Entertainment Industry Still Wants Special Loopholes In Anti-Pretexting Laws

Legal Issues

from the how-it-goes dept

While the FCC has already come out with its own anti-pretexting rules, various states are still trying to tackle the issue with state-level laws. California has been making a big effort to bring back an earlier anti-pretexting law that got shot down prior to the whole HP-pretexting fiasco thanks to efforts by the MPAA, who insisted that pretexting-like tactics were necessary to catch people engaged in file sharing. You would think that, given how much publicity pretexting and other types of identity theft scams have gotten recently, the entertainment industry would recognize that this issue was something of an electric “third rail” to stay away from. However, no one ever said entertainment industry execs had much in the way of common sense. John writes in to let us know that they’re back at it, trying to block California’s latest anti-pretexting law, again claiming they need to be able to deceive people in order to track down those engaged in file sharing. The execs in these industries really do seem to think that the law is written for their own companies’ benefit, don’t they? Luckily, the politicians pushing this law say they don’t see any reason to modify the existing proposal just to put in a special loophole for some special interests.