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“This report is not an ending, but a beginning.” So concluded a sweeping new U.S. Department of Justice report on the theft of intellectual property. The report, issued earlier this month, lays out a Department of Justice strategy that will make piracy punishable by criminal enforcement as well as civil procedures. In the process, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department will bust down doors around the country and turn grandmas and students into felons.

If you think I’m being an alarmist, know that I’m simply mimicking a strategy I saw in the Justice Department’s report, which opens with a horror story about a boy who nearly died while using counterfeit products.

But let’s be honest. This isn’t really about fake Duracell batteries. The big players in the copyright wars are the record companies, movie studios and software corporations.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, as of Sept. 13, 2004, entertainment companies alone had contributed over $22 million to various candidates for this upcoming election, In the last election cycle of 2002, the industry contributed just under $40 million.

(Compare that to oil and gas industries, which contributed $25 million in 2002 and $17 million this year. Or pharmaceuticals, with $12 million this cycle and $29 million in 2002.)

The entertainment companies aren’t handing out the Benjamins because they want to export “The Little Mermaid” to Iraq.

They are worried about piracy, and Ashcroft’s Justice Department is more than willing to go the extra mile to help them in their crusade.

To be fair, the theft of intellectual property is a serious concern. According to the report and other sources, intellectual property industries contributed over 6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product – or about $626 billion in 2002. Imagine how high that number would be if everyone in China paid for their movies and everyone at UCLA paid for their copy of Microsoft Office.

But that doesn’t mean we should turn college students into hardened criminals.

Like the war on drugs, fighting the copyright war will simply spawn yet another massive bureaucracy, more crowded prisons and another government failure.

To give you an idea of how draconian the Justice Department wants to be, here is an example:

The report points out the many good “principles” of the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act. The PDEA would make sharing $1,000 worth of files a felony warranting three years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. Even if no one downloads those files, you are still guilty of a felony.

Share a copy of Adobe Photoshop, a dozen albums, some movies – and you’re sunk.

I’m not suggesting that copyright owners or the Justice Department should ignore piracy. But there is a difference between ignoring piracy and turning the better part of the nation’s population into felons.

The Justice Department should not try to fry small-time file-swappers when its main worries should be terrorism, violent crime and Enron-style crooks.

With all this, I’m afraid that Ashcroft and his cronies are serious when they say this is just the beginning.

If the Justice Department is content to use the tools already available to it, it can probably only do so much damage. But if its leaders are serious about criminalizing copyright infringement, they are going to want an entirely new toolbox of tricks.

Just as Ashcroft’s Patriot Act changed the way we deal with terrorists, this report and the bills that follow may change the way we deal with intellectual crime. We can only hope the Justice Department will not start yet another war for the United States to fight.

Lazzaro is a fourth-year political science and psychology student. He is the editorial development director for the Daily Bruin. E-mail him at dlazzaro@media.ucla.edu.