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.

Omg

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nowhere to begin. I love the hypocrisy of the US and its laws. This cost the RIAA a pretty penny i would imagine.

Here's what the meeting looked like

[Typingsux]

Click me [photoisland.com]

and then ...

[tandr]

... all the hell will break loose when Lucent Bell Labs will DoS all unix machines? Or virus writers will do DoS legaly -- "It is my virus, they stole and DISTRIBUTE it!!".

and then just wait till MS would do DoS to these nasty pirates...

Courtroom scene:

[Anonymous Coward]

Judge: You've been convicted of causing widespread distrubuted denial of service attacks against xzy.com, resulting in a loss of millions of dollars in revenue. How do you plead?
skr1pt |1DD13: N0t gu1ty, y3r h0n0r! Th3y'z h0st1n' K-R4d ph4t mp3z.
Judge: Oh, well in that case: court finds defendant: Not guity.
skr1pt |1DD13: w00t!

Re:Here's what the meeting looked like

[microbob]

Haha, or this one:

http://mediaservice.photoisland.com/auction/Jul/20 027243000388564264875.jpg [photoisland.com]

When this starts happening...

[Quantum Singularity]

It WILL be an act of war. Arm yourselves, people. PGP your files and offload to a disconnected machine. And get a firewall. And Nmap. If they do this, we can fight right back and when they do, the government will finally see the error of this bill.

Re:The MPAA is declaring war

[Wakko Warner]

200 MPAA goons with script kiddie crap vs. 200,000 pissed off hackers. Who are you putting your money on?

The side with better lawyers.

- A.P.

Re:Holy Cow.

[SpotBug]

Anyone read any good books lately?

Is that still allowed?

Re:If this passes...

[Lemmy Caution]

What if file sharing software allows one to spoof IP addresses? What if those spoofed IP addresses lead back to, say, MPAA members? Voila, right to hack.

Re:new p2p scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

It thus behooves us all to take the following steps:

1) Buy a cheap old 486 and run it as a halted iptables firewall, spooling logs to a dot-matrix printer. Severely lock down eth0 and use eth1 for your "real" PC. To find some instructions, do a google search on "halted firewall". I don't remember the URL offhand...

2. Run Linux only on your internet-connected box. Use Bastille on your Linux box as a secondary measure. Secure that box to the best of your ability.

3. Collect IP addresses of machines that try to DDOS or DOS you. Post messages to IRC spoofing that IP address and make fun of script kiddies. Be especially insulting. Sit back and watch amusing fireworks.

Or is this overkill?

Re:It doesn't give blanket protection

[Lxy]

Did the person who wrote the Slashdot editorialization for this story even read the bill?

You're new here, aren't you?

Re:Unconstitutional on it's face

[gorbachev]

Re: DoS the FBI

That would be poetic justice, but as I read the bill, it requires prior permission from The Department of Justice (Attorney General) at which point you would have to tell the court how exactly are you going to do the hacking.

I don't think you would get permission to DoS the FBI, MPAA or RIAA...

That doesn't, of course, prevent EVERYBODY from requesting such permissions from The Department of Justice. That'd probably be the easiest way to bog down this law...everyone REPEATEDLY requesting permissions to hack into everybody else's computers. Imagine the assholes processing 20,000 requests a day. Perfect!

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill MPAA and RIAA

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

[TrebleJunkie]

You know, I almost want to like this, but probably not for the reasons you think.

Were it not for the fact that legal corporate DOS attacks would kill EVERYONE'S bandwidth and violate every known acceptable network use policy for every upstream provider known to God, (and a few that probably aren't.) I'd almost say that it's a good thing.

Why?

Because they'd have to let all you, as copyright holders, play along.

Pity the day that a large media company steals your domain name and you DOS them out of several million in sales and service -- LEGALLY!

And stop, think and drool for a moment at the possibilities of two companies, instead of going to court over copyright issues, just DOS each other out of existance.

And lets not forget the wonderful economic stimulus that adding several million script kiddies to the payroll with bring. And it's cost effective! You can get literally THOUSANDS of underpaid, almost-unpaid, basicially unskilled Hindu hackers for the price of a good legal team.

But then, see, my solution to everything is to give everyone a gun. Sure, you have a period where all the idiots kill each other, but then, things quiet down, and noone uses them unless they really have to.

But, ya know, it's not like the copyright and intellectual property realms couldn't use that kind of shakeup. It does. Bigtime.

Not to mention that it brings the wonderful cyberpunk world just *that* much closer to reality.

Welp, I'll leave you to ponder that while I buy a stack of good books, and pack up my tent and 60 years worth of freeze-dried food onto the back of my ATV and head off for the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Cheers!

Hmmm...

[pjt48108]

So, for the right price, can I get a law passed allowing me to summarily execute recording and movie company executives on site, without fear of punishment? I'd be really cool with that. Can it be done?

I'm only asking...

Re:Lets see how this would work

[Rader]

Well, that's simple. The RIAA has been coming up with concrete $$ amounts they've lost every year due to p2p & pirating. You can do the same!

Here's the formula you're looking for... Figure up how much money you wish you made last year. Then subtract your actual net worth that year. This equals the $$ you lost.

Don't forget to add your god-given right for 5% profit margin increase each and every year. 6% if the economy is down.

If for some reason this formula doesn't give you the number you wish for, simply change the stats on how much money you made until you're happy with the results. For instance, maybe you didn't make ANY money last year during the time you stood on your head in the middle of the road. College kids have heads! Colleges have roads!! College kids download music.... aha!! So that must be why you didn't make any money while standing on your head in the middle of the road.

Re:Corporations fuck Americans, news at 11

[MillionthMonkey]

When will the American people wake up? It's so blatantly obvious to the rest of the world that your corporations are out of control. When are you going to finally realize it's time to put a leash on them?

We have more important things to worry about. The evil liberals took God out of the Pledge of Allegiance!!!

Re:It doesn't give blanket protection

[antirename]

No, you have it wrong. Obviously you should kick the door in, shoot me, take an axe to the printing press, and then burn the house down. You have to be sure that I'm not going to pirate any more stuff, don't you? In the other case, well... you'd do pretty much the same thing. If you burn the house down you can be pretty sure that the cat's not in there (at least not alive, but what's the difference? You didn't get the cat back, but I can't have it either. That's how these assholes think... their reasoning reminds of spoiled three year old kids on a playground.