From the EFF, and BoingBoing.
California INDUCE bill bans the Internet
Cory Doctorow: An extremist California Senator called Kevin Murray has introduced a Californian version of last year’s Federal INDUCE Act, a law that proposed to make the very Internet itself illegal, for it bans producing, selling, offering, descirbing or building a network that can be used to share files unless “reasonable care” is taken to ensure that the files shared won’t infringe upon copyright. This, of course, includes email, IM, Web-browsers, and every other tool for exchanging data on the Internet. Nice one, Kevin! Maybe once you’ve passed this one, you can introduce a bill to make Pi equal to 3 and then execute everyone who insists otherwise.
The tech threat comes in the form of SB 96, Murray’s own souped-up version of Hatch’s controversial Induce Act. The bill, introduced in the Senate last week, would make a criminal of anyone who sells or distributes software that allows users to transmit files over a network, if the seller/distributor fails to exercise “reasonable care in preventing use of the software to commit an unlawful act” such as piracy, computer trespass, or dissemination of child pornography.Goodbye innovation; hello regulation. “Reasonable care” could mean anything from the forced design and/or redesign of software to mandated filtering and digital rights management (DRM) — even the forced installation of spyware to monitor user behavior. Moreover, SB 96 would effectively overrule the Betamax protections that the Supreme Court has provided technology companies for more than 20 years. That kind of seismic shift would destabilize some of California’s most successful companies.
From the birth of the Xerox machine to the modern web server, every technology that enables people to copy or disseminate content has had the capacity to be used for some illegal activity. Under Murray’s logic, we should have stopped the manufacture and sale of VCRs, dual tape decks, postal services, carbon paper, and any other service or device that could potentially be used in a crime.
Link to EFF quickie on this, Link to Ed Felten’s reaction to becoming a wanted man (Thanks, Jason
