... But no, the RIAA has recently persuaded California Congressman Howard Berman - whose district includes Hollywood (surprise) - to create a bill that would provide shelter for copyright owners such as record labels and movie studios against liability for action they take to stop peer-to-peer Web sites from enabling illegal file-sharing.
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0708gibbs.html Howard Berman's email address - and a little more from the article. [EMAIL PROTECTED] .... But can't you just see it? You're getting ready for work one morning. The birds are singing, you're on time, the coffee's just finished brewing, and as you step out of the shower your home phone rings, your cell phone rings and your pager goes off. The messages from the office all say the same thing: "We have a fraction of our Internet access bandwidth left, hardly any e-mail is getting in or out, our Web servers have crashed, the FTP server got wiped clean and what are you going to do about it? Now." Your day has turned into a living inferno. Twenty-four hours later you've got a splitting headache and raging indigestion. You're exhausted, strung out on stale coffee, sweaty and greasy, short-tempered, and talking to some geek from the RIAA's hit squad. "Sorry" he says, "I guess we got the wrong IP address . . . We took out your servers? Oh. Sorry." Just try to take 'em to court. But eventually - and at great cost - enough consumers and businesses will have been erroneously hit. A class-action lawsuit will emerge to waste everyone's time and money, only to wind up at the Supreme Court, which will say the bill was stupid as it contravened this, violated that and rode roughshod over the other. Then it will be back to the drawing board for the RIAA and its band of merry men having made everyone's life just that little bit harder. This kind of legislation is plain crazy. At best it is ill-conceived and shortsighted. At worst, it is irresponsible and unethical. And it could pass this time. So tell Berman - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - how wrong his thinking is.
