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MPAA Requests Immunity to Commit Cyber-Crimes
The news has been buzzing around for the last couple of days that Representative Berman, whose palm has been crossed with silver by the entertainment industry, would introduce a bill permitting copyright holders to hack or DoS people allegedly distributing their works without permission. Well, the bill has been introduced - read it and weep. Although the bill wouldn't allow copyright owners to alter or delete files on your machine, they would be allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way. Let me restate that: the MPAA and RIAA are asking that they be allowed to perform what would otherwise be federal and state criminal acts and civil torts, and you will have essentially no remedy against them under any laws of the United States.
If it applies only to big business (RIAA, MPAA, BSA), and not to joe sixpack, it's unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Oh, and this post is Copyright (c) 2002, by me, "sconeu". I reserve the right to search any and all computers for unauthorized reproductions of this post.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The Canadian Private Copying Collective wants more of your money.
On top of raising existing levys, they want to tax any media that can store copyrighted material. This includes Hard drives and Flash media. While the MPAA is crashing your computer in the US the CPCC is robing you blind every time you buy recordable media.. And how much are the artists getting??? According to reports, after 2 years of the levy being collected NOTHING has been paied to ANY artist.. Theroy has it they are spending all the money lobying for higher levys.
http://www.sycorp.com/levy/index.htm
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
"Notwithstanding" means that the other statutes are preempted and literally will not withstand conflict with the present statute.
Notwithstanding
notwithstanding Pronunciation Key (ntwth-stndng, -wth-)
prep.
In spite of: The teams played on, notwithstanding the rain.
adv.
All the same; nevertheless: We proceeded, notwithstanding.
conj.
In spite of the fact that; although.
IN SPITE OF any other federal or state laws, they can do what they like.
Oh, and they can delete any file they want if it is "necessary" to prevent you from trading their copyrighted files.
Yes, it REALLY is that bad.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
GNUnet - Completely encrypted and completely anonymous file sharing. It's designed to be resistant to attack, let's see them go after that once it's up to a few million nodes. ;)
Having read through the bill, I'd like to make some observations.
The bill defines a peer-to-peer network as being:
two or more computers which are connected by computer software that (A) is primarily designed to (i) enable the connected computers to transmit files or data to other connected computers... (B) does not permanently route all file or data inquiries or searches through a designated, central computer located in the United States
This would seem to obviate any centralized file-trading system (like Napster). In fact, it would exclude any system not truly peer-to-peer. Odd.
The bill also includes provisions for suing the copyright holders if they cause at leaset "$50" in economic damages to you. However, it specifies "Monetary" damages. Does this mean hardware repair, as opposed to the less tangible lost bandwidth? If so, can we throw this back at their somewhat intangible "losses to piracy"?
They also must notify the Justice Department 7 days in advance, as I read it. Given the shitfting nature of the Internet, that seems useless to the **AA.
Okay, this bill sucks, but it doesn't seem nearly as dangerous (yet) as everyone makes it out to be.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
If you're using Linux 2.4, you can configure iptables to cloak your site. Determine what netblocks the ??AAs are using and use something like this to drop inbound traffic:
iptables -A INPUT -s x.y.z.0/24 -j DROP
While they might still be able to chew up bandwidth by dumping a ton of bogus traffic on you, it's not too likely they'd do that without determining that you have moviez and/or mp3z on your system. Your machine won't respond to their pings...if they're smart, they'll assume that your system is offline and not bother. I suppose a search in $P2P_SOFTWARE would still list the files you're carrying, but their attempts to download from you would also be unsuccessful. If they're smart, they'll assume that it's old data that's still cached somewhere and move on.
(Note that I'm assuming a certain minimal level of intelligence on the part of the ??AAs. This may or may not be a valid assumption. Whether the assumption is valid is an exercise left to the reader.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
American corporations are strong legal entities only because the American public let them get that way. The beauty of the US Constitution is that whenver Americans truly want to exercise their rights, they can reign in powers that threaten to undermine our freedoms.
It's happened before. Look at the Robber Barrons. Their excesses spawned a raft of trustbusting legislation. Of course, that legislation didn't just create itself. Normal voters rose up and made their voices heard.
Talk of revolution is nifty, and we'd all doubtless love to engage in a Matrix-style rampage against corporatism. But the real solution isn't revolution, it's working within the political system we already have. The problem is, that requires.. shudder!... actual participation in the process. You can't just write a fucking email or hack your Playstation and get results in politics.
Revolt? Not likely, when Americans can't seem to use the power they already have.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The music industry is already using a company called NetPD to hunt down and kill copyrighted material. Unfortunately they don't just go for the files. They were interviewed for a 'cybercrime' documentary on the BBC recently and they explained they find out who is distributing the files (includes P2P clients as well as websites) and sends one of those we've-got-lawyers, your-customer-hasn't letters to your ISP.
(I'd LOVE to waste some of my spare bandwidth/cpucycles hammering the servers they use to search for files - but this would have to be done by a larger number of users than just me.)
insignificant sig
There is a catch in the bill, so that it would not have the undesired effect of granting equality under the law. You are only allowed to sabotage publicly available peer-to-peer systems. I doubt Big Business use those systems, so it will still be illegal for you to attack them even if this bill becomes law.