Piracy legislation sweet music to industry ears

(CNN) -- Who's writing some of the best scripts for Hollywood these days? Who's penning some of the music industry's catchiest tunes?

Try Washington.

There are two bills before Congress that the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America must consider worthy of Grammys or Oscars. The intent of both bills is to protect those industries from Internet pirates: those who would download and distribute copyrighted music and movies.

Hotwired previously mentioned legislation sponsored by U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-South Carolina, that would force computer and consumer electronics makers to put copyright protection technology into their products. Now U.S. Rep. Howard Berman, D-California, has introduced a bill that would let the music and movie industries fight fire with fire when it comes to piracy.

The bill would allow owners of copyrighted material to use "self-help technology," in the words of a Berman spokesman, to block those data files from being accessed on the Web.

"When a songwriter sees that their song is posted on someone's computer through Kazaa.com," said the spokesman, who requested anonymity, "there are technologies that would allow that songwriter to request that song from a Kazaa user and then download it at an excruciatingly slow speed and then get in line to download again and again."

Such a move would keep anyone else from downloading that particular copyrighted song or movie file.

But the spokesman added that the bill doesn't make it legal for those technologies to be used to take down an entire peer-to-peer network such as Kazaa. Nor does it allow the music and movie industries to go inside places in users' computers where they are not welcome. Nor would it make it legal for those industries to damage computers. If any of that happens, the bill would allow computer users or file-sharing networks to sue for damages.

The intent of the bill is to go after individual song or movie files and those who are distributing them.

"We don't want to legislate away peer-to-peer networks," the spokesman said. "It wouldn't make sense to legislate against a technology. The problem is the illegal piracy, the illegal distribution."

Not surprisingly, some consumer groups are just as unhappy with Berman's bill as they are with Hollings' legislation.

Ari Schwartz with the Center for Democracy and Technology said that the bill is so broadly written that it might give "a hunting license" for copyright owners to go after those who use the Internet for legitimate purposes.

As expected, the Recording Industry Association of America has praised the bill. But shortly after that approval was delivered, technology reared its digital head against the organization. Its Web site was hacked in a denial-of-service attack.

Such an attack occurs when a Web site is bombarded by so many computers all seeking to connect to the site at the same time. That slows down the Web site to a crawl, making it hard for anyone else to read its contents.

A spokesman for the recording industry group said that it's unknown who did the hacking or why, but "it probably provided a distraction [to the hackers] from illegally downloading music."