...immunize all copyright holders -- including the movie and e-book industry -- for any data losses caused by their hacking efforts or other computer intrusions "that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent" electronic piracy. [wired.com]
... which has been speculated to mean that they're left open to create a virus which could infect your machine and delete all MP3s. The amount of shit coming out of the RIAA's little piehole lately has been so great I originally ignored this latest piece of news, but I thought about how something like this would effect me personally should it happen.
When I record music, either jamming with Walken or by myself, I keep a copy or recording of everything. Anything I think worthy of listening to again I tend to keep in WAV format which eventually finds its way to an audio CD for the car. Everything else I MP3 and leave in a directory to be burnt to CD at a later time (usually when the directory hits the 400 meg mark, which happens fairly quickly depending on how often we jam).
If the RIAA decided they'd hack my machine and leave some program around which deleted all MP3s I'd loose everything. All of my work for at least a month and sometimes up to 6 months would be lost, except the few tracks I'd burnt to audio CD. If they extended their program to delete WAV files, I'd loose much more. I'd loose all the components of partial songs I was working on at the time. Devistation. I happened fairly recently when I lost a new hard disk to crash. I managed to same most stuff but lost a lot of material I miss dearly.
Even if they used some magically Napster method of "filtering" to ensure they only deleted "copyright" material, such as searching for Artist - Track names I'd still be pissed. Recently Triple J ran a remix competition to remix one of many famous Australian artists tracks. Walken decided to given Powderfinger's "The Metre" a go. Should this virus have deleted our works in progress for this completely legitimate project I'd have been livid.
What's more, what if someone was a remix artist for other bands legitimately? How would they know? And what of all the tracks I've downloaded legally from band websites? Or what of legally recorded live recordings I've made of bands (their permission) and converted to MP3? And what if Walken called a song "Powderfinger's new album Odyssey Number 5 is crap" and this kicked off the virus? And all of this still ignores the basic right people still have to rip material to their own hard disc or CDr for their own benefit, something the RIAA desperately wants to take away. Which is really the point... the RIAA would love something like Windows media "protected" format to become the only legal way to keep music on your computer, hence any MP3 you had would be illegal.
It's broad ideas like that that are just so amazingly stupid that it's difficult to understand how anyone takes the RIAA (and their friends) so seriously and why I've been ignoring [trying to] their comments for so long...