Kaizenlog

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| Senate Judiciary Committee Approves Copyright Cops                 |
|   from the keystone-of-the-law dept.                               |
|   posted by kdawson on Friday September 12, @08:54 (Government)    |
|   http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/12/1239243 |
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[0]I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The Senate Judiciary
Committee has [1]approved the EIPA (the Enforcement of Intellectual
Property Rights Act of 2008), which would create copyright cops. And
these cops would take over the RIAA’s War on Sharing by filing civil
lawsuits and using civil forfeiture laws to take any and all computers
engaged in infringement. Worse, they would even seize computers (such as
servers or database farms) that house the data of innocent people, and
these people would not have any right to get their data back. At best the
‘virtual bystanders’ who happened to have data on a computer used for
infringement could get a protective order saying that no one should go
rummaging through their stuff. Perhaps the only good thing in the bill is
that they’ve excluded DMCA circumvention from the list of grounds for
seizure. So while the Senators believe this is needed to combat foreign
copyright infringement cartels, it’s entirely likely that innocent people
will be harmed by this law.”

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/09/12/1239243

Links:
0. http://www.eff.org/support
1. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080911-committee-amends-approves-enormous-gift-to-big-content.html