneys general to renew their investigations of inadvertent sharing. In 2004, at about the same time as the FTC, the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) raised its concerns about inadvertent sharing with distributors of filesharing programs. While I have never been able to review the representations that were made to NAAG, it would not be surprising to discover that they were as problematic as some of those made to the FTC.