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Ernest Miller Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
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July 12, 2004

A Few Columns on the INDUCE Act (IICA)

Posted by Ernest Miller

For those paying attention (i.e., not most of the mainstream press) the Inducing Infringment of Copyrights Act (IICA, née INDUCE Act) continues to garner criticism.

Dan Gillmor's weekly column in the San Jose Mercury News is devoted to the INDUCE Act as well as the progress Rep. Rick Boucher's (D-VA) consumer rights bill is making (Glimmer of hope in copyright measures):

The tech industry and many other defenders of consumer rights weren't paying close enough attention when the senators, including the majority and minority leaders, introduced the legislation. But when it looked as though the lawmakers were preparing to whisk the bill to the Senate floor without bothering even to hold committee hearings, the threat galvanized opposition.

John Ginn of the Corvallis Gazette-Times is a tad upset with the RIAA (RIAA: You need to get a life!):

And as to all the little Oliver Twists out there, I don't want to induce you to anything — stealing music is bad — however, given no other choice, by legislation that continues relentlessly to constrict your options, you need to fight like hell, fight ferociously like spitting-mad cornered wolverines, against corporate bodies like the RIAA who see you as nothing but soulless obeying consumerbots, and would have you defined as such in the law of the land.

Fight them, fight them!

Dr. David P. Reed (co-inventor of the end-to-end argument [PDF]) has some analysis of the INDUCE Act from a technical point of view that is must reading (The INDUCE Act is utterly flawed):

I'm not any kind of expert on construction of legislation, but the proposed INDUCE Act (S 2560) seems to be rationalized on the most ignorant and stupid intellectual basis I have ever encountered since the Tennessee legislature attempted to declare by law that pi was equal to 3....It's time that the owners of intellectual property begin to recognize that their proper sphere of influence consists solely of the space around the specific fixed expressions that make up the boundaries of their synthetic rights. The bits are merely zeros and ones, and belong no more to the expression than do the particular particles of ink in a particular book. The systems that transport bits are indeed becoming more efficient, but that efficiency does not and cannot determine which bits are intellectual property and which are not. No bit transport technology is specific to intellectual property alone. Hijacking the bit transport industry by the intellectual property owners is an egregious expansion of their power, and government should be ashamed to even try to do this. [link and emphasis in original]

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