The Intellectual Property Protection Act of the US would criminalise “attempted copyright infringement”. This has generated a lot of heat and noise from IP freedom fighters, but it doesn’t significantly expand the pool of people who are already criminalised by existing legislation. There’s not a lot of practical difference between “copyright infringement” and “attempted copyright infringement”, because an attempt at infringement succeeds 99.999% of the time. Nearly everyone who might be busted for the attempt is already currently liable for the act.

(I suppose it might be easier to gather evidence of attempted infringement on a P2P network, by running fake nodes that gather up search requests; does searching for a song title constitute intent to infringe?).

It’s still a bad idea, although part of me does wonder whether a giant police-state crackdown on infringement might do wonders for the Free culture movement.