Re: "Hollywood hacking bill"

From: <jyanchak[_at_]nttc.edu>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 09:36:56 -0400

The House Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property of the Judiciary Committee is having a hearing concerning this legislation today (Thursday 9/26). The hearing is taking place at 9:00 AM. It looks like the Committee website (http://www.house.gov/judiciary/) is relatively up-to-date as well so you should be able to get the transcript and/or testimony sometime early next week.

|---------+---------------------------->


|         |           David Dailey     |

|         |           <david.dailey[_at_]sru|

|         |           .edu>            |

|         |           Sent by:         |

|         |           owner-cni-copyrig|

|         |           ht[_at_]cni.org       |

|         |                            |

|         |                            |

|         |           09/25/2002 04:01 |

|         |           PM               |

|         |           Please respond to|

|         |           cni-copyright    |

|         |                            |

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  |       To:       Multiple recipients of list <cni-copyright[_at_]cni.org>                          |
  |       cc:                                                                                    |
  |       Subject:  "Hollywood hacking bill"                                                     |
  >----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Perhaps there has been some discussion of this since the last archives were
created at "CNI-COPYRIGHT Forum Archives," so I apologize in advance for
insulting any dead horses, visible or not. I am curious about the recent
legislation introduced to the US House by representative Berman apparently
entitled "LIMITATION ON LIABILITY FOR PROTECTION OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS ON
PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKS" and visible at
http://www.house.gov/berman/p2p.pdf.

Question 1: Is anyone aware of the current status of this proposed legislation?

It authorizes copyright holders to access any machine of any "file-trader"
using "peer-to-peer networks" to interfer with unauthorized copies, and,
barring a few exceptions, protects the copyright holder from liability
arising for such intrusion. My naive reading (IANAL) of the definitions of
the above-quoted terms in the legislation leads me to think this would
include all computers on any network including the Internet whether they
are serving files or not.

The copyright holder has to tell the Justice Department what methods it may
use in these disruptions (I don't gather that the Justice department has to
approve or publicly disclose the methods), and provides some recourse to
the end-user should her computer be wrongfully caused more than $250 damage
by the intruder.

The bill has had some discussion on the 'Net, as a search for the query
("berman bill" copyright) on Google reveals. Some there have labeled it the
"Hollywood hacking bill." Others might view it as a "declaration of hacking
war" between various segments of the networked community.

Question 2: Does it work both ways? A non-infringing end-user of networks,
"A", happens, incidentally, to be a copyright holder (quelle surprise!!). A
believes that another copyright holder "B" may have (while performing an
invasion of A's computer, as sanctioned by the house bill) made unauthorized copies or derivative works of her files or filenames (the
aggregate collection of which would, it seems, qualify as a protected
expression). Is she not then authorized to invade B's computers to snoop
and thence interfere with any potentially infringing files or processes
that B has collected or spawned?

It seems relatively straightforward, then that "C", an infringer, will
simply take any material M that he has wrongfully copied from B, and merge
into it, through a wee bit of encryption, a copy of some material, N, he
owns that is worth more than $250, thus creating a file P=e(M+N). B
suspects that an unauthorized work belonging to B is on C's computer. B's
little eavesdropper (costing only $200 from Virile Viral Enterprises), is
delivered surreptitiously through a
Department-of-Justice-approved-virus,
but has just enough horsepower to detect that P probably contains traces of
M. Therefore, B copies P to B's computer, decodes it into M+N, and then
returns to C's computer and destroys P. C detects the intrusion and knowing
of B's unauthorized copy of copyrighted N, enters B's computers and
disrupts those machines and destroys the eavesdropper. C then litigates
against B for the damages to N.

The legislation sounds like great fun for someone! Poor Hollywood.

David Dailey                                see

http://www.sru.edu/depts/cisba/compsci/dailey/copyright/dailey_on_copyright.htm

Associate Professor                     copyright musings: humor

and dread
Slippery Rock University Received on Thu Sep 26 2002 - 13:35:12 GMT