In an editorial for The Hill, Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) took aim this week at P2P file-swappers. If the moral and legal arguments won't convince them to stop sharing, Coble suggests another tactic: scaring kids straight. Identity theft, he says, is a consequence of file-swapping.

Coble's editorial points out that one Gregory Kopiloff has pled guilty to grabbing information over Limewire and using it to commit identity theft. Kopiloff is scheduled to be sentenced on March 17.

While attempting to convince kids that this could happen to them (Kopiloff's victims "appear to have been of high school or college age"), Coble's wider purpose doesn't really concern identity theft at all. His piece is titled "Share your music, lose your identity," but, by the third paragraph, he's already transitioning back to the "file-swapping is illegal and wrong" argument. It's as though he has no real faith in his premise, and most file-swappers are already aware that sharing all of your documents with the entire world is probably a bad idea.

Here's how Kopiloff segues from the "it's bad for you" to "it's wrong" arguments: "This case is not the first time, however, Limewire and other peer-to-peer programs have been implicated in the deliberate theft of valuable property." Translation: Your personal property is valuable, and you'd hate to have it taken, so why are copying valuable property that belongs to others without paying for it?

From there, it's a short skip and a jump to ISP filtering, though Coble addresses this only in the context of universities (which, it turns out, aren't actually the hotbed of piracy the MPAA claimed). He pointed to Ohio University, which instituted a total ban on P2P apps last year, and held it up as a model of responsible action. "They responded by making leadership and personnel changes in their office of information technology," said Coble, "filing student judicial charges against first-time offenders, and installing a technology that identifies computers engaged in sharing unauthorized copyrighted media and then disconnects them from the university network."

While Coble touts this as an easy solution to the problem, others who have testified to Congress have pointed out that it creates an "arms race" that can be quite easily won by anyone willing to encrypt traffic. For that reason, some schools have also taken to contacting students who exceed certain bandwidth thresholds, even if they haven't been doing anything wrong. Fortunately, these schools are also "protecting student network users from identity thieves."

Public Knowledge staff attorney Sherwin Siy objects to the editorial on the grounds that it equates P2P with piracy (which everyone from NBC to Blizzard to Linux distributors to Vuze will tell you isn't true). More troubling, Coble endorses Ohio's move, which blocked an entire technology regardless of use—a draconian approach to a promising technology like BitTorrent.

"P2P is a manner of transferring data," says Siy. "It's not an infringement-only protocol. Software giants like Microsoft and Sun provide software tools for using P2P precisely because it's a good way for developers to share large files and updates."

Coble's view isn't surprising, but, as someone who sits on the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, one would hope for more nuance here. Last year, though, Coble did support the content industry-backed Copyright Alliance, a group dedicated to pushing stronger IP laws through Congress, so nuance in this area may not be his defining quality.