In an illustration of how desperate the entertainment industry is to destroy P2P networks, the RIAA is attempting to smear file trading sites with the charge that they support and encourage the distribution of child porn.

In a U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing, which took place a day after the RIAA sued 261 alleged illegal file traders, its president, Cary Sherman told the U.S. Senate that the P2P service Kazaa could be used by adults to lure children into having sex. In his testimony that's posted on the Judiciary Committee Web site, Sherman said a pedophile could send "an instant message to the unwitting young person who downloads an Olsen twins or Pokemon file from the pedophile's share folder on Kazaa,"

In his testimony, John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general said that "P2P networks are of significant law enforcement concern and focus, particularly because of their decentralized design and relative accessibility and ease of use...(The FBI) is currently considering a protocol for investigating child pornography cases in the relatively new area of P2P technology."

District Attorney for Suffolk County, N.Y., Thomas Spota, who filed child-pornography-related charges against 12 Kazaa users in July, has called for a new federal task force and said legislation is needed to "attack the owners and the distributors of these programs, who are reaping enormous profits." According to various online news reports both Spota and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said the U.S. Department of Justice should create this task force to track down users of P2P networks who trade child pornography.

The RIAA has been using children as pawns in their quest to stamp out P2P networks for some time. In a U.S. government report released in March, Sherman claimed that that "a significant percentage of the files available to these 13 million new users per month are pornography, including child pornography." This claim is not supported by a recent report from the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) which revealed that a relatively small percentage of the millions of available files contained child porn.

The GAO staff supposedly used 12 keywords known to be associated with child porn and found 1,286 items on the Kazaa file-trading site, 34% of which were adult pornography. The report says that another 24% were non-pornographic. A search of the Kazaa network for child pornography found 341 image files, about 44% of which were child porn, according to the report.