Congressman Howard L. Berman is one of those insufferable lawyer-politicians who infest US politics.
He represents California's 26th Congressional District in the north-east San Fernando Valley - the history of which was recounted, with a certain amount of creative licence, in the movie Chinatown.
Civic leaders encouraged city engineer William Mulholland to build a huge aqueduct from the Owens Valley to give Los Angeles water, and, in 1915, got the city to annex most of the valley, large tracts of which they had thoughtfully already purchased.
The 26th District also encompasses North Hollywood, so many of Berman's constituents are in the movie business. It is therefore not surprising that the Congressman takes a keen interest in intellectual property rights. He was, for example, a prime mover in the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has turned out to be one of the most contentious statutes in the US legal code.
Berman's efforts on the studios' behalf have not gone unappreciated. The website www.opensecrets.org, an invaluable source of information about campaign contributions, reveals that of the top 10 contributors to his last election campaign, seven were media corporations, including Disney, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, Viacom, News Corporation, Dreamworks and Sony.
In the last two years, the movie studios and their buddies, the record companies, have become increasingly hysterical about file-sharing over the net. Initially, their wrath, not to mention legal firepower, was directed at Napster, the first popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networking system, and in due course Napster was extinguished by the US courts.
Its demise did not, however, extinguish file-sharing. Au contraire: there are now far more people routinely swapping MP3 files over the net than there were even in Napster's heyday.
And the new file-sharing systems (Gnutella, KaZaa, Morpheus etc) are much more decentralised than Napster was and correspondingly more difficult to identify and eliminate by purely legal means.
As the recording industry became more and more frantic about file-sharing, its technical wizards began to research all kinds of malicious hacking tricks that might be used to harass, swamp and, perhaps, destroy computers engaged in P2P file-sharing. Their wheezes range from the release of fake or spoof MP3 files to full-scale denial of service attacks and the deliberate infection of 'enemy' computers with destructive viruses. There is only one problem with these schemes: most of them are illegal under the Computer Fraud and Misuse Act, which is where Congressman Berman comes in.
'While P2P technology is free to innovate new and more efficient methods of distribution that further exacerbate the piracy problem', he fumed on 25 June. 'Copyright owners are not equally free to craft technological responses. This is not fair and I believe Congress should free copyright creators to develop and deploy technological tools to address P2P piracy. We could do this by providing copyright owners with a safe harbour from liability for using such tools.'
Accordingly, Berman has introduced a Bill into the US Congress to permit copyright holders to engage in otherwise illegal network vandalism against P2P network users that share copyrighted materials. The copyright holders (such as record companies) would be empowered to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury, and to employ the same vicious techniques that teenage hackers use to disable government and corporate networks.
To appreciate the breathtaking arrogance of Berman's Bill, one has to translate it into real-world terms. It's the equivalent of giving Disney the power to smash its way into your house because it suspects one of the kids has an illicit representation of Mickey Mouse on his bedroom wall. Or of allowing bank clerks to shoot robbers who brandish fake firearms. Or of allowing someone who's been burgled to set fire to the burglar's house. It's the kind of thing that civilised societies abandoned aeons ago. But in cyberspace anything goes.
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