On the face of it, Jerry Springer: The Opera and Kazaa don’t have much in common. But according to The Inquirer, religious groups are on another “let’s ban stuff” crusade, and this time they want to crack down on file sharing networks.

The Christian Coalition, the Concerned Women for America, and Morality in Media have called for the Supreme Court to crack down on file sharing because it could lead to a “proliferation of anonymous, decentralized [sic], unfiltered, and untraceable peer-to-peer networks that facilitate crimes against children and that frustrate law enforcement efforts to detect and investigate these crimes.”

At the heart of the case is the Sony videocassette decision which allowed countless numbers of people to copy television programmes onto videos. It removed liability from companies that produced the tapes and established the concept of fair use.

Hollywood has tried for aeons to get this overturned and force everyone to buy copies of films and television programmes. Now it is applying the same arguments it did for the videos and against file-sharing.

First paragraph edited after posting because it didn’t make any sense.