The July article of Legal Bytes explored the current assault by DirecTV on defendants who are accused of possessing equipment that permit interception and decryption of the digital television transmissions of DirecTV.

Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich) and Howard Berman (D-Calif) have introduced a new bill in Congress that would impose a prison term and a fine for uploading a single file to a peer-to-peer network. They said the bill is designed to increase domestic and international enforcement of copyright laws.

Wired News reported the introduction of the congressional proposal. "The bill, called the "Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act of 2003," or ACCOPS, would allocate more money to the Department of Justice to investigate copyright crimes: up to $15 million a year, compared with the current budget of $10 million. The bill would also enable information sharing between countries to help in copyright enforcement abroad.

"The bill "clarifies" that uploading a single file of copyright content qualifies as a felony. Penalties for such an offense include up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. In addition, filming a movie in a theater without authorization would immediately qualify as a federal offense.

"We're giving notice that this is something we want specific attention paid to," said the aide. "The current law is very general."

"ACCOPS also mandates that file-sharing websites must get consent from consumers to search their computers for content or to store files. In addition, those who provide false information when registering a domain name could also be charged with a federal offense.

"Last year, Rep. Berman introduced a bill that would protect copyright holders from liability if they impaired or disrupted the unauthorized distribution of the unauthorized distribution of their content on P2P networks. The bill is still being debated. "

Wired News further reported that "Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the bill "a sign of desperation" by the recording industry and Hollywood as they try to hold on to their business models. Schultz said ACCOPS shows that the recording and movie industries "don't care what kinds of collateral damage they create. Sufficient laws are in place to punish those who violate copyright law," he said.

Schultz stated, "the poorly written bill sets up an unnecessarily wide dragnet. It criminalizes the placement of any copyright work on a computer network. If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail."

"There have been hearings, year in and year out, and consumers have not complained about anything that is going on in this bill," Schultz said. "The only people complaining are the content industry folks. The content industry is asking the public to fund this kind of an effort against themselves."

This is a fight that will not go away. The rhetoric gets very intense. Are file swappers a national security risk? Apparently there are members of Congress who think so. In a recent meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee for the US Congress, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) gave his personal opinion about file sharing. According to a report on MSNBC, Hatch said, "By the end of the session, the only committee member in attendance, chairman Orrin Hatch-himself a songwriter who sells CDs on his personal Web site - zeroed in on what really bugged him: people sharing copyrighted songs on the Internet without paying for them. Then he ran an idea by one of the panelists: what if you had a system that could detect whether people were getting songs without paying for them and could warn those infringers that what they were doing was wrong?"

And then, if they didn't stop, the system would remotely "destroy" their computers. "No one's interested in destroying people's computers," said the panelist. "Well, I'm interested in doing that," said the senator. "Warn them, do it again, and then destroy their machine! There's no excuse for anyone violating our copyright laws."

Is it possible that the equivalent of a cyber cruise missile would target the offending computer and blow the computer to smithereens? I never knew that P2P file sharing could be life threatening.

The MSNBC website also states that the RIAA (the Record Industry Association of America) sent out hundreds of subpoenas recently to individuals and Internet service providers. Carey Sherman, president of the RIAA, says the time for patience is over. "We've reached a point where we have a legitimate marketplace for downloading music, and we want to give it a chance," says Sherman, referring to the spiffy services like Apple's iTunes Music Store, the new Buy.Com store and subscription services like Rhapsody. But the game is just starting, and the best way to make sure that these services come up with compelling innovations is to match them off against the Kazaas of the world, which are far from perfect (the quality is erratic, they put spyware on your computers, they're loaded with porn). You can compete against free - ever hear of bottled water?"

Eventually, there will be a variety of legal digital music that one will be able to download over the Internet. Until then, the maneuvering of the "powers that be" is fun to watch.

John Brewer practices law in Oklahoma City, is a member of the Governor's and Legislative Task Force for E-Commerce, and enjoys issues relating to eBusiness and cyberspace. Comments and questions are welcome and can be emailed to johnb@jnbrewer.com.

There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. This article is brought to you by the Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member.

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