SOPA - Is it right?

Current Events Domestic United States Politics
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I must say, I am fairly disappointed in the responses by the Objectivist community regarding SOPA. For one, I’d like anyone to point out which section in the bill constitutes a violation of due process; the bill makes clear that court orders will and must be issued, particularly persuant to existing (or ammended) US Code. It seems to me that way too many people have gotten on a bandwaggon without being properly informed, or by being heavily against the bill without even taking the time to read it or parts of it. This bill takes approximately a little more than an hour to read; it’s time for the advocates to get busy actually reading it.

Another thing that irks me is that there are many good ammendments to prior Code in the bill, particularly in Title II, yet the call is for the whole thing to be scrapped. For example, instead of relying on a transmission timeline of 180 days, a standard of 10 infringments, or a single infringment of heavy monitary worth, would be used.

1 Like
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That’s nice. I’m sure in future appeals to donors, they will add “denying service to customers, in an attempt to make a political statement” to the list of reasons why I should give them money.

Actually, you can still access Wikipedia. To get you interested to actually *think* about the bill, this was quite effective. Click the learn more link and you can find this:

Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way? Yes. During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn’t to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it’s okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

23

Other personalities such as Sean “Day9” Plott, hosts a daily internet show where he analyzes and gives advice on how to play the popular strategy game “StarCraft 2”. Other professional Starcraft players (Yes, professional, they have full professional tournaments with teams, casters, the whole deal) make a significant part of their income live sreaming themselves play the game competitively.

Blizzard wants a share of the profits, from any professional tournament involving Starcraft. Their terms of service state that the game may not be used in a sponsored competition, without written consent from Blizzard.

Why is it wrong for the US government to stop the broadcast of such tournaments without Blizzard’s consent, in the US? Shouldn’t the company that created the game have the right to sell it under any terms it wishes?

P.S. And no, that wouldn’t put an end to the Starcraft pro scene. It would force the people using the game for this purpose to share their profits with Blizzard, that’s all. Which in turn will cause Blizzard and other companies to focus on other games that can be played not only recreationally, but as a sport as well.

In fact they already have a signed contract with a Korean tv station, to do just that.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy

25

The text of theSOPA bill H.R. 3261.IH is here

A plain language recitation of the contents of the bill and the objections to it is here:

H.R. 3261, “Stop Online Piracy Act” (“SOPA”) Explanation of Bill and Summary of Concerns

Due process and specifically procedural due process requires a fair opportunity to affect the judgment. When an attorney general or civil plaintiff present their complaint to a judge there is no one present to dispute the facts. A procedure does not become due process merely by being codified in statutory law, and present due process case law is not consistent with the procedure put forth in SOPA. This aspect is simply unconstitutional.

The In rem jurisdiction countenanced in section 102 ( B) (2) takes a page from the asset seizure tactics employed by the U.S. government in the drug war. Inanimate objects do not have rights and so any expectation of due process is conveniently dispensed with. Legal actions should always be between persons or legal persons (corporations or the government) or in the legalese in personam.

The history leading up to this proposed law is that attempts to sue the individual downloaders in their teeming millions by movie and music industry trade groups one at a time or en masse are impractical and result in bad publicity. Foreign countries are outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. law and unmotivated to cooperate with the mercantilist schemes of RIAA and the MPAA because it does not benefit them in the slightest. As a last gasp attempt this law goes after the connection between domestic downloaders and foreign internet hosts by attempting to censor the internet domain name system (DNS). DNS is simply the database that pairs up a domain name using letters such as google.com with an internet protocol address in numbers such as 173.194.34.16. This is completely useless if the destination numerical address is known as you can test for yourself by pasting 173.194.34.16 into your browser as an address (you don’t even need http://) . (lookup IP addresses for domains from within a browser at http://ip-lookup.net/domain.php). Not only is it completely and trivially bypassable, entire non-official domain name systems exist which you can access by instructing your browser or computer to use an alternate DNS server so even the trivial inconvenience of the DNS censorship can be cancelled.

The law as written permits user-provided content such as comments, forum posts and videos to justify taking down entire domains and not just the individual comment, posts or media. This means every host has to constantly self-police to keep from being shutdown, which cancels out the “safe harbor” provisions of Title II of the DMCA of 1998. Everything loosely identified as “Web 2.0” would never have existed without the ‘safe harbor’ provisions of the DMCA, and I am not interested in a legal experiment to see how long inertia can keep them going without that protection.

And then there is still Usenet. I won’t even go into that.

26

The text of theSOPA bill H.R. 3261.IH is here

A plain language recitation of the contents of the bill and the objections to it is here:

H.R. 3261, “Stop Online Piracy Act” (“SOPA”) Explanation of Bill and Summary of Concerns

Due process and specifically procedural due process requires a fair opportunity to affect the judgment. When an attorney general or civil plaintiff present their complaint to a judge there is no one present to dispute the facts. A procedure does not become due process merely by being codified in statutory law, and present due process case law is not consistent with the procedure put forth in SOPA. This aspect is simply unconstitutional.

The In rem jurisdiction countenanced in section 102 ( B) (2) takes a page from the asset seizure tactics employed by the U.S. government in the drug war. Inanimate objects do not have rights and so any expectation of due process is conveniently dispensed with. Legal actions should always be between persons or legal persons (corporations or the government) or in the legalese in personam.

The history leading up to this proposed law is that attempts to sue the individual downloaders in their teeming millions by movie and music industry trade groups one at a time or en masse are impractical and result in bad publicity. Foreign countries are outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. law and unmotivated to cooperate with the mercantilist schemes of RIAA and the MPAA because it does not benefit them in the slightest. As a last gasp attempt this law goes after the connection between domestic downloaders and foreign internet hosts by attempting to censor the internet domain name system (DNS). DNS is simply the database that pairs up a domain name using letters such as google.com with an internet protocol address in numbers such as 173.194.34.16. This is completely useless if the destination numerical address is known as you can test for yourself by pasting 173.194.34.16 into your browser as an address (you don’t even need http://) . (lookup IP addresses for domains from within a browser at http://ip-lookup.net/domain.php). Not only is it completely and trivially bypassable, entire non-official domain name systems exist which you can access by instructing your browser or computer to use an alternate DNS server so even the trivial inconvenience of the DNS censorship can be cancelled.

The law as written permits user-provided content such as comments, forum posts and videos to justify taking down entire domains and not just the individual comment, posts or media. This means every host has to constantly self-police to keep from being shutdown, which cancels out the “safe harbor” provisions of Title II of the DMCA of 1998. Everything loosely identified as “Web 2.0” would never have existed without the ‘safe harbor’ provisions of the DMCA, and I am not interested in a legal experiment to see how long inertia can keep them going without that protection.

And then there is still Usenet. I won’t even go into that.

I don’t disagree with your analysis of Due Process provided by the 14th Amendment, but it is definitely limited in scope. Due process does in fact also deal with equal enforcement of the law and the procedures provided within that law. One must also not forget that the scope of SOPA is to deal primarily with “foreign infringing sites,” which Sec. 201 highlights in its title, and such sites would most likely not fall into the jurisdiction of being covered by our Due Process laws. In fact, Sec. 201 seems to make clear that if such sites operated in the United States ("domestic internet sites), they would fall under current law and would “be subject to seizure in the United States in an action brought by the Attorney General if such site were a domestic Internet site.”

As far as the technical details of shutting the sites down, it seems that you are implying that only domain names and DNS servers will be targeted, an allegation made by various anti-SOPA advocates. However, the bill points out other avenues of approach, such as sub-domains, IP, and IP allocation entities. Additionally, taking out whole domains that are full of user-generated content, because of some users’ posts of pirated content, is simply not provided for in the bill, unless that site fulfills the definitions required for action–those requirements are not as specific as they can and probably should be, but it is clear that YouTube, et al, do not qualify.

The provision does bring up the topic of immunity for services that have policy of removing pirated material, and you refer to self-policing. Since when did self-policing become a negative concept? While we don’t take the concept as far as the anarcho-capitalists, generally Objectivists regard self-policing as being in order when the law is absent or insufficient, or even simply consider it just responsible behavior. I find nothing draconian at all about granting immunity from liability the websites that engage in self-policing as described in the bill; it is just another example of how websites like Facebook would not be shutdown.

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Due process and specifically procedural due process requires a fair opportunity to affect the judgment. .

They do have a fair opportunity to affect the judgement. The court order regarding any action is not definitive, it can be challenged. They just don’t get to continue profiting off of the website, while dodging lawsuits to the best of their lawyers’ abilities.

Off the Internet, if you’re running an illegal business, you don’t get to continue running it while you’re on trial for it.Prosecutors can get a court order shutting it down until further deliberations. If you’re stalking a woman, she can get a restraining order against you. If there is a civil dispute between two people, one of them can get a court order freezing the funds until a judgement can be made. Etc, etc.

This bill just takes the same practice to the Internet. Due process doesn’t include the ability to openly sell stolen goods until you lose a trial in a court of law. That is absurd.

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For those of you who opposed SOPA/PIPA and have enough free time or willpower to do anything about its inevtiable resurgence under some other name,

http://nwlinux.com/what-politicians-received-money-to-support-sopa/

^This is a list of politicians who received money from support groups to vote for SOPA.

www.maddox.xmission.com

^This guy has compiled a list of large companies that supported SOPA/PIPA, which you can choose to boycott if you really want to help get the point across. They’re color-coded by difficulty to boycott for your convenience (eg. MasterCard is red because it’d be near impossible to boycott completely).

If we contact the politicians who voted for these bills and boycott or complain to the companies that supported it, we can hopefully discourage Congress from trying to pass similarly invasive legislation in the future.

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http://nwlinux.com/w…o-support-sopa/

^This is a list of politicians who received money from support groups to vote for SOPA.

Iterestingly Michael Bennet, D-CO, has shown himself to be a dishonest politician. He doesn’t stay bought. (He shows up in both lists and apparently made 2.3 million bucks off this controversy.

Actually I would want to know how on earth they determined that these monies were tied to SOPA… those seem like enormous bribes for just one piece of legislation. (Clearly I got into the wrong racket. /sarcasm :angry: ) Furthermore, given that blatant bribery is illegal, how can one prove that that money was paid solely for that vote?

Edit: removed part of quotation that was not germane.

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Iterestingly Michael Bennet, D-CO, has shown himself to be a dishonest politician. He doesn’t stay bought. (He shows up in both lists and apparently made 2.3 million bucks off this controversy.

Actually I would want to know how on earth they determined that these monies were tied to SOPA… those seem like enormous bribes for just one piece of legislation. (Clearly I got into the wrong racket. /sarcasm :angry: ) Furthermore, given that blatant bribery is illegal, how can one prove that that money was paid solely for that vote?

Edit: removed part of quotation that was not germane.

That’s a good question. However, if you go to the opencongress link at the top of webpage referenced, you will see how the contributions were identified as being funds in support of SOPA. Of course, organizing campaign contributions in such a manner is misleading, especially when phrased as “money to support SOPA.”

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So the thing about all this is that the right legal theory and implementation of property rights and i.P to the internet and modern tech hasn’t been totally worked out. Do you guys think there’s any good legal theorists or political theorists etc. out there that could solve how to protect these rights properly? Or is Objectivist conception of individual rights and the mind as the source of all rights and property the only hope?

How do you guys think these rights could be properly protected in a non-clashing way without violating others?

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I don’t disagree with your analysis of Due Process provided by the 14th Amendment, but it is definitely limited in scope. Due process does in fact also deal with equal enforcement of the law and the procedures provided within that law. One must also not forget that the scope of SOPA is to deal primarily with “foreign infringing sites,” which Sec. 201 highlights in its title, and such sites would most likely not fall into the jurisdiction of being covered by our Due Process laws. In fact, Sec. 201 seems to make clear that if such sites operated in the United States ("domestic internet sites), they would fall under current law and would “be subject to seizure in the United States in an action brought by the Attorney General if such site were a domestic Internet site.”

If foreign infringing sites because they are foreign are not entitled to due process then neither are they subject to any U.S. laws including copyright laws in the first place

As far as the technical details of shutting the sites down, it seems that you are implying that only domain names and DNS servers will be targeted, an allegation made by various anti-SOPA advocates. However, the bill points out other avenues of approach, such as sub-domains, IP, and IP allocation entities. Additionally, taking out whole domains that are full of user-generated content, because of some users’ posts of pirated content, is simply not provided for in the bill, unless that site fulfills the definitions required for action–those requirements are not as specific as they can and probably should be, but it is clear that YouTube, et al, do not qualify.

Whole domain shutdowns are not prohibited by the bill either. As I wrote it is a ‘legal experiment’ to enact this bill and then see what happens. It is also non-objective law.

The provision does bring up the topic of immunity for services that have policy of removing pirated material, and you refer to self-policing. Since when did self-policing become a negative concept? While we don’t take the concept as far as the anarcho-capitalists, generally Objectivists regard self-policing as being in order when the law is absent or insufficient, or even simply consider it just responsible behavior. I find nothing draconian at all about granting immunity from liability the websites that engage in self-policing as described in the bill; it is just another example of how websites like Facebook would not be shutdown.

This is not mere ‘self-policing’, it is ‘chilling effect’. This is because checking that every upload does not violate a copyright held by someone, somewhere requires near omniscience on the part of the website host. The current system under the DMCA where someone writes a complaint when they recognize a copyright violation exists is better because it distributes the burden of protecting rights to each person that has such a right.

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They do have a fair opportunity to affect the judgement. The court order regarding any action is not definitive, it can be challenged. They just don’t get to continue profiting off of the website, while dodging lawsuits to the best of their lawyers’ abilities.

Off the Internet, if you’re running an illegal business, you don’t get to continue running it while you’re on trial for it.Prosecutors can get a court order shutting it down until further deliberations. If you’re stalking a woman, she can get a restraining order against you. If there is a civil dispute between two people, one of them can get a court order freezing the funds until a judgement can be made. Etc, etc.

This bill just takes the same practice to the Internet. Due process doesn’t include the ability to openly sell stolen goods until you lose a trial in a court of law. That is absurd.

Copyright law defines a property right, and person to person disputes over property are matters of civil law not criminal law. As a civil law matter the plaintiff must request the injunction not a prosecutor. Preliminary injunctions require the plaintiff to demonstrate “… he is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief” which can never happen in a copyright case because the damage is a monetary loss and can be repaired with a monetary award for damages if proven.

Off the internet, you may indeed be permitted to continue an infringing business until the case is over if the conditions for a preliminary injunction are not met. This is true for both copyright and patent law.

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“Feds shut down file-sharing giant over piracy violations” (Chicago Tribune, January 19, 2012):

One of the world’s largest file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, federal prosecutors said.

An indictment accuses Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart online piracy.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and three others were arrested Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Two other defendants are at large.

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“Feds shut down file-sharing giant over piracy violations” (Chicago Tribune, January 19, 2012):

From the press release by the Justice Dept at http://www.justice.g…12-crm-074.html

Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement

WASHINGTON – Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced today.

This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.

The individuals and two corporations – Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited – were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

In addition, the following alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:

Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;

Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;

Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;

Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;

Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;

Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.

According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies – often before their theatrical release – music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale. The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.

The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. The conspirators further allegedly offered a rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites. The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world.

In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.

The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the infringing content.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Philippines also provided assistance.

This case is part of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force) to stop the theft of intellectual property. Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation’s economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to

www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce

.

12-074

I added the bold to the paragraph in the middle. The significance of that paragraph is that there was an alleged willful and repeated flouting of the terms of the DMCA. SOPA was not needed for this arrest.

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Copyright law defines a property right, and person to person disputes over property are matters of civil law not criminal law.

I added the bold to the paragraph in the middle. The significance of that paragraph is that there was an alleged willful and repeated flouting of the terms of the DMCA. SOPA was not needed for this arrest.

Just to clarify: you are not saying that copyright infringement is a civil matter. Just that if it is treated as a civil matter, then there should be no shutdowns before a trial.

But you are OK with criminal prosecution in this case.

Would you support a bill that would allow authorities to prosecute (and request a shutdown) in cases like this before a site gets to 50 million daily visitors, $175 million in profits, and $500 million in damages (as per the indictment), by changing the criteria under which action can be taken?

Preliminary injunctions require the plaintiff to demonstrate “… he is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief” which can never happen in a copyright case because the damage is a monetary loss and can be repaired with a monetary award for damages if proven.

Can it? So, it would be realistic to expect $500 million to be paid to copyright holders, by the end of this case? (and that’s an oddly low estimate by the prosecutors, I must say: we are talking about 50 million users/ day, and years of activity)

What if it’s a foreign website?

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http://techcrunch.co…ent-of-justice/

Hacker group Anonymous isn’t happy about

the takedown of file-sharing site Megaupload, and as a result, it’s targeting some big companies and government agencies are going to

Earlier this afternoon, interspersed with a stream of anti-SOPA and PIPA tweets, Anonymous

the main Anonymous Twitter account declared, “The government takes down #Megaupload? 15 minutes later #Anonymous takes down government & record label sites. #ExpectUs.” Specifically, the group claimed responsibility for taking down the Universal Music, RIAA (the record industry’s lobbying arm), MPAA (the movie industry’s lobbying arm), and Department of Justice websites, among others. As of 3pm Pacific, the sites were still down for me, although some comments on Twitter suggested that they were returning online sporadically.

The group also

claimed that the current attacks were “the largest attack ever by Anonymous,” with 5,635 participants. And it looks like the campaign is ongoing — Anonymous says it’s going after the FBI’s website next: “Get some popcorn… it’s going to be a long lulzy night.”

I’m sure Wikipedia will shut down have a large, easily removable JavaScript popup tomorrow, to draw attention to this egregious violation of individual rights on the Internet, amiright?

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Just to clarify: you are not saying that copyright infringement is a civil matter. Just that if it is treated as a civil matter, then there should be no shutdowns before a trial.

But you are OK with criminal prosecution in this case.

Correct.

The three areas of law are crimes, torts and criminal fraud. They can be understood as validly distinguishing the three ways to initiate physical force as understood in Objectivist political theory.

Crimes are initiated force that intentionally and violently overcomes the non-consent of the victim to inflict a loss. Crimes are defined by public laws and apply to everyone.

Torts cover violations of agreements made in good faith or accidental infliction of losses. The loss is necessary and the violence may or may not be present but the intent to inflict harm is absent or not relevant. The agreements or contracts involved only cover the parties to the agreement and not the general public.

Criminal fraud covers agreements made in bad faith by one party where there was always the intent to violate the terms. The violence may be absent but the harm and intent to inflict harm remains.

Crimes are always prosecuted by the state against the accused, torts are civil law matters between private individuals resolved by lawsuits, and criminal fraud is a borderline area that is given to the state to prosecute because retribution rather than restoration of damages is necessary to put an end to the fraudulent behavior and because there would be an open ended number of future victims if the fraud continued in the future as it had in the past.

What is alleged to have occurred at Megaupload.com is criminal fraud because of demonstrated bad faith based on their handling of DMCA requests among other things.

Would you support a bill that would allow authorities to prosecute (and request a shutdown) in cases like this before a site gets to 50 million daily visitors, $175 million in profits, and $500 million in damages (as per the indictment), by changing the criteria under which action can be taken?

Yes, but not 10 (ten) downloads in total ever or $1000 of damage which is an amount so small that it would qualify for a small claims court jurisdiction or a petty theft misdemeanor.

Can it? So, it would be realistic to expect $500 million to be paid to copyright holders, by the end of this case? (and that’s an oddly low estimate by the prosecutors, I must say: we are talking about 50 million users/ day, and years of activity)

When the damages have no realistic prospect of being made whole then injunctive relief is the only relief possible and is therefore appropriate. As to the numbers, not everything and every user at Megaupload.com was about illegal downloading. Megaupload.com has a wikipedia entry describing the scope of what the business was about.

What if it’s a foreign website?

If the foreign country is cooperative in having the same or similar laws or treaty arrangements then a law enforcement action might be possible. If not, then not.

39

Correct.

The three areas of law are crimes, torts and criminal fraud. They can be understood as validly distinguishing the three ways to initiate physical force as understood in Objectivist political theory.

Crimes are initiated force that intentionally and violently overcomes the non-consent of the victim to inflict a loss. Crimes are defined by public laws and apply to everyone.

Torts cover violations of agreements made in good faith or accidental infliction of losses. The loss is necessary and the violence may or may not be present but the intent to inflict harm is absent or not relevant. The agreements or contracts involved only cover the parties to the agreement and not the general public.

Criminal fraud covers agreements made in bad faith by one party where there was always the intent to violate the terms. The violence may be absent but the harm and intent to inflict harm remains.

Crimes are always prosecuted by the state against the accused, torts are civil law matters between private individuals resolved by lawsuits, and criminal fraud is a borderline area that is given to the state to prosecute because retribution rather than restoration of damages is necessary to put an end to the fraudulent behavior and because there would be an open ended number of future victims if the fraud continued in the future as it had in the past.

What is alleged to have occurred at Megaupload.com is criminal fraud because of demonstrated bad faith based on their handling of DMCA requests among other things.

Makes sense to me.

Yes, but not 10 (ten) downloads in total ever or $1000 of damage which is an amount so small that it would qualify for a small claims court jurisdiction or a petty theft misdemeanor.

In Cali, stealing something worth $1000 or more is already grand theft, actually. Depending on what was stolen, the limit is even lower. But you’re right, that is pretty low, probably opens the door on way too much litigation, and makes it easier to abuse the law via frivolous suits.

Would you be OK with setting the limit at $10.000? I can’t imagine any jurisdiction where grand theft starts higher than that. And for an indie film or album, that’s a pretty significant amount.

As for the ten downloads total thing, that’s not very specific. I’m sure there is more to it than that.

When the damages have no realistic prospect of being made whole then injunctive relief is the only relief possible and is therefore appropriate.

So wouldn’t such a decision have been appropriate a long time ago, in this case, at the request of copyright holders? Why did the victims have to wait this long for anything to be done?

Shouldn’t that practice also be appropriate with other sites, such as rapidshare (another large site very similar to megaupload), bittorrent sites that openly allow torrents of copyrighted material (not audio or video files, just a small data file which IDs and helps coordonate the sharing of the large media file stored on users’ computers), and sites dedicated to the posting of links to copyrighted material illicitly uploaded to video sharing sites?

If the foreign country is cooperative in having the same or similar laws or treaty arrangements then a law enforcement action might be possible. If not, then not.

Well, law enforcement action clearly is possible: ordering ad services under US jurisdiction to cut ties with the site, ordering search engines to stop listing the site in search results, and if all else fails ordering ISPs to reject requests for the domain name of the website.

Why do you disagree with any of those actions? I’m aware of the claim that the third option would interfere with the security of the Internet. I’d be interested in why that is (I heard the claim, but no one elaborates on it), and also what’s wrong with the other two options.

Another option is facilitating self-policing, by affording ISPs legal immunity for various voluntary anti-piracy initiatives. What’s wrong with that?

40

“Feds shut down file-sharing giant over piracy violations” (Chicago Tribune, January 19, 2012):

Finally, that parisite known as Kim ‘Dotcom’ has been brought to some sort of justice. This is an example of the US Codes of SOPA put into practice for the properties in country. I really can’t say much more about this. To me it is straight forward: protect IP. Notice, however, that the Kiwis were heavily inovled here, just like how we engage the rest of the civilzed world in IP protection. SOPA needed more work, yet it shouldn’t have been thrown out on face vailue, especially since it is such a short bill to read. To me, what happened two days ago was nothing but populist bullshit.

edit: my point is like i’ve said: there are already US laws regarding what’s in this country’s jurisdiction. The actions against ‘Dotcom’ go to prove that SOPA had nothing to do with what anti-SOPA advocates were saying.