Gigaom: The threat of rampant piracy — the downloading and re-distribution of what the content industries claim are billions of dollars worth of intellectual property — is continually raised to justify ever-more-draconian laws such as the recently proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. While they have been shelved (at least for now), the pressure on legislators to come up with new variations continues, as does the pressure to launch federal cases against service providers like Megaupload or Hotfile. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham argues that this phenomenon isn’t the natural order of things, but stems from the failure of those content industries to adapt to the new realities of the internet. He is right — as long as they continue to resist, the battle will go on.
US music and movie industry companies helped to get pirate sites blocked in many countries but on their home turf, legal action is surprisingly absent. For years we have wondered why local ISPs are being left alone and we now have an answer. Former RIAA executive Neil Turkewitz says that SOPA's ghosts have been a major stumbling block.
Allowing private entities the power to censor the internet is never a good idea. If pirates can get blocked, so can unpopular bloggers and political groups. There are good reasons why SOPA failed, and if that failure is still bearing fruit, I applaud it.
Warnings from the EFF this week that Hollywood is making renewed efforts to obtain SOPA-like powers over Internet companies has touched a nerve, with filmmakers and anti-piracy activists attacking from all angles. The EFF should stop talking about the past, its critics say, and admit that the Internet won't get broken by Hollywood.
TorrentFreak has the exceptionally troubling story of a federal district court in Oregon issuing an incredibly broad and questionable order, effectively wiping a bunch of websites out, without ever letting the websites in question know that they were being "tried" in court. The request came from ABS-CBN, a giant Filipino entertainment company arguing infringement, of course. But the argument against these sites is somewhat questionable already, made worse by the demand that the whole thing be done under seal (without alerting the site operators). Then Judge Anna Brown granted the temporary restraining order, basically deleting these sites from the internet, without even a sniff of an adversarial hearing.
