Senator OK with zapping pirates' PCs

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1018845.html

By Declan McCullagh 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 18, 2003

Sen. Orrin Hatch on Wednesday backpedaled slightly from his suggestion
a day earlier that copyright holders should be allowed to remotely
destroy the computers of music pirates.

In a brief press release, Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, said that he suggested the idea at Tuesday's
hearing

"I think that industry is not doing enough to help us find effective
ways to stop people from using computers to steal copyrighted,
personal or sensitive materials," he said.

But Hatch noted that his proposed law permitting wide-scale
destruction of computers used to download illicit files from
peer-to-peer networks was still on the table. "I do not favor extreme
remedies--unless no moderate remedies can be found," Hatch said in the
statement.

Because Hatch oversees the Senate committee responsible for writing
criminal laws, and because he has taken a personal interest in
copyright legislation, his suggestion raised eyebrows and some alarm
in Washington. It represents the most radical proposal to date in
Congress, going even further than a bill introduced last year by Rep.  
Howard Berman, D-Calif., that would have permitted copyright holders
to disable or block a P2P node that they suspected of distributing
their intellectual property without permission.

During a hearing that Hatch convened Tuesday on the "national security
risks" of P2P networks, he asked a witness, "Can you destroy their set
in their home?" referring to a home PC.

Randy Saaf of MediaDefender, a secretive Los Angeles company that
works with the recording industry to disrupt P2P networks, replied by
saying "nobody" is interested in that approach.

"I am," Hatch said. "I'm interested in doing that. That may be the
only way you can teach someone about copyright...That would be the
ultimate way of making sure" no more copyright is infringed.

Hatch suggested that Congress would have to amend laws restricting
computer intrusions. "If it's the only way you can do it," Hatch said,
"then I'm all for destroying their machines...but you'd have to pass
legislation permitting that, it seems to me, before someone could
really do that with any degree of assurance that they're doing
something that might be proper."

Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department prosecutor who is an associate
professor at George Washington University law school, says Hatch's
idea "would not only be a bad idea, but an extremely bad idea. The
cure would be worse than the disease."

If Hatch's proposal were to be written into law, Kerr said, it would
have to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal computer
crime statute. "It would give an exception to copyright owners who are
taking reasonable steps to disable acts of copyright infringement,"  
Kerr said. "The trick is that all of these (disruption or disabling)  
offenses are crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."

In the past, Hatch has chosen sides carefully in copyright tussles. He
commended the Justice Department for arresting Dmitri Sklyarov, a
Russian programmer charged with criminal violations of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, and he claimed in 1999 that the
controversial law "laid the cornerstone for a rich and more vibrant
Internet." But a year later, Hatch split with the Clinton
administration when it sided with the record labels against Napster,
and a former top Hatch aide, Manus Cooney, left to become Napster's
chief lobbyist.

Hatch's proposal for legislation left public interest groups puzzled
and alarmed. Mike Godwin, an attorney at Public Knowledge, said, "Much
as I respect Sen. Hatch, he is virtually alone in believing that the
destruction of computers could even be a last-ditch remedy for
copyright infringement."

"I wish he hadn't said that," Godwin said. "And over time I suspect
he'll wish he hadn't said that either."

Hatch is a conservative Mormon and former church bishop who was a
presidential candidate in 2000 and is an amateur songwriter.

On Wednesday, Hatch came under attack for allegedly being a copyright
pirate himself. His hatch.senate.gov Web site's menus use JavaScript
code created by the U.K. company Milonic Solutions. Milonic Solutions
charges between $35 and $900 for the right to obtain a license number
for its JavaScript menu, but Hatch's site does not include a license
number. Instead, this comment appears in the site's HTML code: "i am
the license for the menu (duh)."

A Hatch representative did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.



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