Government takedown of Megaupload leads to new fears

[Poll_Blind]

From USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-20/megaupload-arrests-FBI/52697186/1

[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.3077em 0.3077em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Government takedown of Megaupload leads to new fears[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3077em 0.3077em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]The government takedown of Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site, has stoked simmering fears that hard-line enforcement of copyright infringements could profoundly disrupt Internet commerce.

File sharing has become a major way corporations collaborate with employees and partners and interact with customers. It fuels the sharing of rich content across Internet-connected devices in the home and office and distributed to mobile devices and has emerged as a major component of cloud computing, the delivery of content and services across the Web.

"If legitimate content is housed on the same service that might have infringing content, it gets sucked into this vortex and it's gone," says Dennis Fisher, security blogger at Threatpost.com. "I don't know how much the government or these companies (advocating strict anti-piracy enforcement) have thought this through. I would guess not a lot."

--snip--

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends free speech and digital rights online, said in a statement that the arrests set "a terrifying precedent. If the United States can seize a Dutch citizen in New Zealand over a copyright claim, what is next?"

PB

[snagglepuss]

1. I know next to nothing about file-sharing but KimDotcom doesn't seem

to have been motivated by altruism given the amount of money he made from megaupload. He didn't produce the music so why should he of all people benefit?

[starroute]

2. First they came for the software pirates ...

... and I said nothing because I was not a software pirate ...