Devoted to show business and the entertainment industry

In an almost unbelievable move, the California assembly voted down an anti-pretexting bill - the same stuff that Hewlett Packard used to uncover information that caused heads to roll. While the vote was on August 23, it has just come to light that the MPAA was behind the results. 

Intimidated by the MPAA, after being approved easily through three committees and voted on 30-0 by the state Senate, the assembly then voted it down by 33-27 in a shameful act.

Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse said, "the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America."

He added that their argument was that, "We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading."

What's new in this story is that it was unknown at the time that the MPAA had been the influence behind the changing of direction of the bill, which was changed to basically protect no privacy rights.

Essentially what has happened is that the same thing that was considered an outrage by the entire country, is now being encouraged by the MPAA, as long as it benefits them. They don't care about the privacy of citizens, as long as they can keep up their attacks upon what they say is piracy.

An aide said: "The MPAA told some members the bill would interfere with piracy investigations, and doesn't want to hamstring investigators."

To me the MPAA is going renegade here. They are starting to act above the law and are now behind an outrageous act of determining public policy that the voters are the ones to decide on. How did the MPAA become our democratic representation?

Sen. Debra Bowen was the one who wrote the bill, SB1666, which would have disallowed investigators from making "false, fictitious or fraudulent" statements for the purpose of getting private information from people. The result would have been the empowering of individuals to be able to sue for damages.

The bottom line is that California legislatures have now said that the MPAA can make "false, fictitious or fraudulent" statements to fool people into handing over information.

If pretexting is wrong, it's either wrong across the board, or it's right. I hope you pass on this message to others so that the cowardly California legislature and evidently the power behind them - the MPAA - can be called to account for this. They need to be indicted just like the Hewlett Packard people were.