RIAA Wants Right To Hack 651
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to Wired, the recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete
your stolen MP3s." From the article: "It's no joke. Lobbyists for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to glue this hacking-authorization amendment onto a mammoth anti-terrorism bill that Congress approved last week. A copy of an RIAA-drafted amendment obtained by Wired News would immunize all copyright holders -- including the movie and e-book industry -- for any data losses caused by their hacking efforts or other computer intrusions 'that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent' electronic piracy." Does this give you the right to crack RIAA systems to make sure no one there is selling copies of your term paper?
This feature is built into the WIN XP license (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Farenheit 451 is here early. (Score:5, Informative)
The RIAA's interest in the USA Act, an anti-terrorism bill that the Senate and the House approved last week, grew out of an obscure part of it called section 815. Called the "Deterrence and Prevention of Cyberterrorism" section, it says that anyone who breaks into computers and causes damage "aggregating at least $5,000 in value" in a one-year period would be committing a crime.
If the current version of the USA Act becomes law, the RIAA believes, it could outlaw attempts by copyright holders to break into and disable pirate FTP or websites or peer-to-peer networks. Because the bill covers aggregate damage, it could bar anti-piracy efforts that cause little harm to individual users, but meet the $5,000 threshold when combined.
I'd call this "circumventing" wouldn't you? Those intrusive bastards want carte blanche to do whatever they want, while ordinary people get screwed.
Re:Farenheit 451 is here early. (Score:1, Informative)
Music Firms Fail to Get Anti-Piracy Proposal on Bill [latimes.com]
Re:Farenheit 451 is here early. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, according to the article, this is already legitimate. The article cites US Code, Title 18, Section 1030 [cornell.edu]
The real news in this is that the USA Anti-Terrorism bill includes language to prevent this, whereas RIAA is trying to open this loophole back up.
did anyone actually read the proposed amendment? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the full text (emphasis mine):
'No action may be brought under this subsection arising out of any impairment of the availability of data, a program, a system or information, resulting from measures taken by an owner of copyright in a work of authorship, or any person authorized by such owner to act on its behalf, that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent the unauthorized transmission of such work by wire or electronic communication of such transmission would infringe the rights of the copyright owner.''
It looks like they are trying to come up with a way to detect if mp3s are being transmitted, and block it.
They claim they already have the right... (Score:5, Informative)
RIAA already claims that they have the right to hack your box if there is sufficient evidence (for them) that you are engaging in illegal distribution of their copyrighted material. Any 'incidental' damage to your computer outside of their copyrighted material was just side effects and not their fault, according to how their read the law.
The rub here is that in the recently passed USA bill, any act of hacking that incures more than $5k of damages could be concidered as a terrorist act, and thus, if RIAA were to accidently wipe your hard drive with their hacking attempts, that could be a terrorist act.
So RIAA was trying to get language added to the USA bill that would protect hacking done by copyright owners from being considered a terrorist threat, allowing them to continuing following the law as they believe they can already.
Apparently, if they've done this, no one has sued them, traced them, or otherwise indicated that their mp3's have suddenly disappeared. As it stands, I think it's a rather questionable application of the law and I wonder if further legal investigation of it should be done.
once again, slashdot misreporting at its best. (Score:2, Informative)
- A.P.
Re:On that note... (Score:4, Informative)
I put one mp3 file on the ftp server and they can say that every download constitutes a lost sale on the CD which has that song. Pricing a CD at $20 that is 250 downloads.
You really need to learn the New Math companies use to determine on-line damage.
Re:This feature is built into the WIN XP license (Score:5, Informative)
And get this, I tried to play that .wma file with winamp, not windows media player, so the protection is either in the file drivers somewhere or winamp has the wma protection code built in too...
Yes-- it's a documented feature (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like a great reason to use ZoneAlarm (Score:2, Informative)