Re: "Hollywood hacking bill"

I think the proposed legislation you discussed here is hilarious? But kidding aside the mind of person who would think of such jebberish??? what is particularly interesting is the would be fraud that could be induced by a bill such as this:

   Company A decides that person A is to be discredited. To effect that dis creditment Company A invades the individuals computers and finds only a little copyrighted infringing material, so it invades another computer and adds multiple infringements to the findings and reports it to justice, justice sends squads of infringement cops who shoot the place up, hose down the infringers computers, arrest his bits, frustrate his circuits, unwind his discs, and reprogram his proms. Then after a few weeks of such activity it is discovered that Company A had fabricated the conditions that were reported.

     All of the members of A are now safely back in Company B and Company A is no where to be found. Meanwhile the newspapers have made public mince meat of the individual.
Strike! Set em up in the other alley?

sterling

At 04:01 PM 9/25/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>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 Fri Sep 27 2002 - 02:46:56 GMT