Fair or Foul Way to Fight Pirates? Tech Firms and Hollywood Divided Over Proposed Bill to Stop Piracy July 31 — Record companies are supporting a new bill in Congress that would let them legally disable peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — and even target individual computers — to fight digital piracy. Observers say chances are remote that the so-called Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act will pass Congress. The proposal represents the latest round in the battle between content companies and technology firms over how to control illegal copying and distribution of copyright material on the Web. "If the pirates are able to develop services without any obstacles and reach millions in seconds, then at least the technology ought to be available to the [copyright] owners to prevent that piracy — without hacking anyone's computer, without violating anyone's privacy, without doing any damage to a PC," said Mitch Glazier, senior vice president for government relations at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in Washington, D.C. Legalized Hacking? The proposal outrages some critics. Fred Von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco, calls it "legalized hacking" for copyright holders. He also calls it ironic, given that Washington just toughened anti-hacking laws in order to fight cyberterrorism. "Frankly, that's too much power. That's a degree of power we wouldn't trust the FBI with," Von Lohmann said of the legal provisions copyright companies could win under the new legislation. "What the… bill does is allow [record companies] to break the law." He says music companies have enough power to fight digital piracy under existing federal statutes. The RIAA won't discuss methods that record companies could use to disable KaZaA, Morpheus, and other peer-to-peer software, other than to say they would encompass existing and future technologies. But Von Lohmann says the firms appear to want to use denial-of-service attacks on peer-to-peer computers, which would be overwhelmed and clogged by worthless messages and traffic. Such attacks by legitimate firms on copyright violators are legally questionable, Von Lohmann says, and the proposed legislation would give companies a "safe harbor" to conduct them and prevent them from being sued by their targets. click for complete article
<a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/25/190235&mode=thread&tid=123">Here's the /. story</a>. I think we had a thread or two on this already -- it is unconstitutional on its face, under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It's a really, REALLY dangerous piece of legislation for many reasons. Among them is that it gives the RIAA and MPAA free license to do what they desire, and your only recourse is to sue them, IF you can even figure out who to sue. Heck, you may not even know that they are doing anything to you. And how do you prove it? THEN if you do sue, how can you with limited time and financial resources beat a giant corporation with virtually unlimited resources. They can just keep the trials going until you run out of money. There was a discussion of this on <a href="http://www.democracynow.org">Democracy Now</a> this morning. I'd advise anyone who is interested to listen to the archive. It's not up quite yet, but it should be available in the next hour or so. The representative from Congressman Berman's office tried to make the bill look all nice and fuzzy by using large generalizations and no specifics, even when pressed and questioned about it.
Wouldn't they need a search warrant first before breaking down your "door" and looking at your "files." How do they really know that you don't own the CDs, but don't own ripping software or know how to convert them to MP3s to save space in your computer MP3 juke boxes, so you grab them from someone who does? How do they really know that the person d/l-ing doesn't own the CDs and own a Sony freaking hardware-based MP3 player and is d/l-ing from his home machine to a friends to burn them so he can play the Sony CDs on his Sony MP3 player. They can do irrepairable harm to people's machines with no just cause, mere suspicion??? For that matter, why in f!ck couldn't I set up a company that burns legal CDs to MP3 for people to play in their Sony MP3 players. Why couldn't that company have an upload/download service to make the conversion simpler and hassle-free? You cannot legally break into someone's computer on suspicion. If any such law passes, I'll lose all faith in the computer intelligence of our representatives. If a law passes as isn't immediately struck down as breaking the 14th amendment, then I'll lose all faith in the Supreme Court.
I think it only applies to people sharing over a P2P network. Berman's lackey said that the idea is that they are sharing it with the whole internet, so that's how they know. He summed up how they can be certain its a copyrighted work by saying "there is technology to do this". Now what that means, I don't know exactly.
So If I copy right something . .. I would be able to hack folx to make sure they not copying? QUESTION Could the companies HACK each other incase Warner is stealing from Sony? Rocket River
The funniest thing is, P2P isn't even the largest source of illegal mp3s. They can shut down all the p2p networks they want to..it aint gonna stop file sharing... One word....Usenet And also...there aint no way the RIAA is gonna get thru my router and firewall and my second router and then they have to get thru my secondary software firewall that is installed on every machine on my network..
I know that their big thing is to send DOS attacks. That's at least what I've heard the most about. I wonder how much money Berman has received in campaign finance from the RIAA and MPAA?
