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JackSpratts · 07-08-02, 07:43 AM

By Farhad Manjoo
Salon | July 30, 2002
The fight against online music piracy entered the realm of the bizarre last Thursday, when Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., proposed giving the recording industry sweeping new powers to do what, for the rest of us, would be illegal: hacking computer networks.

Berman's bill, the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, allows record companies to respond to the "theft" of copyrighted materials by "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, [or] otherwise impairing" a peer-to-peer file-trading network. As long as record companies do these things to prevent the trading of their copyrighted works, they couldn't be prosecuted under computer crime statutes.

Nobody knows what specific attacks copyright owners would carry out, but the bill seems to allow companies to do what many "hackers" have been jailed for -- denial-of-service attacks, for example, that would prevent users from accessing a Web site or other online service. Berman's efforts are being championed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade group. In a statement, Hilary Rosen, RIAA's CEO, called the measure an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy."

Because the bill has almost no chance of becoming law in the short term -- just a few weeks remain in the congressional session, and there is not yet any companion legislation in the Senate -- file traders and civil libertarians responded to its introduction with a bit of bemusement. For some, the bill is just more furious hand-waving from an industry that fears it's going under. "It's not that different from making it legal to break into someone's house to make sure they don't have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall," says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ing/index.html

- js.

07-08-02, 07:43 AM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,021	Enlightened P2P Article - Good Read By Farhad Manjoo Salon \| July 30, 2002 The fight against online music piracy entered the realm of the bizarre last Thursday, when Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., proposed giving the recording industry sweeping new powers to do what, for the rest of us, would be illegal: hacking computer networks. Berman's bill, the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, allows record companies to respond to the "theft" of copyrighted materials by "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, [or] otherwise impairing" a peer-to-peer file-trading network. As long as record companies do these things to prevent the trading of their copyrighted works, they couldn't be prosecuted under computer crime statutes. Nobody knows what specific attacks copyright owners would carry out, but the bill seems to allow companies to do what many "hackers" have been jailed for -- denial-of-service attacks, for example, that would prevent users from accessing a Web site or other online service. Berman's efforts are being championed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade group. In a statement, Hilary Rosen, RIAA's CEO, called the measure an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy." Because the bill has almost no chance of becoming law in the short term -- just a few weeks remain in the congressional session, and there is not yet any companion legislation in the Senate -- file traders and civil libertarians responded to its introduction with a bit of bemusement. For some, the bill is just more furious hand-waving from an industry that fears it's going under. "It's not that different from making it legal to break into someone's house to make sure they don't have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall," says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ing/index.html - js.