Gonzales to Make Thought Crime a Reality
With everything that’s going on today - terrorism, the rising cost of energy, and inter-office political scandal, you would think that Alberto Gonzales would have little time for anything else. Sadly, that’s not true. The highest lawyer in the land has identified, what he feels, is the largest threat facing this nation: attempted copyright infringement. As the Epicenter blog states:
Essentially, the bill would turn copyright law into something more akin to drug law: The government could seize personal property, wiretaps become legit for the first time, violators could face lifetime prison sentences, and, in an ambiguous and far-reaching provision, the mere attempt to violate a copyright would become a crime.
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Thanks to a new “attempt” provision that wouldn’t require the actual commission of a violation, the bill could conceivably be expanded, in an extreme case, to interpret a computer full of music next to a spindle of blank CDs as an act of piracy.
The proposed law has yet to find a politico to Sherpa it through Congress. I can’t imagine why. The U.S. political system has passed a lot of disappointing technology legislation over the years. But apparently they have enough sense to know that making thought crime punishable is not good job security.
