None dare call it cyberbullying.

Methinks the thugs the big movie studios have hired to threaten suspected online pirates into forking over settlement money without a fight have grown a bit big for their britches, given this story from Des Plaines, Illinois. Either that or the robots they use to spam out their extortion messages can't discern the difference between a person and a library.

Well, at least the library had the backbone to come back at them with "Look, here's proof we paid for all the copies of your crappy film that we own, and if that isn't enough for you we'll see you in court." A better response than the one we saw from the panicked politicos of Coshocton County, Ohio a year and a half ago, don't you think?

That said, the library is probably taking a good step by strengthening its acceptable use policy's provisions against copyright infringement-even if it's still very unlikely they'd ever catch an illegal downloader in the act. A better one would be to ban peer-to-peer file sharing-at least in its present form-altogether.

Save your brains and fingers, torrent fans. Don't give me that blather about how legitimate software vendors are using P2P for distribution and support; any software worth buying-and any freeware worth using-is still going to be available from traditional safe sources that don't put customers at risk.

P2P is simply going to have to legitimize itself before gaining acceptance. That means it's going to have to attract investors willing to follow Napster's lead-by kicking out the pirates, pornographers and cybercrooks, making sensible deals with content providers (and if Big Entertainment's thinking is still too twentieth-century to catch the rising tide, maybe going with Little Entertainment for starters will eventually force the big guys into the same corner iTunes maneuvered the Beatles into), and working with operating-system and security software vendors to remedy P2P's current status as a malware conduit. As long as anyone runs the risk of either getting a letter like the library received, or winding up serving time for distributing kiddie porn because their P2P client software passed it through their computer, the torrent community will remain a disreputable corner of the Internet, sorely in need of a Times Square-like makeover.

And frankly, I hope it gets one. Even though public hotspots are getting faster all the time-take a gander at how good users at Chandler, Arizona's downtown public library have it, will you?-the P2P infrastructure might still offer advantages. Those advantages, however, simply don't justify having to wade through the cesspool that currently lies before them.