Draft of Rep. Berman's bill authorizes anti-P2P hacking

Thu Jul 25 21:37:15 UTC 2002

I'd get on my cell phone and call the police. That's their job. Of course
there is that little fact of having a legal right to the property in
question in the first place. :)

I fully agree this is Not Good (TM), hence the BAD in my response. Having
said that, satellite providers periodically 'kill' hacked access cards on
equipment in the user's home with no legal ramifications. How would this be
significantly different?  Waiving the fourth amendment flag is just FUD in
this case.

There's more than sufficient current law out there that applies in this
case. The entertainment industry just wants an even easier answer. They're
lazy. What's new?

WorldComm, Adelphia, AOL, (you and me next?), have made this industry and
its practices an easy target. Historically, market segments either clean up
their own act, or government steps in. I believe this business is at that
point now. How we act in the near future will greatly affect the amount of
government involvement we'll see. Arguing in support of haz0r/warez networks
won't help the cause.

To put a different spin on the DCMA/17USC512 takedown letter issue, does
this mean you support opt-out lists for Spam as apposed to opt-in? That's
how the entertainment industry views our current process. There's a lot of
disucssion on this list (actually OT but we see it here anyway) about
identifying questionable E-mail traffic (spam). Is it really that much
harder to identify questionable P2P traffic? Or are we all too busy
listening to our MP3s playlists and watching the latest Starwars rip?

Just my 2¢

Best regards,
_________________________
Alan Rowland

-----Original Message-----
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 1:57 PM
To: Rowland, Alan D
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Draft of Rep. Berman's bill authorizes anti-P2P hacking 

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002 13:11:00 PDT, "Rowland, Alan D"
<alan_r1 at corp.earthlink.net>  said:

> IANAL but IMHO spewing cracked copies of say, Photoshop, or other 
> copyright violations might be considered probable cause with the 
> specific place/things being the share program and it's contents.

If your house was broken into, and your TV stolen, and you were walking
along and saw it in your neighbor's living room through the window, would
that give you the right to go in and reclaim it?

Would it exempt you from having to pay for a new door to replace the one
that got broken down?

You might want to ask yourself why the now-standard 17USC512 takedown letter
isn't sufficient.....

I wonder how many 'Hax0rs-R-Us' record labels are about to incorporate.

Bad JuJu.