Utterly unconstitutional (figures it's a Democrat who doesn't know the Constitution). It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment because it would allow private individuals or companies to flagrantly break into your home and commit searches and seizures without a warrant. (And yes, breaking in via a Net connection is still breaking in. If you wake up and find your files missing, it's irrelevant whether the files are missing because someone physically entered your home and took the hard drive out of your PC, or if RIAA thugs hacked in and destroyed stuff.)
Second, it would allow wanton destruction of property by the RIAA thugs, as long as the damage was less than $50. Also unconstitutional under the Fourth.
Third, the thugs have no way of knowing which music files on my PC are "legal" or "illegal." If I own a physical copy of the new Bruce Springsteen CD, I am perfectly within my rights to download copies of songs from that album via P2P. But the RIAA has no way of knowing whether I bought the album or not. They're simply going to go and (try to) zap every music file off your drive of every commercial artist who ever existed. And if you want to stop it, YOU have to file suit. In other words, you're guilty until proven innocent. WILDLY unconstitutional.
In any case, it really doesn't matter whether this law passes and stays on the books or not. The law would have no effect on file servers outside the US. There is no attack scheme the RIAA could come up with that would not be defeated by hackers within days. Tens of thousands of hackers would not just release programs to protect end-users, they would also immediately band together, break into the RIAA severs and drop trojan horses, ping-flood, and otherwise use every trick in the book to completely shut down all outgoing packets from IP addresses identified as P2P attack drones.
When they do start trying, the outrage amongst all music buyers - especially teenagers, the biggest purchasers of music, who have never known a world where file sharing wasn't an integral part of the music experience, would organize a boycott and stop buying albums entirely.
There is no way the RIAA can win this game in the end.
TS, your comments are dead on the money. These corporate knuckleheads just don't have any clue how outmatched they are in this department.
Your right, this is where it inevetiably breaks down. Regardless of right or wrong in file sharing, this is the same "Vigilante Justice" people rail against when people defend themselves against would be attackers. Or people they think have committed a crime.