The MPAA and RIAA reach a new low in their fight to ignore real piracy issues in favor of increasing the scope of their highly unsuccessful practice of bankrupting blue-collar individuals this week.
The LA Times reported this week that the Californian Senate is proposing new laws which would tighten up state privacy laws by preventing the use of false statements and misleading practices to get personal information.The loophole in the law has already allowed some companies to obtain personal information on their rivals.
However, the MPAA and RIAA, two companies who have obviously decided having an acronym and a lot of conviction equates their cause to that of something like the CIA, aren't happy with this idea. They have announced that they believe they should be exempt from these new laws as having to be honest would damage their ability to fight piracy. They claim that they HAVE to use deception, subterfuge and lies in their world-security-enhancing quest to stop teenagers getting their hands on copies of Turistas from Bit Torrent, so the law shouldn't apply to them.
What is means in real terms, though they deny it, is simply that they wish to chip away at being accountable to the laws which prevent them from blatently lying to ISPs to get the providers to supply names, addresses and telephone numbers of anyone they suspect of downloading movies or music, which in legal terms they would have no right or business in obtaining. Digital rights groups are quite rightly up in arms, but both the RIAA and the MPAA are playing the hard-working martyr, expecting us to believe that they need to be above the law to go deep undercover to destroy the seedy world of terrorist-fuelled economy-crushing piracy.
Hollywood already managed to kill a similar bill last year, but now the Democrats now have a say and they look likely to toss these organizations' claims in the trash where they belong, hopefully denting the ego of these megalomaniacs.
The truth is that the two organizations here are acting like spoiled children, throwing down and demanding they get their way over something that isn't as far-reaching as they'd like the world to believe. The Senate is in the position of the harassed parent and must either start teaching the MPAA and the RIAA the boundaries of what they are and are not entitled to, or we run the risk of having a rogue organization prosecuting people left, right and center with nobody to answer to on how it conducts itself [insert your own Bush administration jokes here].
I suppose if nobody has any cash left to pay for their PC and internet connection after paying their court fines then piracy is solved. Maybe that's the perverse logic at work here.
