Declan McCullagh:

“If you’ve ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you’re guilty of a federal felony.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry’s bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload.

Be warned–you’re what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon.

I’m not joking. A obscure law called the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act that former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed in 1997 makes peer-to-peer (P2P) pirates liable for $250,000 in fines and subject to prison terms of up to three years. (You may want to read it, since you’ll likely be hearing more about it soon.)” CNET

There are signs that prosecution under the law, of which there have been exactly none since its passage, will soon start after a bipartisan group of congressmen concerned about intellectual property theft on the net asked John Ashcroft to start enforcing it.

“A quick check of Kazaa on Friday afternoon showed that there were 4.1 million users online, sharing some 800 million files. The odds of any specific person getting busted are pretty low, but someone’s going to be a test case. Got your lawyer ready?”