Hollywood's gone to far
Consumers currently live in a day and age where just about everything is readily available on the internet. Experienced users - such as me - have access to just about anything they wish, this is one of the things that makes the internet grand. Now it seems that movie studios are trying to get congress to enact another copyright bill - this one more deadly than the last - on top of the extra protections dealt to the media and tech industries through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, whose purpose was to reform and update the copyright laws for the digital age.
Now, Representatives Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, and Howard Coble, Republican of North Carolina, have introduced a bill that plans to immunize copyright holders from the laws that govern computer intrusion if they have disabled or impaired any "publicly accessible peer-to-peer networks" to prevent their works from being traded. Translation, the bill would basically allow the movie studios to legally hack - meaning free of prosecution - into computers using file trading software, or peer-to-peer network computers (i.e. Kazaa, Limewire, Bearshear etc.). The bill states supposedly that the companies hacking in are not permitted to damage or erase any files from ones computer, but merely shut those computers down. The problem lies in the fact that the hacking companies can not be sued if any of the files are erased or damaged which is often the case during a hack, whether its intentional or not.
This issue should be a huge concern to anyone who uses a computer. The legalization of any kind of "computer hacking" will easily be a detrimental action to the online community, not to mention the possibility for the invasion of privacy. This bill is not only a danger to the countries computer security, but to individual rights as well. It is by no means a reasonable thought to think that ones computer might be violated because they are using a program that shares certain files over the internet. Another problem arises in the fact that the bill does not specify what kind of means they will resort to when "hacking" into users computers, whether they'd be using worms, viruses, denial-of-service attacks etc.
These companies are resorting to guerrilla-tech tactics because of their own incompetence, laziness and unwillingness to protect their own properties. The bill that has been proposed is easily a threat to legitimate practices by file-sharing companies. The possibility of ones computer being hacked into should not be a viable or legal option to resort to by anyone in any industry, profession or group. It's a ridiculous thought to think that such a measure has the possibility of being sanctioned by the U.S. government because some companies refuse to devote time and money into protecting their assets, thus destroying any sort of thought/feeling of privacy/safety when using the internet in any aspect. This bill leaves no room for prosecution of the companies in wrongful destruction suit - they can't be sued of the make a mistake. This shouldn't even be considered to be a reasonable option. Internet users have a right to their privacy just as anyone else; the repercussions could be serious if this bill were to pass in its entirety. It should be at the top of any internet users mind to voice their opinions to prevent this one bill from damaging the internet as we know it.