I'm pretty sure this was shot down by congress, but I still can't believe that Alberto Gonzales tried to push this though.

From my reading about Gonzales from liberal, conservative and neo-con sources I have come to the conclusion that not only is he a nasty piece of work, but also there appears to be a definite possibility that he is insane by any standard that I deem acceptable.

I guess this would be a bad place to pitch my idea of shooting people who remove those tags from their mattress..?

padzilla -

Heh...

Do we really need an intellectual property bill which calls for harsh and rather abrupt forms of discipline? Or are we just trying to raise the level of punishment on such things to fund the overly large prison industry and make it stop looking like we're too tough when we sentence some kid to 10 or 20 years because of the joint in his pocket?

This is about the money. How much does the U.S. Government benefit from royalty income? I'm sure they get at least as much through the trading cycle as the programmer. Every pirate copy denies them money that they imagine is theirs.The the amount of money involved must be astounding, considering the number of copies of pirate software. Now they can say how lucky people are that they are not to be treated like Captain Kidd.