A federal appeals court decided on August 19 that the Grokster and Morpheus—two of the more promiment file sharing networks—were legal. In the face of that ruling, the only thing left for the Recording Industry Association of America was to advocate a law that would overturn the 9th Circuit’s ruling. Leave it to the RIAA to suggest outlawing an entire technology in order to keep people from abusing it. It’s like shutting down the Internet to keep spammers from spamming or outlawing telephones to keep drug dealers from setting up deals.

Nevertheless, the RIAA has found an ally in the U.S. Copyright Office, which is promoting the Induce Act (this is a PDF file), designed to shut down P2P networks.

There’s a lot of illegal file-sharing occurring on these networks, to be sure. I would argue that copyright law and profit models for intellectual property need to change, since this technological genie is out of the bottle. (In a glaring display of hypocrisy, the same music industry that is trying to outlaw P2P networks is also using those same networks to determine what’s popular among listeners.) But this isn’t the place for those arguments.

Instead, I’d like to remind the RIAA and the Copyright Office that there are legitimate uses for peer-to-peer networks. Wannabe bands release their own music over these networks. Jam bands that freely share their live music use the networks. Advertisers have released commercials to P2P networks in order to generate buzz before the ads start airing on TV. Groove, the workplace application from Lotus Notes developer Ray Ozzie, runs over P2P. And let’s not forget that P2P is only a few years old; most of its potential uses haven’t even been explored yet.

And what happens if P2P file-sharing is shut down? An alternative will fill the void (like the streaming media recorders I wrote about earlier this week).

In the meantime, I’m contacting the Department of Transportation. You know all those people who violate traffic laws? The problem will vanish if we outlaw cars and highways. My petition will be online soon.