Michigan has been taking a beating in the high-tech press and in Net chat rooms over an update to the state’s penal code that free speech activists claim is an unreasonable effort to stop Internet piracy.
Critics of Public Act 672, which was signed into law Dec. 30 by former Gov. John Engler, claim legislators were pressured by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) into accepting changes to the state’s telecommunications law that could prohibit people from having firewall protections on their home computers or from using things like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), a popular way many workers use to connect from home to the computer system back at the office.
“That is not the intent at all,” said state Rep. James Koetje, R-Walker, the sponsor of the update. “These people either haven’t read the bill or have misunderstood it. All the new wording does is prohibit attempts to defraud, or unlawful use of electronic devices.”
Not so, says the Electronic Freedom Foundation (www.eff.org), which claims that the language of the state’s bill is “so broad that it could ban critical security and privacy tools online as well as restrict what machines you can connect to the cable, satellite and Internet lines in your home.”
Koetke acknowledged that movie lobbyists weighed in on the updated Michigan law and offered lots of suggestions. But the law, he said, “is not intended to make criminals out of people who have security or privacy features on their Internet connections.”
The movie industry claims it loses $3 billion annually to piracy and that new privacy and file-swapping technologies make it even easier to steal and illegally distribute movies on the Internet by encoding or scrambling digital communications.
The outrage has been so strong over the new law that Koetje told me he thinks it needs to be brought back to the Legislature to add language that makes plain that what is being banned is theft of copyrighted information.
“This is not as scary or horrific as some people are saying,” Koetje said. “We need to make that clear so everyone will settle down.”
Bill would prohibit disposable phones
State Rep. Chris Kolb, D-Ann Arbor, has a high-tech issue of his own: He wants a ban on disposable cell phones.
Although the electronics industry has yet to make or market a disposable phone, trade publications have hinted that one day soon consumers will be able to buy a wireless phone good for a certain number of calls or minutes in limited areas. After that, they would stop working and could be tossed away.
Kolb has introduced a bill to prohibit disposable phones. He has environmental concerns over the lead and other materials used in the batteries and circuit boards.
High-tech novel close to the real thing
I received a nice note from Dexter author Tom Grace, who has been getting lots of recent praise from critics as a writer of high-tech fiction along the lines of Tom Clancy.
Grace said until he read a column of mine a couple of weeks back about an Ann Arbor company doing DNA sequencing research, he didn’t know how close his current paperback novel “Twisted Web” (Pocket Books, $6.99) really is to fact.
Seems a character in his book works at a fictitious company with a similar name in the state’s Life Sciences Corridor.
“Twisted Web” is the third of Grace’s adventure novels about a globe-trotting ex-Navy Seal. Its plot revolves around some kinky DNA manipulations that threaten mankind.
