News.com‘s Declan McCullagh breaks down the current state of P2P in congress: Even casual observers of the moral swamp called Washington, D.C., may remember the notorious Hollings bill, a mandatory copy protection proposal last year, which Hollywood’s lobbyists loved and Silicon Valley hated.
Because Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C. is retiring, the entertainment industry has been forced to locate new champions in the U.S. Congress. It has found them in three key members of the U.S. House of Representatives: Lamar Smith, R-Texas; Howard Berman, D-Calif.; and John Conyers, D-Mich.
The like-minded trio has quietly drafted a bill arguably as intrusive as Hollings’ plan. They seem to be trying to target peer-to-peer clients, but you wouldn’t know it from their proposal.
