H.R. 4279 Would Establish Federal IP Cops

MrSnivvel writes "H.R. 4279, Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008, is gaining momentum in Congress. It passed the House a few days back. It would allow the Feds to seize hardware that has even one file coming from 'dubious origins,' e.g. downloaded from P2P. If passed into law, the bill would establish an Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General. Rep. John Conyers says the goal is to 'prioritize intellectual property protection to the highest level of our government.'"

They can start with confiscating Orrin Hatch's PCs

[viking80]

from http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/06/59305 [wired.com]

  Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.

But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.

The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website.

Re:Watch out WoWers!

[Mjec]

.. they can confiscate the person's computer with no possible recourse for the victim?

Oh there's recourse. But have you ever made an administrative appeal to your state's supreme court? Let me tell you, it's a bitch. A bitch that takes lots of time and lots of money (even if you're representing yourself). And likely if you're right they'll still have legislative immunity from having to pay costs....

At that point it's faster, cheaper and easier to buy a new PC and rewrite your PhD thesis rather than appeal against the decision.

Re:IP is the most important issue facing us in the

[aussie_a]

Nice try, but all work produced by the government is public domain. The only way your point is valid is if a private corporation produced this law and didn't put it into the public domain.

Direct violation??

[consonant]

Is this not a blatant transgression of the 4th Amendment?? Back to the dark days of the writs of assistance..

Copyright infringement as a criminal act - that's just wrong. And scary. Too long has this corporate fellatio been going on..

And as an additional WTF:

"This is a strong, common sense measure that provides new tools and resources to help protect one of this nation's most important economic engines," says Mitch Bainwol, chairman/CEO of the RIAA.

Britney Spears/Justin Timberlake/Beyonce/Dude, Where's My Car?/Gigli are the USA's most important economic engines? Or at least, the engine's constituents??

Goddamn. Just, goddamn.

p.s: TFA's dated May 6th. Isn't this coming a tad late on /.?

Intellectual Property Enforcement Division

[amar0k]

Or IPED. Funny fact: in my country (Portugal), the secret police of the repressive regime of Salazar was called PIDE [wikipedia.org].

Re:This is not capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia never had communism. The fact that everyone was equal, unless you were member of the polit-buro meant that it was fascism and dictatorship.

The revenues of the 'state-owned' industry never flowed back equally to all members of that society, but were unequally distributed.

Re:ideas != property

[drfireman]

While the term "intellectual property" doesn't have an upstanding motivation behind it, you should get over it. Intellectual property is now a term that has meaning, and if you can't understand that "property" doesn't always mean exactly the same thing in every possible context, then you will have a hard time understanding virtually any sentence in English. There are many very serious and disturbing problems with this kind of legislation. But the use of the term "intellectual property" is not one of them.

That said, there are many cases in which stealing an idea costs the original owner something. If you can't think of any, then you owe it to yourself to familiarize yourself with the music, publishing, software, and movie industries, to name a few.

Re:They can start with confiscating Orrin Hatch's

[backbyter]

The story for your link is 5 years old. Apparently Hatch's people have since licensed the menu system. View source from Hatch's home page:

Milonic DHTML Website Navigation Menu ...
License Details:
        Type: Professional
        Number: 188909
       

Re:This is not capitalism

[dlcarrol]

Fascism is a specific econo-political structure where the means of production are "privately owned" but production targets are managed by the state. Therefore, the proper range is (eliding some):

Capitalism --> Fascism --> Socialism --> Communism

The issue here is not "greed." The issue is "whose greed." So yes, we are becoming more and more Fascistic in the US (read their platform [or the NDSP] and compare/contrast with the current Democratic platform), but this is precisely because we're moving away from capitalism

Re:Well

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

So the democrats in control of the house are basically in Satan's personal employment ?

Not that I entirely disagree, but this seems a bit strong, even for them.

Here's the roll call :

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2008-300 [govtrack.us]

Here's the (short) list of "No" voters :
Nay CA-4 Doolittle, John [R]
Nay TN-2 Duncan, John [R]
Nay AZ-6 Flake, Jeff [R]
Nay TX-14 Paul, Ronald [R]
Nay TX-2 Poe, Ted [R]
Nay GA-3 Westmoreland, Lynn [R]
Nay AK-0 Young, Donald [R]
Nay VA-9 Boucher, Frederick [D]
Nay OH-10 Kucinich, Dennis [D]
Nay CA-16 Lofgren, Zoe [D]
Nay WI-4 Moore, Gwen [D]

Barack Obama didn't vote, but all the IL guys voted "Aye"

John McCain didn't vote either, but one (out of 4) of his Arizona colleagues voted "Nay". The democratic candidate for Arizona votes "Aye"

Thought this was worth mentioning.

Re:Well

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Well, considered that the senate hasn't voted on it yet I think I know why neither McCain nor Obama voted on it...

Re:This is not capitalism

[DrLang21]

It should be noted that the platform of the NSDAP on paper was not the NSDAP under Hitler. There were many similarities yes, but much of what Hitler did was at odds with the party at large. Hitler was very much in bed with big money heavy industry and despite the NSDAP's stance of being pro labor union (so long as they weren't Marxists), they were very heavy handed with them in an effort to appease some of their biggest monetary supporters.

Re:Well

[PachmanP]

Good point which means there still may be time!

Sorry to thread jack, but I think everybody needs to see this and I don't want it lost down the discussion...

Everybody in the US of A write your senator tonight! This nonsense needs to stop, and maybe a response from the constituents would make them at least think twice in the future. Don't do what I've done in the past and get incensenced and not do anything. Don't whine on a /. write the letter. Maybe it won't do anything, but we should at least put our effort where our mouths are.

That said try to present a reasoned arguement instead of a rant, or just be short and quick and say you're against it.

Senate Contact Info [senate.gov] to make it even easier!

Write your senators...

[Etherwalk]

Write your senators, please--this is akin to the police closing a library for six months to two years because they found a novel on the floor and they can't positively determine that it's a legal copy.

Only, because of the internet, someone who's never even been to the library can drop it there. Furthermore, it doesn't even have to be there--if a cop says he thinks he saw one, that counts. *and*, because it's computer hardware as well as software, the overall value and lifetime expectancy of the library decreases tremendously over the time it's not usable.

Re:hehehehehe

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, it's CAPTCHA, not capture, and it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. So while it may seem that captcha is just slang for capture, in fact it is not.

Re:How Big Business buys Government in America

[yuna49]

I'm going to put on my ex-political-scientist hat here for a moment to talk about the relationship between contributions and voting patterns.

Of course the *AA's contribute a lot of John Conyers. He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee which has jurisdiction over copyright matters. You'll notice that his most substantial contributions come from the legal profession whose interests are also quite closely linked with what happens in Judiciary. This pattern of contribution to committee chairs depends little on party. When the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, many industrial organizations started contributing to the new committee chairs and reduced their support for the deposed Republicans. If you look at the current contributions to Lamar Smith, the Ranking Minority Member on Judiciary, you'll see they come from the same places as do Conyers', just in smaller amounts.

As another example, look at the pattern of contributions to Barney Frank, one of the most liberal members of the Congress, who happens to now be the chair of the Financial Services (formerly Banking) Committee. Despite his rather populist views, Frank's received substantial contributions from the investment, real estate, and insurance industries.

The fact is that industries contribute to the chairs of committees with jurisdiction over those industries. Determining the direction of causality between contributions and voting patterns is made much more difficult by these types of "selection bias" problems.

Overall wouldn't you expect that contributors would donate to candidates who share their opinions? So how do you know if the candidates are bending their opinions to fit the contributors' wishes, or if we're just seeing a rather obvious pattern of correlation based on shared opinions? Answering these questions adequately takes a lot more work that pointing at contribution patterns alone.

Let's Pretend This Works

[Noted Futurist]

If this were to be passed, and function as it's sponsors envision, here is what would happen:

1. US residents only subjects to this legislation, so tech sales and interest in the US dwindles.
2. The Free World freely distributes and utilizes IP free of charge, making real value = 0, and increasing demand and interest in tech.
3. US loses the tech lead and the free markets=free minds advantages to foreign power.

Using men with guns to create artificial scarcity for a false local economy will result in the end of the United States as we know it.

Re:Yay!

[the eric conspiracy]

This bill passed 410-12. Dems or Reps it wasn't going to matter.

It's bad... but relax, it's dead (for now)

[Relic of the Future]

I came in late, and just read all the +5 comments. So apoligies if I missed some posts.

Has no one has pointed out that this happened over a month ago? Or the last line mentioning that no comparable bill has been proposed in the Senate (which is still the case)? Or that the Justice Department has come out to opposing the bill? Yes, I'm pissed off that the House is turning the same stupid (and failed) drug-war tactics to the ip-war; but thankfully, it looks like this is dead in the water.

If these issues are important to you, you can keep better abreast of them at techdirt.com (often seen in a /. article... three days later) or williampatry.blogspot.com (Google's senior copyright lawyer's blog).