If the music and movie industries had their way, they'd have spyware on every computer for the purpose of catching copyright infringement.
I'm not making this up. The Recording Industry and Motion Picture Associations of America actually offered up the idea to the government as a way to enforce intellectual property law. The U.S. Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is seeking these comments as it forms a "Joint Strategic Plan" for cracking down on copyright infringement.
Spyware (or as the MPAA and RIAA put it, "Consumer tools for managing copyright infringement from the home"), is just one of the measures recommended by the entertainment industry. On the Internet service provider side, they'd like to see bandwidth throttling, traffic filtering, content recognition technologies and Web site blocking and redirection, complete with warning messages and quarantines of repeat offending sites.
All those other recommendations seem pretty obvious coming from Big Content. Of course they'd love to have piracy sites and people who illegally share copyrighted music effectively erased from the Internet.
But the idea of anti-piracy spyware just doesn't make any sense. Surely they're not asking the government to make people install software, because that's way too extreme and maybe unconstitutional. But if the anti-piracy tools are voluntary, what's the point? To help parents keep tabs on what their kids are downloading? Even if that's the case, there's technically nothing stopping the RIAA and MPAA from offering this kind of tool on their own, without government help. Not that anyone would install it after Sony BMG messed up computers with its rootkit software.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, "these comments are just an entertainment industry wishlist, an exercise in asking for the moon." But they highlight how the industries would gladly jeopardize privacy and freedom in order to protect their copyrights. They also show that the RIAA and MPAA are full of bad ideas.
