wahwho
Practice Squad Player
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2006
- Messages
- 202
- Reaction score
- 109
Even current laws provide too broad a brush (or sword, if you prefer) to law enforcement: today, MegaUpload was shut down by the FBI. Of course, nobody would deny that MegaUpload had its share of illegal files on it, but it also had plenty of legal content and should have been protected by various safe harbor provisions. When you consider that bills like SOPA, PIPA, and similar legislation in other countries want to expand penalties to linked content and not just directly hosted files you can see what kind of a nightmare it would be for the way the web is used.
The point of the web, at its most fundamental level, is sharing and linking. If legislation tries to restrict that then it breaks the web both technologically and conceptually. Frankly, the studios were doing the right thing when they were taking individuals to court because it was an attempt to hold those people accountable and not try to restrict multiuse technology - they were just doing it in a horribly, horribly foolish way that failed to meet any kind of burden of proof and caught up far too many innocents in essentially a legal racketeering and extortion scheme. (Oh, and completely ignoring the real problem of massive commercial infringement, as well as being completely ignorant of the true mechanisms of large-scale piracy that they never even touched, but that's a different argument.) The burden of copyright enforcement has always been on holders and these bills attempt to shift it to ISPs, site owners, and other third parties...including the federal government, which is possibly the worst group I can think of to put in charge of such a thing.
The point of the web, at its most fundamental level, is sharing and linking. If legislation tries to restrict that then it breaks the web both technologically and conceptually. Frankly, the studios were doing the right thing when they were taking individuals to court because it was an attempt to hold those people accountable and not try to restrict multiuse technology - they were just doing it in a horribly, horribly foolish way that failed to meet any kind of burden of proof and caught up far too many innocents in essentially a legal racketeering and extortion scheme. (Oh, and completely ignoring the real problem of massive commercial infringement, as well as being completely ignorant of the true mechanisms of large-scale piracy that they never even touched, but that's a different argument.) The burden of copyright enforcement has always been on holders and these bills attempt to shift it to ISPs, site owners, and other third parties...including the federal government, which is possibly the worst group I can think of to put in charge of such a thing.