p2pnet.net News:- Senator Orrin ‘Terminator’ Hatch’s INDUCE Act, another Hollywood anti-p2p law being rammed home behind the spectre of child pornography, has passed.

Short for ‘Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation,’ it’s a, “horrible public policy that will chill the development, if enacted, of not only peer to peer technology, but wonderful new information tools yet to be devised,” says P2P United’s Adam Eisgrau. 

“The logic is that P2P applications inevitably lead to exploitation of children,” writes law profesor Susan Crawford on her blog here.

“It’s the Hollings Bill by other means, says EFF intellectual property lawyer Fred von Lohmann, going on thaat INDUCE is, “an over-reaching new form of indirect liability that will force technology companies of all kinds to ‘ask permission’ before innovating for fear of ruinous litigation if they don’t”.

It, “furthers Hatch’s exploitation of children-centered concerns in his quest to appease deep-pocketed entertainment companies,” says ARS Technica’s Ken Fisher here. “In short, the act seeks to hold liable anything and everything that could be used to infringe copyrights. Burn the VCR, burn the photocopiers, folks.

“For the children, of course.”

Analysts have already warned strongly this act could easily also apply to TiVo, your VCR, your CD-burner, or any of the other exciting technological developments that most of the honest people out there would like to use, Fisher points out, adding:

“It’s really amazing: if a device or application can be used for infringement, it makes the producers of such devices liable, even if it’s the end users committing the violation. Such a law would virtually eliminate a whole range of technological innovations, as companies would be afraid to produce anything that anyone could manage to somehow use to infringe copyrights. In Hatch’s world, ‘intentionlly inducing’ is akin to merely knowing that infringement could happen.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1105 times