The RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC. The Recording Industry Association of America wants to make it legal for copyright holders to hack into your computer and delete files, and be obsolved of any responsibility for data losses caused by their hacking activities. They tried to tack this on to an anti-terrorism bill last week. They have since abandoned this amendment, but will be back with "a more modest approach."

This particular attempt has interesting, specific motivations:

The RIAA's interest in the USA Act, an anti-terrorism bill that the Senate and the House approved last week, grew out of an obscure part of it called section 815. Called the "Deterrence and Prevention of Cyberterrorism" section, it says that anyone who breaks into computers and causes damage "aggregating at least $5,000 in value" in a one-year period would be committing a crime.

If the current version of the USA Act becomes law, the RIAA believes, it could outlaw attempts by copyright holders to break into and disable pirate FTP or websites or peer-to-peer networks. Because the bill covers aggregate damage, it could bar anti-piracy efforts that cause little harm to individual users, but meet the $5,000 threshold when combined.

It gets better! The RIAA also wants to use Denial of Service attacks against suspected pirates:

The new strategy would take advantage of file-swapping networks' own weaknesses, amplifying them to the point where download services appear even more clogged and slow to function than they are today. Because most peer-to-peer services are unregulated, the quality of connections and speed of downloads already varies wildly based on time of day and geographic location.

This use of technology would be considered illegal and immoral under pretty much any circumstances. Two wrongs don't make a right, fellas.