RIAA and MPAA want permission to pretext

The California Senate wants to make pretexting, using false statements and other misleading practices to get personal information, illegal to protect people's privacy better. In other words, a employee of the RIAA anti-piracy department can obtain information on you or me and use that information when he is talking to a suspect. For example, if he uses his real name and address, the suspect would probably be able to figure out who he works for; however if he uses someone else's name and address, the suspect will have no idea. The RIAA and MPAA want the bill to not apply to them as they claim they need to use deception in order to catch bootleggers and that this bill would seriously undermine their anti-piracy effort. Brad Buckles, the RIAA's executive vice president for anti-piracy, says he wants the criminal to feel comfortable working with him and giving him information, which he can only do by pretexting. The bill comes up for an initial hearing on Tuesday.

I think it is absolutely ridiculous that the RIAA and MPAA can go around taking other people's personal information just to try to catch a bootlegger. They should find other ways to do it because in this case I do not think the ends justifies the means. Furthermore, their amendment was written very broadly saying "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." This includes far too many people that would be given full permission to use your or my personal information. I just do not think it is worth that invasion of privacy.