The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said today that he favors the development of technology that would remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the web. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, noted during a hearing on copyright abuses that destroying the PC's of illegal file traders "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights".

Hatch apparently supports a technology that would warn offenders twice, then on a third offense send their PC's to digital oblivion. "If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," the Senator suggests. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the error of their ways.