Grant our invisibility cloak immunity, begs RIAA

In the wake of the HP case last year - where the printer ink company was caught pretending to be someone else to sneak out phone records of journos and board members - California has been planning to strengthen the law on pretexting. The state thinks that if you want to know something, you should be honest about who you are and why you're doing it.

Fair enough, right?

Not quite - the record and movie industry are wailing that they need to be exempt:

But the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America say they sometimes need to use subterfuge as they pursue bootleggers in flea markets and on the Internet.

In recent letters to state Sen. Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), the trade groups said the proposed legislation was written too broadly and could undermine anti-piracy efforts. They said investigators sometimes pose as someone else to obtain bootlegged CDs or movies and to break into online piracy rings.

"Basically, we want criminals to feel comfortable that who they're dealing with is probably some other criminal and let us in on what's going on," said Brad Buckles, the RIAA's executive vice president for anti-piracy. "We're not talking about trying to go in and get customer information. In no case have we ever tried to do that."

The RIAA proposed changes to the piracy bill that raised alarms among consumer advocates. The trade group asked that any owner of a copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret be able to use "pretexting or other investigative techniques to obtain personal information about a customer or employee" when seeking to enforce intellectual property rights.

Hmm... the music industry has never attempted to pretend to be someone else in order to winkle out customer information, eh? Isn't that exactly what they were doing when they were breaching the terms of service on file sharing network a few years back? And if it's not about investigating customers, then why does their requested version of the law expressly give them the right to, erm, investigate customers?

The other important thing, of course, is that the RIAA is not dealing with "criminals" at all - it's dealing with suspects. And if it really does believe crimes are being committed - even the ridiculous non-crimes its managed to get onto US statute books - shouldn't it be a law enforcement agency who investigates them? Does the State of California really want to give trade associations the legal right to play at being Secret Squirrel?

[Thanks to our tipster for the tip.]