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MPAA Kills California Anti-Pretexting Bill
IAmTheDave writes "A California anti-pretexting bill that got unanimous support in the state senate with a vote of 30-0 was struck down after heavy last-minute lobbying by the MPAA. The bill aimed to make deceptive 'pretexting' (lying) to gain personal information on another person illegal. The MPAA told legislators 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,' and thus killed the bill when it came up for a final vote. California passed a much narrower bill that 'bans the use of deceit to obtain telephone calling records, and nothing else.' In a final 'think of the children' bid, the Califonia Association of Licensed Investigators also opposed the bill, saying it needed to be able to use pretexting to help find missing children, among other things."
Oh really? So its OK if I call your phone company pretending to be you and get a copy of your phone records?
Its OK if I call your Satelite/cable provider and get a list of all of the services you signed up for?
Its OK if I call you bank and get a list of all of your acounts and their balances?
The problem is not that these people are pretending to be someone they are not, the problem is that they are pretending to be some one in particular and useing that to gain information they could not otherwise gain.
What the MPAA has just done is say "There is information out there that we cant gain through normal legal channels, so we want to be allowed to gather the information through semi/non-legal channels" and the governemnt said "Oh, OK".
On the one hand we have the RIAA trying entrap media pirates under false pretenses. On the other, we have Universal trying to extort royalties for mp3 player manufacturers because they are "repositories for stolen music": http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/29/ 2328222. So I'm supposed to pay a tax on my mp3 player to keep the RIAA at bay, and then go home and not download free music? Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
> The answer is that succesful politicians are not developed, they're bought.
... uh ... someone whose name escapes me at the moment.
There was an interesting piece on PBS some years back where they interviewed 4 former California governors at once: Davis, Wilson, Jerry Brown and
Anyway, there was an interesting discussion about what they'd do to 'fix' California if they could, and one of them was to -increase- the amount of time legislators were elected for. They said that the situation now was that the legislators were there for such a brief amount of time between elections that they basically had no time to learn how to do their jobs. When faced with this dilemma, these freshman legislators turn to the only people there with experience at the job at hand - the lobbyists, who have typically been around Sacramento for many years and know how to get things done. As the governors explained it, this is the mechanism by which lobbyists essentially buy laws.
Another thing they thought would be a good idea: pushing the legislature back to part-time, so they had less time to pass useless laws. Say what you will about Arnold, he's like the veto king. He vetoed more laws in his first month than previous governors did their entire term.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.