Ms. Litman scoffs at the idea that privacy rights protect any and all information privately amassed, denying, e.g., to Newsweek access to your subscription record to Time. "'Property law,' she said," the Times goes on, "'is largely intended to make it possible to sell property, not to keep it secure. The property framework does fit intellectual property because those rights help artists and their representatives trade their art for money.'"
The stuff being picked up on the Internet is certainly copyrighted. And the Millennium Act seeks to stress the point by authorizing law enforcers to move against what, thieves?
Only in America: a raft of organizations is at hand. They march under the banner of P2P United. That stands for "peer-to-peer." The general idea is that the browser who shoots out the latest Bee Gee to you is, really, just a "peer," talking friendly to a peer. An organization called Downhill Battle (downhillbattle.org) fights strenuously for the Jane Does of this world and helps to mobilize legal defense and a legal and moral armory of arguments.
Questions before the house -- and before the courts: (1) Is your right to the information you have generated, or amassed, the equivalent of your right to ownership of the music, or literature, you have written? And (2) do protections that are explicit or inhere in the Constitution shield you from the official (officious?) curiosity of the Justice Department?
Jane Doe of Boston College, if ever we find out who she is, will edge us toward an answer to those questions. And who will provide her with music in jail? Who will be her peer, the faculty adviser or the warden?