The furor about the stupidity of the Induce Act continues to mount. I point your attention to the fantastically (obsessively) annotated transcript of the act over at The Importance of.... Note that the CNet piece is entitled "Senate Bill Bans P2P Networks".

The act is really dumb (as Ernest Miller proves in his interlinear commentary), but may have the impact of making all P2P technology illegal, since it could act as an inducement to the little children, who would potentially break copyright and various moral laws as well. This is the most egregious example of prior restraint, ever.

Today, in the Lenz Blog, I saw a few really dumb comments about the act.

K Lenz

[from A Balanced View of the INSANE Act Proposal]

If the proposal can come up with an answer to these questions, possibly requiring adding some language to restrict its application to Internet P2P software that is specifically designed to resist enforcement attempts by copyright holders, it might be better than the Japanese approach of just arresting creators and sort out later if it was actually illegal what they did. Sinking this proposal would not change any risk under existing rules of secondary liability for copyright infringement.

And anyway, it's not that big a deal. Even if development in the P2P area gets shut down in America, there are still some free countries around where research won't be stopped. The result of that research will flow back to the U.S. over the Internet, leaving the legislation without any measurable effect on the availability of P2P software there.

Potentially every IM system is impacted (to the degree that it can be argued that they are P2P), and a wide variety of useful tools like Groove, Shinkuro, WiredReach, and thousands of others, leaving aside the targets of the Act, like Kazaa, Morpheus, etc. This is a sledgehammer approach to hitting a pesky mosquito -- don't get me wrong, the mosquito is carrying malaria, but this is not the way to fight it.

The Induce Act has got to be fought. Write your Senators and Congressional representatives, and tell them to block passage of this act,