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Hacking the Law
Ok, nearly everybody has chimed in to say what a stupid idea the "Berman/Coble Bill" is. I think it's a great idea. The way I read the bill (which doesn't mean much), any "copyright holder" can interfere with file-swapping in his copyrighted files.
This presents three opportunities. The first is rather obvious: the development and deployment of secure file sharing networks. To have these used for file-sharing may not be a big deal, but the technology and innovation created in this development may prove to be useful in other applications. Internet-based transactions or enterprise knowledge management, for example.
The second opportunity might seem a little scary to some. I'm thinking about the US government here. Consider that there are many small copyright holders in the world who might have an axe to grind against the US government for any number of reasons. Take me, for example. Okay, so I don't really have any specific reason to want to disrupt the operation of the government. But I do hold a copyright on a number of various small pieces of software. The notification requirement and restrictions on damaging non-owned data might make it tricky, but I can see damage being done to government agencies without any legal recourse. Even if that "damage" is simply disabling a popular, useful piece of software. (Think Apache.) If CSS can be easily cracked, I'm sure that the Berman/Coble Bill could be cracked.
The third opportunity partly derives from that last bit. The community involved in creating software on the Internet stands to gain a fair amount of knowledge in hacking the law. Such knowledge seems to have been growing over the past few years, as new laws interfere in various ways with Internet usage.
From all appearances, it looks like the Berman/Coble Bill was
written by Hollywood lawyers and given to Rep. Berman with a hefty
Bill Introduction Fee. There's a lot of us on the Internet. Perhaps we
should shift some of our not-inconsequential resources from creating
software to influencing politicians? Maybe we can get them to
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