US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to attack pirates!

SONY RootKit VisualizationYeah. since that whole Sony RootKit thing worked out so well, let’s give them “permission” this time.

The hilariously named “Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property” has finally released its report, an 84-page tomethat’s pretty bonkers. But amidst all that crazy, there’s a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware.

via Boing Boing.

One Reply to “US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to attack pirates!”

  1. I’m just surprised I haven’t noticed anything from the Defective By Design team at the Free Software Foundation on this yet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *