Return to the Den of Evil

Once again, I’m perplexed and shamed by the technophobia of the Democrats in Congress. And once again, a name is added to the roll of miserable luddites: John Conyers of Michigan, who has sponsored, along with a few of the usual suspects, the worst copyright and technology law of this session.

Professor Felten comments on the section of this scathingly idiotic law that apparently makes Windows, ftp servers, webDAV, and all browsers illegal in one fell, vaguely-worded swoop, by making it a crime to offering (without appropriate warnings) ‘enabling software’, which the bill “defines” as:

[S]oftware that, when installed on the user’s computer, enables 3rd parties to store data on that computer, or use that computer to search other computers’ contents over the Internet.

Yeah, that pretty much covers everything, IDE drivers to Unreal Tournament.

There’s also some good stuff in there about how our government should be spying on us more effectively, in order to better serve foreign governments that want to investigate us for copyright crimes. And the bit that makes—even accidental—sharing of a single copyrighted work punishable by 5 years in jail, that’s good too.

It’s infuriating that these kinds of bills are proposed at all, but so very much more so that they are proposed by people who claim to represent the “people, not the powerful”. At least the Republican party honestly represents the best interests of millionaires and megacorporations. Conyers, Berman, Hollings, Smith, and all of the other Democrats who are pimping these despicable and dangerous laws—they represent nothing but their own corrupt self-interest.

Filed under: politics