Musings

Decline and Fall

The RIAA continues its slow slide from lobbying to legal thuggery to outright criminality. Presumably, having spent all this money recently, financing the development of Trojan Horses, DoS Attacks and other nasties with which to attack P2P file-sharers (I like the one which erases all MP3 files, legal or illegal, from the victim’s hard drive.), we can expect them to spend a little more and make another attempt to pass a revived Berman Bill, exempting them from the pedestrian restrictions of anti-hacking laws.

Update: Ed Felten is sceptical. He’s right that there is a certain element of self-promotion in the article, on the part of the companies, Overpeer and MediaDefender, who have been contracted to develop the malware. I’m not so sanguine. Somebody’s paying for it. And I would not be surprised (disappointed, but not surprised) to see a “Berman II” type bill surface in Congress. But till it does, you would expect Music Industry executives to be “closed-mouthed” on the subject.