The upside to this is that if you are a hacker, you can now legitimize your activities and legally protect yourself by spending $30 to incorporate as a record company. On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 12:40:51 -0400 From: Marshall Eubanks <tme@multicasttech.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Draft of Rep. Berman's bill authorizes anti-P2P hacking
Thought this would be considered on-topic as guess who would have to clean up the resulting messes...
Regards Marshall Eubanks
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From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Draft of Rep. Berman's bill authorizes anti-P2P hacking To: politech@politechbot.com Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 20:29:35 -0400 X-URL: http://www.mccullagh.org/ X-URL: Politech is at http://www.politechbot.com/
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945923.html?tag=politech
Could Hollywood hack your PC? By Declan McCullagh July 23, 2002, 4:45 PM PT
WASHINGTON--Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to disable PCs used for illicit file trading.
A draft bill seen by CNET News.com marks the boldest political effort to date by record labels and movie studios to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that they view as an increasingly dire threat to their bottom line.
Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., the measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place. Berman and Coble plan to introduce the 10-page bill this week.
The legislation would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a "publicly accessible peer-to-peer network."
Anyone whose computer was damaged in the process must receive the permission of the U.S. attorney general before filing a lawsuit, and a suit could be filed only if the actual monetary loss was more than $250.
According to the draft, the attorney general must be given complete details about the "specific technologies the copyright holder intends to use to impair" the normal operation of the peer-to-peer network. Those details would remain secret and would not be divulged to the public.
The draft bill doesn't specify what techniques, such as viruses, worms, denial-of-service attacks, or domain name hijacking, would be permissible. It does say that a copyright-hacker should not delete files, but it limits the right of anyone subject to an intrusion to sue if files are accidentally erased.
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