Bills to discourage Internet piracy of music and films including with fines and jail, and to make secret filming or photographing of people “in a state of undress,” were signed by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week.
That was the good news. The not so good news was Schwarzenegger vetoing a bill to ban putting cameras into a home without the homeowner or home renter’s permission.
State Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City), who authored the anti-piracy bill, said the bill was needed to update incumbent anti-piracy laws to include electronic dissemination. The bill, Murray said, would protect California consumers and the music and movie industries by requiring any commercially produced music or movie file be labeled with the sender’s e-mail address, which Murray said would seriously discourage piracy.
Under the Murray bill, sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America, distributing movie and music files without proper authorization would net a $2,500 fine and up to a year in jail, with significantly lesser penalties for minors who violate the law knowingly.
“The bill protects the consumer’s right to know whether or not the movie or music files are legitimate or counterfeited,” Murray said, “just like video movies and CDs when the true name and address was first enacted 20 years ago by the legislature.”
The anti-voyeurism law was written by State Sen. Dick Ackerman (R-Tustin). It added bedrooms to California’s list of places involved in “criminal peeping” and raised the maximum fine for repeat offenders to $5,000.
But Schwarzenegger said he vetoed Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson’s (D-Santa Barbara) bill to keep cameras out of homes without the occupants’ consent because the bill would criminalize what he called “otherwise innocent video recording… [of] private or embarrassing conduct.”
Jackson, however, has maintained that she aimed to protect home privacy rights “where we expect and are entitled to the highest level of privacy,” as she said the day her bill was voted out of the Senate Public Safety Committee and sent to the full Senate.
“Advances in technology have made the use of surveillance devices and inappropriate distribution of images over the Internet an increasingly common threat to the invasion of our most precious personal sanctuaries,” Jackson said at the time.
