"Bill would hurt music downloads" - Article from local newspaper

[Azimer]

WASHINGTON (AP) - A proposal by a California congressman would give the entertainment industry broad new powers to try to stop people from downloading pirated music and movies off the Internet.

Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecendented new authority to secretly hack into consumers' computers or knock them off-line entirely if they were caught downloading copyrighted material.

"There is no excuse or justification for this piracy," said Berman, the leading recipient in the House of compaign contributions from entertainment industries. "Theft is theft whether it is shoplifiting a CD in a record store or illegally downloading a song."


My analysis:

Land of the free or land of the tyrants? You decide.

This type of piracy is likened to that of copying books from the library or from a friend. The industry is not immediately harmed by the theft since no raw materials have been removed from the industry's possession. The only thing the industry loses, is a potential license from the individual who may or may not have boughten the material in the first place.

Allowing the industry to invade our homes is unconstitutional. At the moment, a court order is required in order to tap someone's phone line, or entire their house. In both cases, they require reasonable cause. Under this new legislation, there will be no reasonable cause for the industry (a non governmental body) to invade your computer, and in effect your home, and punish you somehow without just cause. This is not an act of a free country.

So I brought this before you to keep those U.S. residents informed of your "rights" or lack there of. I personally find this threatening more then just our mp3s and DivX movies. It threatens our software and emulation files as well. Reminds me of a picture someone sent me as a joke.

 

[vampireuk]

hack them back

 

[RatTrap]

that's just ridiculous.. it would start a massive online war that they could never win..

 

[2fast4u]

this aint a funny issue actually ... in times in which good ol bush wants to establish the TIPS operation which will bascially turn the united states into a country full of spies it wouldnt suprise me if a ruling like that wouldnt also get passed by congress.

sides that, what rat says is completely right. one pirated song doesnt mean one cd less that the industry sells, or that a store owner could sell (well coz its a copy, get my drift?).

the possibility that a non-govt agency could possibly have the right (!) to spy on ANY kind of information on your computer is unconstitutional about ANY democratic state in the world ...

 

[sytaylor]

songs that have anti piracy protection on them rareley sell as ones that are normal, mp3s actually help music sales... over the last few years album sales have been quite healthy, the offspring had the most pirated album with consiracy of one... and it sold absolutley massive! so why are people so worried about us sharing music? i for one would go absolutley apeshit if someone told me i couldnt keep my mp3 collection!!

 

[Tri-Force]

it's pure RECOCKLE!!! i would LOVE to see someone who doesn't work for the government TRY to come in and take my $400 MP3 player away from me and take off all the songs that i dont have in my collection. that's just CRAP!!! TRY IT PUNKS TRY IT. and if someone trys to get into my system they will get reverse fried. HACKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!!! or something like that

 

[Eagle]

songs that have anti piracy protection on them rareley sell as ones that are normal, mp3s actually help music sales... over the last few years album sales have been quite healthy, the offspring had the most pirated album with consiracy of one... and it sold absolutley massive! so why are people so worried about us sharing music? i for one would go absolutley apeshit if someone told me i couldnt keep my mp3 collection!!

Actually they dont sell as well because the ones with that copy protection can't be copied or played on CD-Roms at all. Copy protection is one thing, but I'm not going to buy a CD I can't play cause my CD-Rom is the only CD player I own.

Also I dont see how this is a big problem since most people have firewalls anyway.

 

[sytaylor]

Actually they dont sell as well because the ones with that copy protection can't be copied or played on CD-Roms at all. Copy protection is one thing, but I'm not going to buy a CD I can't play cause my CD-Rom is the only CD player I own.

Also I dont see how this is a big problem since most people have firewalls anyway.

actually eagle my point was valid so dont wipe your ass on it k? if people cant hear a song from an album before they think about buying it theyre gonna be less confident about buyin it aincha

 

[AlphaWolf]

All of this is actualy being proposed by a california congressman who was funded into office mainly by the MPAA/RIAA. This will be a major political debate for months (years?) to come. Even if this bill becomes a law, I wouldn't let it bother you, mainly because Six Four is coming soon, and secondly, a dos attack can go two ways, and a ddos is much worse.

Try as you might, but you can't stop change on a scale this broad, this late into the game, I don't care how much money your corporate croneys throw at it.

 

[Sukh]

Personally I doubt that the illegal file swapping community would put up with this. The record companies themselves would be attacked 100s of more times. This is a case of putting the law in your own hands.

Just a query, afaik, it'd still be illegal for these companies to hack say me as I am in Europe? I should hope so...

 

[Azimer]

The point I was making wasn't so much what we could do to counter this atrocity. What I am MORE concerned about is our rights in this damn country being limited more and more year after year. This is just a blatent attempt to limit us on the internet as the US had always wanted to do.

 

[Eagle]

Well, the fact is its unconstitutional. My computer is my private property. Hacking into it to search for illegal material is an illegal search under the fourth ammendment of the constitution, which reads (As if I needed to post this)

Article the sixth [Amendment IV]

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Therefore even if congress were stupid enough to pass such a bill, the first person caught downloading illegal material would take it directly to the Supreme Court and it would most certainly be declared an unconstitutional law. Remember Supreme Court justices hold their positions for life (until retirement) and cannot be influenced by voters, congress members, or even the President, and as they have demonstrated before, they do have the power to reject a law for violating the constitution.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Hell I would love to see what ISP would tolerate extremely large ammounts of "waste" bandwidth flowing both from the MPAA and from the counter attacks. :devil:

 

[Seta-San]

what's the point

people will still pirate everything they can anyway. People will just be much quicker about burning the songs/movies/roms/Appz to disc before they can search your hdd. People would learn that formatting once a month destroys LOTS of evidence that could incriminate.. I have my LLFormat disk in my drive at all times in case something weird or crazy happens and the govrnmt comes after me.

 

[Eagle]

Re: what's the point

people will still pirate everything they can anyway. People will just be much quicker about burning the songs/movies/roms/Appz to disc before they can search your hdd. People would learn that formatting once a month destroys LOTS of evidence that could incriminate.. I have my LLFormat disk in my drive at all times in case something weird or crazy happens and the govrnmt comes after me.

Not true. The government has ways of recovering data after a format. The only true way to get rid of the data is to have a wipe program that you can wipe the free space with. I'm not sure but deleting the partition might do the job, then again they may be able to get around that as well.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Well, the "government" forensics teams can actualy recover data from a hard drive after its been overwritten or erased a few times (a low level format is the most effective way, but its not enough, and actualy in a lot of cases, they commission the drives mfr as an expert witness, and have them recover shit you may have long forgot about), but quite honestly, they wouldn't bother persecuting you like that unless you were a major pirated software dealor making a huge profit on it or something (or commited murder or some other capital offense and there was good reason to believe that your hard drive has evidence), and even if they did bust you for pirating maybe ten or so games, they more than likely wouldn't spend the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to analyse just one hard drive.

The government isn't out to get you though, there are much bigger fish to fry, doing a low level format often is way extreme.

If you are truely paranoid, you can go buy some software which was origionaly designed for the military to declassify drives which at one time or another contained sensitive information so that they could be donated to schools instead of being destroyed. It works by writing random zeros and ones throughout the drive several times over, then finaly zeroing out the MBR, takes a massively long ammount of time for even small drives though.

 

[blizz]

or you could just use a Eraser which is free

 

[RatTrap]

i sudgest you grab a big ass magnet somewhere.. rubb it all around your harddrive for about an hour.. then put your harddrive into the refridgerator for a day or 2.. then start a massive fire in your backyard.. open up your harddrive.. and toss the HD disks into the fire.. after that.. go buy a new harddrive ..

low level formating won't get ridd of everything.. although it's a pretty nice thing to be able to do bout once a year maybe.. it's not gonna help you hide your mp3s ..

Azi is right though.. you guys are being stripped clean from every right to the new things that comes out.. latelly it's been enviromental.. b4 that it was genetics.. the constitutions.. geez.. now piracy..

i'm not saying it's "right" to have piracy.. but they are taking it to some stupid extremes.. mostly to get a frontpage cover i guess.. make ppl see how they feel about it and how much money they are losing maybe.. and even to maybe scare some ppl at the same time.. coz if they really believe they would be able to pass a law giving them every right they need to dive into your system and roam free.. then they are probably on some very expensive crack..

 

[AlphaWolf]

blizz: Ah yeah after looking I saw that . Still very unnecessary for your average pissant software pirate though.

 

[AlphaWolf]

i sudgest you grab a big ass magnet somewhere.. rubb it all around your harddrive for about an hour.. then put your harddrive into the refridgerator for a day or 2.. then start a massive fire in your backyard.. open up your harddrive.. and toss the HD disks into the fire.. after that.. go buy a new harddrive ..

low level formating won't get ridd of everything.. although it's a pretty nice thing to be able to do bout once a year maybe.. it's not gonna help you hide your mp3s ..

Azi is right though.. you guys are being stripped clean from every right to the new things that comes out.. latelly it's been enviromental.. b4 that it was genetics.. the constitutions.. geez.. now piracy..

i'm not saying it's "right" to have piracy.. but they are taking it to some stupid extremes.. mostly to get a frontpage cover i guess.. make ppl see how they feel about it and how much money they are losing maybe.. and even to maybe scare some ppl at the same time.. coz if they really believe they would be able to pass a law giving them every right they need to dive into your system and roam free.. then they are probably on some very expensive crack..

Well, quite honestly the government isn't "trying" to take rights away, its people who have influence on the government that do (IE the californica congressman). If you think about it, the democrats are trying to remove our second ammendment right, which is to bear arms (for the clueless, why we are allowed to have guns). Our second ammendment right was designed to give the people the chance to fight back against the government should it ever become too opressive. We are one of the few countries to give the chance to act against the government, yet a big chunk of our population just wants to throw that right away. Sure giving that right has consequences, but if you take it away, you may create a worse problem. The same applies to the anti-piracy bill in question.

That aside, I for one have no doubt that this bill will not pass, the media (who has the tendancy to stand out) has already slammed it several times, and one of it's clauses is a direct violation of the fourth ammendment (if they revise the offending portion, then this bill is actualy pretty meaningless). It also wouldn't surprise me if the DMCA were to be changed in the near future because of all of the heat it has been getting from fair use.