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Like a frontier judge, California Representative Howard Berman believes that when there's trouble on the range upright citizens should be able to take the law into their own hands. And the range, in this case, is the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that flourish on the Internet.

Berman, a Los Angeles-based Democrat, wants to end rampant illegal file sharing on P2P venues like those reached through Grokster, Kazaa, and Morpheus. His solution? Make it legal for entertainment industry minions to hack into such networks in order to block the transfer, copy, or display of stolen works. (For more, see "Hollywood vs. Your PC" on page 127.)

This aim is laudable. Writers, composers, filmmakers, and others depend on fair and enforceable intellectual property laws for their livelihood.

Copyright Vigalantes

But the Berman proposal, spelled out in a bill introduced in Congress earlier this year, could foster a new kind of corporate vigilantism. Copyright owners--without a warrant--could decide whose machine to hack, provided they gave the U.S. Department of Justice seven days' advance notice of the technologies they intended to use.

Once that requirement was satisfied, copyright owners might, for example, infect pirated MP3s with a virus that crashes your PC when you try to play the song. Or they could launch spyware--installed without your knowledge when you view a movie trailer, perhaps--that monitors the movies you watch to make sure they were legally obtained. Owners could even mount a denial-of-service (DOS) attack against a PC that trades pirated files on a P2P network. And while the bill is clearly designed for the entertainment industry, any copyright owner would have the power to use "self-help" technology against a suspected thief.

In fairness, the Berman bill tries to keep things from getting out of hand. For example, the attacks must be limited to P2P networks, they cannot harm anyone who is not doing anything illegal, and they cannot cause more than $50 in damage to an affected pirate. The Justice Department would serve as referee, reviewing complaints from aggrieved users and determining which parties could pursue claims for damages in court.

But it's hard to imagine this law working well. Pirates would quickly develop countermeasures, preventing the law from having its intended effect. And it would spawn endless legal tangles from innocent people harmed in error and from pirates who claim excessive damage. About the only good thing you can say is that the bill has little chance of passing.

The real flaw in the Berman bill--as in other antipiracy proposals, including that of Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina--is that it seeks a technological fix for a human problem. File sharing is not inherently wrong; the problem is how some people use that technology. So let's go after wrongful users. The record industry should take a few individual high-volume traders of illegal files to court under existing law first. And it must come up with a better alternative to existing services so honest people can buy particular songs and make copies for personal use. Those moves wouldn't stop copyright theft altogether. But they would cause many otherwise well-meaning citizens to think twice before breaking the law.

On a happier note, this month PC World welcomes back a former editor, Steve Fox, who's writing the new Plugged In column that surveys the digital world with a uniquely Foxian twist.

Kevin McKean is editorial director of PC World.

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