Wired: Senator takes a swing at the RIAA. My new favorite Republican senator (a rather short list), Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas introduced new legislation that would return checks and balances to the Internet downloading fracas. The bill would require those who would seek Internet users’ identities from ISPs to sue for downloading to file a John Doe lawsuit, a more complicated process that requesting a subpoena. The lawsuit process would reintroduce some much needed process to the fracas that so far has seen the RIAA blackmail a twelve year old girl and her family out of $2,000.
Of more immediate interest to me, the bill would also require a labeling system for all digital media that are protected by Digital Rights Management. This would be really good to have on CDs (and DVDs, which all have such protection through region code schemes), but I’m not sure how it would work on digital files. Interesting, though.