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"I hack you in the name of the law"
Do the means ever justify the end?

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Friday 27 September 2002

Put down your headphones, stop listening to your MP3s and let's pretend we all agree peer-to-peer file sharing is a bad thing - and, like all bad things, something that should be stopped.

For starters it's robbing performing artists of their hard-earned money. Even with Napster in its death throws for most of 2001, Britney Spears barely managed to clear $30m last year. It's time this madness was stopped. Agreed?

So how do we do it? The proposal being put before Congress in the US at the moment (see: http://www.silicon.com/a55730) is to hand the power to the copyright holders, to permit the record companies to access networks and block any MP3s or other copyrighted material from being traded illegally - if necessary by impairing the network.

However, civil liberties groups have already begun to worry about the effect of record companies being given the right to carry out what will effectively be a legalised hacking campaign.

The real question here seems to be one at the very heart of all law enforcement and crime prevention - the thorny issue of 'reasonable force'.

Earlier this week, Britney herself compared downloading music illegally to walking into a store and stealing a CD (see: http://www.silicon.com/a55715 for more). Perhaps she's got a point - theft is theft however you dress it up.

But what would the reaction be if security guards in record stores started lobbying for the right to arrest thieves and hand out their own punishments in some back room of the store? Store detectives can detain thieves but they still have to wait until the police get there to press any kind of charges or seek any punitive measures.

Whatever the music industry's frustrations at waiting for the police to catch up with its own 'shoplifters in the store' scenario, vigilantism is not the future for any kind of law enforcement - whether it is sanctioned by government or not, it is too dangerous a road to start down.