Hatch Takes Aim At Illegal Downloading
By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press Tuesday, June 17, 2003; 5:22 PM

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jun17.html

that's insane. that guy is a f**king idiot. sorry, but that's just ridiculous.

eric

This burned my biscuits enough that I linked to it on Signal To Noise:

What a tool.

here's info about H.R. 5211, a bill introduced last year to do just what Hatch suggests:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.05211:

(note the absolving of "copyright holder's" liability, they can trash your stuff with impunity. If that doesn't alarm you, check out this news item:

The Recording Industry Association of America apologized Monday to Penn State University for sending an incorrect legal notice of alleged Internet copyright violations.

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html )

Hatch's comments on his comments:

http://www.senate.gov/~hatch/index.cfm? ... _id=205147

more fun with our mormon buddy....

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Senator Hatch Introduces Bill to Burn People's Eyes Out

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today introduced legislation authorizing the use of high-powered microwave lasers to burn out the eyes of non-paying viewers of copyrighted material. If we could develop technology which just burned out the parts of their brains where the illegal memories are stored, that'd be fine with me--but we can burn their eyes out right now! said Hatch, while introducing the Hatch/Hollywood Eyeball Evisceration Act.

http://www.jzip.org/jzip/archives/000573.html#000573

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Orrin Hatch, software pirate?
http://amish.blogmosis.com/archives/012511.html#012511

another quote...

"That Hatch site is a government site and it does not meet Section 508 guidelines either..."

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from Lileks...

As for Orrin Hatch and his remarks about blowing up the computers of people who download pirated files: I'll just say that I think he's made mostly of molded plastic, there?s a pullstring in his back, and the RIAA fingerprints are all over the big white ring. I won?t listen to any of these guys blather about computers or the Internet until they have demonstrated on film that they can install some RAM, burn a CD (shiny side down, you say?), tell me what HTTP and URL stand for, prove they know how to get the source code for a webpage, and know better than to click "Yes" when asked if the computer should always trust data from Gator Corporation.

His remarks about remotely destroying computers that download copyrighted material is just grampa blather. The computers are stealing music! The cars are frightening the horses! The Kaiser took my dog! It would be amusing if these people didn?t have the power to pass thick stupid laws crafted by aides, lobbyists and other gnomes hauling up heavy buckets from the deep sooty mines of legalese. Of course the people who vote them up or down don?t actually read them; they get the gist from the title.

What's this Copyright Enhancement Act of 2003 all about, young underpaid aide?

It's about enhancing copyright, sir.

Very good then. . . .

I know, I know - he was just talking off the top of his head. But if someone is talking about, oh, women's pay relative to men, and they say off the top of their head can't the girls just stay home and put up preserves? - well, it shows what they really think. Off the top of one's head means when I reach for an idea, this one is the closest. For a reason.
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Much like every government-implemented security measure we will see in the near future, this one will be cracked and exploited courtesy of the millions of hackers worldwide who will instantly begin working on it the second it shows its ugly face.
The problem is that the record-industy and the government are pissed because they are not on the forefront of development of this technology.
This was the whole point of capitalism in the first place!
You thought of it first, you get to use it, capitalize on it, everybody else gets left in the fricking dust! I am sure we can all think of a million other ways that the government is on the other side of the coin in similar situations and give the proverbial finger to whomever calls "foul".
I have said it before and I will say it again, the only people hurt by illegal mp3 sharing are the people who make a million dollars a second anyway, i.e. the metallicas and van halens of the artist world, the big record companies and the goddamn RIAA.

you tell 'em, brotha

more on Orrin using unlicensed script in his pages: