US rightholders ask for legality of using malware against pirates

An organization called the American Intellectual Property Theft Issues Commission issued an 84-page document reporting its work. Among the descriptions of the frantic rates of theft, considered dubious methods of huge losses for American companies and other exaggerations, the document suggests a method of more active struggle with distributors and consumers of unlicensed copies of protected materials.

In particular, it is proposed to legalize the distribution of special malicious software that punishes people on whose computer pirated content will be found. The report describes the following: The software is loaded onto the machine and somehow finds out if you are a pirate. If the answer to this question is positive, then the contents of your computer's drives are blocked, and you are invited to call the police and confess to the crime.
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It is also possible that your webcam will take a picture of you, and the software will contact law enforcement authorities on its own. The mechanism of the Trojan extortionist familiar information security specialists called ransomware .

Additionally, you can write software that will allow only authorized users to open files containing important information. If an unauthorized person accesses it, a series of actions may occur. For example, a file may be blocked, and an unauthorized user’s computer may be blocked with instructions on how to contact law enforcement agencies to obtain the password necessary to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws relating to the use of the Internet, at the same time they can help to halt attacks and stabilize a computer incident providing time and evidence for law enforcement involvement.

The authors of the document regret that the measures used by organized crime do not have legal status:

Although it is not yet fixed in US law, a more permissive environment for active network protection demonstrates the increasing need for creation. Such an environment will allow companies not only to stabilize the situation, but also to take the next steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, changing it in the intruder’s networks, or even destroying information within an unauthorized network. Additional measures can go deeper, including photographing a hacker using the camera of his own system, infecting the hacker's network, or even physically shutting down or destroying a computer or a hacker's network.

Illustration pasukaru76 ( CC-BY 2.0 ). Based on Boeing Boeing and Loren Weinstein’s blog . Discussion on “Reddite” (eng.).