Reuters reports that Senate backers of the INDUCE Act — including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Tom Daschle — may attempt to attach the bill to a must-pass spending bill in an effort to secure passage for the controversial (and ill-conceived) legislation.
The Senate Judiciary Committee could take up the bill on Thursday, according to the Reuters’ report.
We’ve covered the bill here previously. The bill attempts to create a new form of secondary liability for copyright infringement that would hold technology makers and service providers liable for copyright violations by end users even if they never knew, contemplated, or intended to facilitate user infringement.
The U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM has been keeping a close eye on the legislation and has more information.
Update: Much better coverage from Wired here.
Another Update: It now appears that the consensus within the technology community is strongly against the current version of the Induce Act. As Jason Schultz from EFF explains, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) (Microsoft, Apple, HP, IBM, Intel, etc), the Computer Systems Policy Project (Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, NCR, Motorola, etc), and the Information Technology Industry Council (Accenture, Canon, Cisco, Kodak, Oracle, Sun, etc) have all weighed in against the measure. EFF has links and analysis.
One More Update (Thursday, Sept 30, 2004): The Senate markup of the bill scheduled for today has been postponed.