Jari Ketola
29 Jul 2002 14:41
Well not quite, but almost. Senator Joseph Biden, the head of Foreign Relation commitee, is on a mission to stop the theft of intellectual property. In February he released a report titled "Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and At Home" in which he describes counterfeit products as a major cause for loss of revenue for American software companies.
Shortly after ToAIP:FCAaAH (sounds like someone falling, doesn't it? "FCAaAH...!") was released, Biden introduced a bill titled "Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002". Originally the bill targeted physical counterfeiting, such as fake holograms and packages, but was later rewritten to cover digital rights management technologies as well.
In essence what the bill means is that it would be illegal to fake a DRM watermark and distributing the product, e.g. a song, with the fake watermark. Now why would anyone want to fake a watermark? There are several projects around, such as Microsoft's Palladium that will, eventually, embed operating systems, computers, and all sorts of gadgets with DRM modules -- whether you like it or not. Now if you have a perfectly legitimate MP3 of your own making, you wouldn't be able to listen to it with these devices, or operating systems, equipped with a DRM scheme of some sort. If there's a software available that would allow you to create a valid, but fake watermark for the song, it would be illegal to use it. The bill would make this type of action a federal felony, and you could end up in prison for the next five years after first scooping up up to $25,000 in civil penalties per offence.
Sounds like a reasonable law now doesn't it? Might sound like a big joke now, but it might be the cruel reality sooner than we realize. We should be lucky if we're able to listen to our CDs in a couple of years without having to purchase a Discman equipped with a "Designed for Microsoft Palladium" sticker on it. I think there might be call for a Digital Right to Copy Act soon...
Source:
ZDNet News