A Penguin in the Orchard

Coble Responds

A Penguin Shell reader sent me a note this evening about HR 5211. You’ll recall that that’s the bill that would relieve copyright holder of liability for any damage they might cause your computer in an effort to “protect their copyright.” The reader had taken the time to write Representative Howard Coble, co-sponsor of the bill. Here, in part, is Coble’s response:

I cosponsored H.R. 5211 because I support efforts to reduce the rampant piracy of copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks. Piracy is hurting songwriters, authors, graphic artists, photographers, and software developers in North Carolina and across the country. Contrary to media reports, H.R. 5211 does not allow copyright owners to “hack” into the computers of private network users. H.R. 5211 is intended to clarify that copyright owners may utilize new technologies to protect their property as it is distributed on peer-to-peer networks. In other words, copyright owners could use decoys, spoofs, redirection, or file-blocking to protect their works from piracy. The legislation is narrowly crafted and provides network users with legal recourse against a copyright owner that acts beyond the scope of what is permitted by the legislation

This is really a non-response, in my eyes. That copyright owners can use “new technologies” to protect their property is incredibly vague. Even when Coble tries to give an example, he clearly has no concept of the breadth of “decoys, spoofs, redirection, or file-blocking.”

I’m really just left with more questions.

Let’s say I’ve put months of work into a paying programming project. The RIAA or whomever represents the copyright holder suspects I’ve got pirate copyrighted materials on that same machine. If their “decoys, spoofs, redirection, or file-blocking” destroys my project, but finds no evidence of pirated materials, are they protected from a liability claim based on their suspicion? That wouldn’t seem to be too narrowly crafted. Even if I had some recourse in that case, what I’d really want is the destroyed project - something that couldn’t be replaced, anyway.

Here’s a scenario from the other side of the coin. The copyright holder acts, on suspicion, to protect their copyright but finds nothing. Two days later my bank calls and says my credit card number has been compromised and used in several thousand dollars in fraudulent Internet transactions. Two days after that, a story hits The Register claiming that the tools used by the RIAA in defense of their artists’ copyrights was poorly tested and opens a backdoor in some machines; a backdoor that’s now been exposed and exploited. Since my liability for credit card fraud arising from theft is limited to $50, the credit card company will be left holding the bag to recover the remainder. With a potential scope of several thousand users. Would you want to be the RIAA in that situation?

Could the RIAA, for example, legally loose an innocuous email-based trojan that does nothing but read the contents of your drive and send that information to some centralized RIAA server? Even that, though probably not physically damaging, causes some harm in lost privacy.

Further, what types of copyrighted materials fall into this legislation? Does this open the door for any goofball with a © symbol attached to their bass-fishing and barn-dancing web site to search through my browser cache on the suspicion that I’m illegally in possession of their Bigmouth Billy Bass image?

In typical Washington fashion, an answer is really not an answer. The bill’s sponsor, Howard Berman, is from a copyright-rich southern California district. At least his motivations are clear. But Coble?

All this from the party that claims to be working to get government out of our lives.