Foreword

by Jon W. Dudas,

Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States

Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

This report originated when one of its authors showed me data on the behavior of
filesharing programs that was being compiled for use in a law review article. Because the
data seemed to have potentially important implications, I asked the authors to present it in
the form of a report to USPTO. Having reviewed the resulting report, I conclude that this
data should be made known to the public.

This report analyzes five popular filesharing programs to determine whether they have
contained, or do contain, "features" that can cause users of these programs to share files
inadvertently. It concludes that these programs have deployed at least five such
"features," and that distributors of these programs continued to deploy such features after
their propensity to cause users to share files inadvertently was, or should have been,
known. It concludes that further investigation would be warranted to determine whether
any distributors who deployed these features intended for them to trick users into sharing
files unintentionally.

I requested this report because I believe that it raises important questions about why
individual users of these filesharing programs continue to infringe copyrights. This
report also reveals that these filesharing programs threaten more than just the copyrights
that have made the United States the world's leading creator and exporter of expression
and innovation: They also pose a real and documented threat to the security of personal,
corporate, and governmental data.

For the Federal Government, this threat became manifest during 2005, when the
Department of Homeland Security warned all Federal Agencies that government
employees or contractors who had installed filesharing programs on their home or work
computers had repeatedly compromised national and military security by "sharing" files
containing sensitive or classified data. These users probably did intend to use these
programs to download popular music, movies, software or games. But it seems highly
unlikely that any of them intended to compromise national or military security for the
sake of "free music."

A decade ago, the idea that copyright infringement could become a threat to national
security would have seemed implausible. Now, it is a sad reality. It is important to ask
how and why this happened. This report attempts to provide some answers and to
encourage further research into questions that it can raise, but not answer.

The unanswered questions raised by this report implicate diverse competencies: Some
might be best addressed by consumer-protection advocates or agencies, others by
computer-science researchers. By releasing this report, I hope that USPTO will

i