Orrin Hatch wants to outlaw your VCR

Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican, representing the RIAA/MPAA) reportedly plans to introduce a bill cunningly titled the "INDUCE" Act of 2004 sometime in the near future. That's short for "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act". Hatch is lying through his teeth by pretending that the bill has anything to do with "protecting the children". Nothing even remotely relevant to children appears anywhere in the text of the bill. (Also available here for anyone who doesn't like .pdf's.)

What the bill's all about is suppressing technological development and suppressing our Constitutional rights to free speech and legal representation, all for the benefit of the poor lil' ol' media industry, which just happens to have donated large amounts of money to Senator Hatch's slush fund. It seeks to do so by extending liability for any conceivable potential copyright infringement to anyone who "aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures" such infringement. The past legal actions of the Hollywood IP barons (the Sony Betamax case, for example) have made it abundantly clear that producing hardware or software capable of copying anything they don't want copied will be considered to fall in this category, whether or not the product has legitimate non-infringing uses, whether or not any significant number of people actually use it for illegal activities. So will academic and technical discussions of encryption or copy-prevention technology -- remember the RIAA's legal threats against computer researcher Edward Felten? So will political and editorial statements "inducing" or "counseling" anything that Jack Valenti objects to. (You remember him -- the "What's Fair Use" fellow?) And one legal scholar even suggests that Hatch and Co. are stealing an idea from the Bush "Justice" Department's recent prosecutions of attorneys who represent government-targeted defendants, and, by including the word "counsel", seek to effectively outlaw legal representation of anyone accused of copyright infringement.

Don't take my word for it. See what Declan McCullagh, the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and the folks over at Copyfight have to say. (More assorted ranting and raving available via Slashdot.)