Copyright Holders Want to Hack Your PC

Electronic Frontier Foundation ^ | n/a | n/a

[beckett]

Representative Howard Berman has introduced legislation that would grant copyright holders near-immunity from the law while attacking a citizen's computer. The bill protects copyright holders from legal action stemming from denial-of-service attacks on people whom they suspect of using material in an unauthorized way on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

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[beckett]

You may have some interest in this issue.

[Greeklawyer]

RIAA seeks to eliminate the stand alone computer.

[Clock King]

Whatever they do, someone with anti-hack or reverse engineer the system. Probably do it at the router level.

[beckett]

Well when you say "reverse engineer," I'm not sure that applies in this case. Berman's legislation seeks to allow denial-of-service attacks. In other words, say you've got copyrighted material on your server --- Britney's latest classic, timeless tune, for example, and 100 people are accessing your server and downloading from it. If some spyware picks up on the activity and finds that you have no license for that material, Berman wants the holder of the copyright, RIAA or whoever, to be able to flood your server with bogus requests for access, thereby effectively shutting it down. There is no way to reverse engineer that kind of activity --- it's simply a bandwidth issue.