As if the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 wasn’t a bad enough blow to the Fair Use rights of consumers, the clueless old farts in Congress are taking another stab at killing every remnant of consumer rights. After massive lobbying by the RIAA and the MPAA (among others), the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO IP Act) has passed the House Judiciary Committee. Oh joy.
On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with making penalties stronger against folks who pirate content, right? They’re criminals. So why should the rest of us law-abiding citizens be worried about it? There are two major problems I see.
One is that the actual act of “violation” is open to much interpretation by the copyright holders. This means they can claim violation in cases where Fair Use should allow content duplication. The RIAA and others already abuse the existing laws to harass thousands of innocent people into paying multi-thousand dollar fines just to avoid court battles. Do you think they will hesitate for one second to abuse this new law? Not likely.
The other problem with this new law comes in the lack of consideration as to HOW the violation occurred. As this law stands, an innocent individual can have their equipment seized and be put in jail simply because a guy sitting in a car across the street with a laptop used their wireless network to download illegal content. When deciding if you are a suspect, they only look at your IP address, which really means the IP address of the wireless router attached to your cable or DSL modem. Anyone who can access that router can make it look like you violated the law. In fact, there are lots of ways a criminal can make it look like you were the one who downloaded the illegal content. One of the most popular is called “IP spoofing” and the real pirates all know about how to use it. So this law will not catch all of the pirates, but it will destroy the lives of a lot of innocent individuals.
There are, in fact, many other situations where innocent individuals could have their lives ruined by the idiots like the RIAA who will abuse this law. What if somebody staying at your house uses your computer? What if one of your children downloads something without even knowing it is copyrighted? What if you download something that is listed as non-copyrighted by a web site and that web site was lying or ill-informed? Sure these things might be able to be proven AFTER the arrest and seizure of your equipment, but your life is still ruined.
The reality is that the copyright holders will mostly use the THREAT of imprisonment to force you to pay them large fines regardless of whether you are actually guilty. This makes me wonder what happened to “innocent until proven guilty?” It seems that Congress has eliminated that concept at every possible opportunity.
In fact, it seems to me that Congress is owned by the special interests who are pushing this law. What makes me think this? Those special interests have a documented history of abusing the law to harass innocent individuals, and yet Congress keeps giving them more power. Congress is showing complete disregard for the rights of consumers, because they have not included provisions protecting individuals from abuse or even provisions for damages when these laws are abused and ruin an individual’s life.
In my opinion, Congress has become nothing but a collection of technologically-clueless individuals who pander to the highest bidder, rather than protecting the rights of their citizens. I’d love to see them replaced with a bunch of regular folks with a lot more common sense. This country would be a much better place.
Meanwhile, watch your backs because it looks like the RIAA, MPAA, and others like them are going to have even more powers to ruin the lives of their once-loyal customers.
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