Feds Shut Down File-Sharing Website Megaupload

[Leopolds Ghost]

64. Well, it doesn't help that fans pirated and steal-read everything, did it? THAT BEING SAID

I disagree with Nadine on this. Copyright law is fundamentally broken and we're on the road to perpetual copyright with all content eventually passing into the hands of the corporations. And YES the little guy will go out of business. The big RIGHTS HOLDERS aren't going to lift a finger to protect small fry competition. The only proper course of action is to develop new open source protocols and fair use protocols that benefit the little guy. The big associations won't allow that. They want intellectual property to be rigorously defined as such -- ideas as property, not as work product.

it's funny how I posted extensively about SOPA and PIPA last fall, and hardly anyone said WORD ONE about it. I've been deathly ill for the past two weeks, so haven't had much time to post here or on the old site but I have a whole folder of articles on the SOPA issue I wanted to share. Of course no one here will read it because it's yesterdays news -- "everypony's on the bandwagon" now that Wikipedia and MoveOn and Daily Kos and of course DU signed onto the blackout strike.

Meanwhile, you can say goodbye to all those clips and re-orchestrated versions of Metropolis on the internet (including the Moroder version which the foundation that claims rights to Metropolis has been literally trying to destroy every copy of.)

The Supreme Court just ruled 6-2 (Justice Breyer and Alito dissenting)

that Congress can, as it intended, RE-COPYRIGHT works in the public domain to comply with the neoliberal Berne convention.

Talk about a one-two punch, eh? I have far less sympathy for Megaupload, a commercial site that was mostly devoted to out and out piracy of commercial works, than I did when they abrogated the safe harbor provision and claimed that the developers of file sharing networks were liable for policing peer to peer users and should be sent to jail. You see, the thing about jurisprudence as it applies to stuff like peer to peer and the Internet as a whole is: The more effort you make to police users, the more liability you assume. There is that classic case where the owner of a footbridge became liable when a disabled person fell into the stream -- the plaintiffs argued the park should have been fenced off from potential users to protect against hapless accident -- the judge ruled that the fence was not required but became liable for neglect when the owner posted a helpful "caution" sign on the footpath to warn people to be careful. Thus assuming legal responsibility.