Petteri Pyyny
23 Jul 2002 14:52
News.com has an article of a upcoming bill that would make it legal for copyright holders to hack individual users' computers if they share illegal material through the Net.
If passed, the bill would make copyright holders, such as MPAA and RIAA, immune to all state and federal legal actions if they disable, block or otherwise impair a publicly accessible peer-to-peer network. If an individual user's computer was damaged because of the copyright holder's action, he/she would have to request a specific permission from the U.S. attorney general before filing a lawsuit against copyright holders. And to make matters worse, this suit could be filed only if the monetary value of the damaged hardware would exceed $250.
"I think it's wildly overreaching," Jessica Litman, a professor at Wayne State University, said. "Copyright owners are in essence asking Congress to say that peer-to-peer file trading is such a scourge, is so bad, that stopping it is more important than enforcing any other laws that federal or state governments may have passed on computer security, privacy, fraud and so forth."
Scary, scary stuff... More from News.com article