[luau] Forthcoming legislation allowing content companies to probe computers

Elizabeth Long lizlong at geek.com
Mon Jul 15 05:20:00 PDT 2002


...
But no, the RIAA has recently persuaded California Congressman
Howard Berman - whose district includes Hollywood (surprise)
- to create a bill that would provide shelter for copyright owners
such as record labels and movie studios against liability for
action they take to stop peer-to-peer Web sites from enabling
illegal file-sharing.

http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0708gibbs.html

Howard Berman's email address - and a little more from the article.

howard.berman at mail.house.gov 
....

But can't you just see it? You're getting ready for work one
morning. The birds are singing, you're on time, the coffee's
just finished brewing, and as you step out of the shower your
home phone rings, your cell phone rings and your pager goes off.
The messages from the office all say the same thing: "We have
a fraction of our Internet access bandwidth left, hardly any
e-mail is getting in or out, our Web servers have crashed, the
FTP server got wiped clean and what are you going to do about
it? Now." 

Your day has turned into a living inferno. Twenty-four hours
later you've got a splitting headache and raging indigestion.
You're exhausted, strung out on stale coffee, sweaty and greasy,
short-tempered, and talking to some geek from the RIAA's hit
squad. 

"Sorry" he says, "I guess we got the wrong IP address . . . We
took out your servers? Oh. Sorry." 

Just try to take 'em to court.

But eventually - and at great cost - enough consumers and businesses
will have been erroneously hit. A class-action lawsuit will emerge
to waste everyone's time and money, only to wind up at the Supreme
Court, which will say the bill was stupid as it contravened this,
violated that and rode roughshod over the other. Then it will
be back to the drawing board for the RIAA and its band of merry
men having made everyone's life just that little bit harder.

This kind of legislation is plain crazy. At best it is ill-conceived
and shortsighted. At worst, it is irresponsible and unethical.
And it could pass this time. So tell Berman - howard.berman at mail.house.gov
- how wrong his thinking is.







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