Comment to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the proposed CBDTPA, submitted this date and also posted here

To the Committee and its Honorable Members:

I am an attorney in private practice in California. I have read the proposed CBDTPA and am troubled by its willingness to sacrifice broad public rights to narrow economic interests. We do not have the facilities to detain the multitudes who would violate the proposed legislation should it pass. Its efforts to preserve "the limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright owners, including the fair use doctrine" - and to restrict security measures that would bar even perfectly legal copying - appear half-hearted and insufficient. And, leaving fair use considerations aside for a moment, seeking to prevent a crime by banning the means of carrying it out seems a strategy better suited to firearms than to consumer technology.

The following observations from writers Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor, respectively, capture some of my reservations about the bill:

"Napster and its successors are the listeners' workaround of the failed radio industry...Other workarounds are bound to follow, over and over, until the entertainment industry starts serving fully empowered customers or gets replaced by something that will. Protective legislation will only make the process happen faster."

"Policy is not going to stop technology from evolving. It can only make criminals of more and more people who are going to use it no matter what her [Hilary Rosen's] clients say."

The bill, if passed, will spawn an Orwellian future where citizens sequester, hoard and construct their own Rube Goldberg versions of technology circa 1998-2002, which will be vastly preferable to the eviscerated offerings thereafter available on the consumer market. It will restrain trade by requiring technology manufacturers to take ten steps back after taking two steps forward. There are other, less onerous means of accomplishing the bill's goals that do not trample on progress and individual freedoms. I respectfully urge Congress to refrain from enacting the proposed legislation.