Download that movie, lose your home

County politi­cians in Los Ange­les have passed leg­is­la­tion cham­pi­oned by the RIAA and MPAA that lets author­i­ties con­fis­cate prop­erty from any­one con­victed of IP theft or piracy. See Wired for more information.

The RIAA uses auto­mated meth­ods for col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion fom LimeWire and other peer-to-peer pro­grams. Data includ­ing the IP address and the files offered for trade are col­lected. The trade orga­ni­za­tion also has an auto­mated take­down notice and set­tle­ment sys­tem that tar­gets uni­ver­si­ties and stu­dents. The RIAA uses a man­ual process when inves­ti­gat­ing com­mer­cial ISPs. This arti­cle from the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion has some details.

Mean­while, Boing­Bo­ing reports that the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has passed a sim­i­lar mea­sure (HR 4279, PRO-IP (Pri­or­i­tiz­ing Resources and Orga­ni­za­tion for Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Act of 2008). The bill may not get through the US Sen­ate this year.

See Ars Tech­nica and TechDirt for more infor­ma­tion on this ridicu­lous piece of legislation.

Related posts on

billso.com

• 11 May 2008: Qtrax makes a free music down­load deal with Universal
• 15 March 2008: 10 years of MP3 players
• 21 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Copy­right and fair use
• 4 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Bet­ter than free
• 13 Novem­ber 2007: File shar­ing and cam­pus security
• 5 Octo­ber 2007: What’s wrong with copy­right?
• 17 July 2007: A quick expla­na­tion of copy­right law
• 29 Sep­tem­ber 2006: US copy­right law in verse
• 15 August 2004: Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion pro­motes fair use
• 27 June 2003: Sue your best customers

Tagged as: audio, BitTorrent, congress, copyright, crime, government, MP3, mpaa, P2P, piracy, RIAA, student, university, video