Well...look at all the people that are screaming "what do you mean they can listen to my wireless network?!!!!" It may be a violation of privacy acts but if it does happen does the denial or destruction of service in the pursuit of preserving intellectual property outside the court system "trump" basic human rights? Now I know WIPO believes that it does in the case of developing nations but what of so called developed nations? The software may target file sharing but what if they hit machines that are file sharing but not violating the holy intellectual property? Since some hospitals put in "honey pots" of celebrity records to test if their privacy policies actually are being followed by their employees, the case that Arnold proposes need not be so far fetched.
Now it believe it would be criminally negligant to tie a computer doing life threatening operations onto the internet (afterall they were doing this before the internet so why does EVERYTHING have to be tied to the internet...what about a good old fashioned twisted wire pair) but what of other cases?
As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once remarked-if you allow the police to go outside the law, then all you have done is create a class of super criminals. Who needs the police at that point? The idea of changing the law so that one class of citizens is empowered to go outside the court system is even more bizarre.
Jeremy Erwin <jerwin@ponymail.com> Sent by: owner-dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
05/07/2003 02:08 PM
Please respond to dvd-discuss
To: dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
cc:
Subject: Re: [dvd-discuss] Illegal tactics funded by Anti-piracy advocates
On Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 09:09 AM, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
> It's entirely conceivable that record company sabotage could kill
> someone. Say a nurse downloads music on a computer used to monitor
> hospital patients, it freezes, and they miss a cardiac arrest. The
> people responsible for that sabotage software could be subject to the
> death penalty under the the federal anti-hacking laws as recently
> amended by the USA Patriot Act.
>
> Arnold Reinhold
A bit far fetched-- don't you think? Many of these viruses target file
sharing networks. It would probably be a violation of the various
privacy act statutes to install the necessary clients. It all seems a
little bizarre to me-- as I'm not aware of any mp3 players that are
designed to execute arbitrary code.
As for mediadefender, the're website consists of the following.