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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.
Where I am allowed to distribute copywrited works for my own profit? I mean, they make alaw that severely limts fair use and then turn around and ask the govt to allow them to violate our privacy?
I hear lots of crying "Ohh the big bad MPAA is going to hack my computer for pirating their movies!!"
Well for starters, this is a very touchy issue. In all honesty we all know P2P is used PRIMARILY for piracy. I think the MPAA is well within their rights to try and remove movies from peoples hard drives.
I don't think them DoS'ing a server is very cute though, I compare it to spam, where as the MPAA doesn't have to pay for all the havoc their DoS'ing causes between them and their victum.
Thing is though, the type of DoS'ing they're doing already is benign. All those fake movies and MP3's out there, it's an inconvinience at the most and doesn't really do any critical damage.
For your review, my pirated dishTV
I have a pirated dish TV. 10 channels of porn and everything else. Dish networks will occasionally (before major events) send out a signal that will damage your box if you've been pirating. Do I cry and say "Waaaaaa! They broke MY property!" No! I knew coming into it that this is just a part of being a pirate. I accept the fact that I have to be on a constant mailing list to recieve updates to "Fix" my dishtv box.
So the point I wanted to get across in all this, don't cry because MPAA doesn't want you to pirate their movies anymore. As of now, they don't really have a lot of other recourse until ISP's are required by law to be more forthcoming about a suspected pirates information OR DRM goes from being a pipe dream to something real OR people just stop being pirates.
Does this mean the people who wrote Apache can DoS my web server? And the GNU people can DoS the rest of my computer?
Posted from the wireless couch.