ZDnet reports that a Republican senator withdrew his support for an anti-piracy bill that would make it a crime to distribute counterfeit authentication features including digital watermarks.
The original bill, made it a crime to counterfeit "physical features" such as holograms or special boxes used to certify software, CDs or DVDs as authentic. (Current federal law covers only "counterfeit labels," not physical holograms or other packaging material.) The revised version, however, covers "any feature" used to guarantee authenticity.
The bill originally targeted the kind of large-scale pirates who manufacture fake Windows holograms and enjoyed broad support from software makers such as Microsoft. But, in a little-noticed move the Senate Judiciary Committee rewrote the bill to encompass technology used in digital rights management. Following the revisions, companies that had previously backed the measure pulled their support for the bill. |
"Opening this legislation to the digital realm has caused the virtually unanimous industry support behind it to evaporate, and it has raised a host of troubling liability issues that cause substantial harm to Internet service providers," Allen, who chairs the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force, said in a statement
Source: ZDnet.com
