Suppose I were a programmer of some skill and maybe some sublety. Or suppose I had access to a good set of instructions. Suppose I used this skill and sublety or these instructions to create a worm — a simple, harmless worm which did nothing more than get into your computer — via a file-sharing network, or perhaps via an instant messaging program — and once it is inside your machine, it crawls inside your music files, say, and just sits inert. Copyright attaches to the worm — a small piece of computer software — as soon as I create it, and now my copyrighted work is sitting on your machine.

Representative Berman’s new bill, introduced into Congress just before the August recess gives “copyright owners the right to violate the law in their efforts to stop the unauthorized circulation of their works on peer-to-peer networks.”

If this bill becomes law, all I need to do is notify the Attorney General 7 days in advance of my action, and I am immune from prosecution for my denial of service attacks, my hacking into your computer, my destruction of your MP3 files, my disruption of your instant messenger service, my deactivation of any DLL files necessary for the use of your file-sharing software.

Representative Berman — who is probably not as much of an idiot as this fiasco makes him seem — wrote this bill at the behest of some of his biggest donors (including Disney), who, in their typical short-sighted view of the world, assumed that only the Copyright Cartel would be able to use the provisions of the law. Guess again, and prepare for Armageddon.