In September, while the US Congress was busy at work, working on the USA Act (anti terrorism bill) the RIAA and its chief lobbyist (Mitch Glazer) was also busy, very busy, behind the scenes trying to insert another one of his “technical adjustments” into a bill that has nothing to with copyright. What does the RIAA have to do with terrorism you ask? Why was he bothering our lawmakers with this absurd bill? Good Question. "He sold his soul" is the only answer I can offer.They were trying to get the following language inserted into the bill to make it legal and protect them from high damages in case they screwed up and messed up your computer while disabling software, hardware, placing files, roaming around your computer looking for potentially infringing files. Go ahead, reread it. That's right. the USA act has a provision that makes it a felony to hack into someone's computer and doing damage, and the RIAA wants an exemption so they can hack into your computer. 

Think about this for a minute. They want to search your computer, without a warrant. But while there they will be able to access any other information, private, personal, work, banking, where you've been visiting on the internet, anything! Without cause, without reason. These are rights we don't even extend to the Federal Government without a search warrant. They have no shame.

It's becoming more and more apparent each day that the RIAA cares absolutely nothing about privacy, about due process, or fair use rights. Ripping a MP3 file is not illegal. Storing that copy on you computer is not illegal. Not one case has determined that filesharing is illegal, not even the Napster case. Napster has yet to got to trial, as does Aimster or any of the other suites they've filed.

The language did not make it into the USA Act, but the very fact that they tried to tie copyright enforcement with terrorism shows the ends they will go to. As one legislative aide said: "This just smacked of vigilantism." Although labels and studios still would have been subject to criminal charges, the proposal to ban lawsuits amounted to "an authorization to trespass on other people's property," the aide said.

This is the text the RIAA suggested:

"Section 815(d)(2) [of the Senate antiterrorism legislation] currently amends section 1030(g) (the provision of 1030 which creates a civil cause of action) by adding a sentence at the end providing: 
'No action may be brought under this subsection for the negligent design or manufacture of computer hardware, computer software or firmware.' 

We [would propose adding a new sentence to the end of this as follows: 

'No action may be brought under this subsection arising out of any impairment of the availability of data, a program, a system or information, resulting from measures taken by an owner of copyright in a work of authorship, or any person authorized by such owner to act on its behalf, that are intended to impede or prevent the infringement of copyright in such work by wire or electronic communication; provided that the use of the work that the owner is intending to impede or prevent is an infringing use.' 

OR 

'No action may be brought under this subsection arising out of any impairment of the availability of data, a program, a system or information, resulting from measures taken by an owner of copyright in a work of authorship, or any person authorized by such owner to act on its behalf, that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent the unauthorized transmission of such work by wire or electronic communication of such transmission would infringe the rights of the copyright owner.''


The RIAA denied they wanted to hack your computer, but some very intellegent people disagree. It's not what the clause says, it's what it allows you to do.