The FBI Does Not Need SOPA or PIPA

There is an interesting and actually spectacular news story today about the successful raid of Kim Dotcom’s estate in Auckland, New Zealand.  At the same time, Dotcom’s millions of dollars in assets were frozen, and will remain so for the duration of his legal troubles.  And what are his legal troubles?  His corporation, Megaupload.com has been shut down, and Dotcom as well as several company officers have been indicted in what the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is calling the largest copyright infringement case in history.  As captivating as this story is, the more important point is that this “dot.com” or online business was identified, investigated, documented, and shut down ALL WHILE USING EXISTING FEDERAL AND INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT LAW.  I said that with bold letters to emphasize that this huge bust was made WITHOUT the aid of the house bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or its Senate counterpart the Protect IP Act (PIPA).  Does this mean that maybe the tools to protect online copyrights are already in place? Hmmm…

Both SOPA and PIPA have been praised by various politicians and heads of various mega corporations as being necessary to stop online piracy and other abuses of intellectual property rights on the Internet.  Other parties have pointed out, however, that both bills go much further and appear to allow government and media moguls to curtail and even censor the American people’s use of the Internet.  Under the pending SOPA and PIPA bills, any Internet site that was “believed” to be infringing on someone’s copyright would have been required to shut down immediately until the dispute was settled. The disturbing aspects of this requirement are threefold.  One, of course, is the “guilty till proven innocent” scenario.  The second problem is that the bills are vague as to what exactly would have to be shut down.  As one critic pointed out, if a website had some content that appeared to violate someone’s copyright, the entire website could be required to shut down.  For example, one pirated video placed on, say, YOUTUBE, would be just cause to require the entire operation to cease.  YOUTUBE would be out of business in just a click of a mouse.  Finally, entertainment sites such as Napster and Rhapsody could be locked up in court for years with thousands of claims of copyright infringement, again likely shutting down or bankrupting such websites. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the FBI for proving to us what we already knew – that the laws already on the books are indeed adequate to protect the intellectual property that may be at risk on the Internet.  I would also like to point out the government’s love of creating bill titles and acronyms that express exactly the OPPOSITE of the bill’s intent.  I am thinking here of course of the USA PATRIOT Act.  We all know by now that the “Patriot Act” is actually the most treacherous attack on the United States Constitution ever engineered in the history of this nation.  I believe that the massive bills known as SOPA and PIPA, while touted as major advances in controlling intellectual crime on the Internet, are actually at best poorly thought out bills with unforeseen consequences.  But at worst, they represent another in a series of treacherous attacks on our freedom.