The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez provides important perspective regarding public outcries over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) by reminding of how the FBI already has significant power when it comes to internet regulation. That certainly doesn’t mean that apparently successful protests over these two acts weren’t a good thing, but Sanchez uses a Justice Department action that took place just last week to illustrate his point. From FBI Reminds Us Government Already Has MegaPower to Take Down Websites:
Online activists were still busy celebrating a successful day of protest against proposed (and now shelved) Internet censorship legislation when the Justice Department pulled the popular cyberlocker site Megaupload offline Thursday, and indicted its owners on charges of criminal copyright infringement. It was a serendipitously timed demonstration of two important facts.
First, the U.S. legal system is perfectly capable of reaching criminal suspects overseas. Megaupload is incorporated in Hong Kong, and its CEO was arrested (along with three employees) in New Zealand. That’s significant because supporters of laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) typically claim they’re helpless to do anything about overseas sites by more conventional means, necessitating aggressive new enforcement powers with streamlined hearings that give short shrift to due process. Now, if the people behind Megaupload are, in fact, guilty of criminal activity—and the indictment certainly looks damning—the government will have the opportunity to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt before a jury, which will also get to hear any exculpatory facts or arguments the defendants are able to offer. It can be a slow process, but it’s also how we’re supposed to do things in the United States: we don’t just issue orders branding people or sites as “rogues,” we convict them.
Second, if you’re worried about the government taking down U.S.-registered sites, which include any site in the .com and .org domains, wherever their servers might be located, then SOPA and PIPA aren’t really what you should be concerned about: the government already has that power under the PRO-IP Act of 2008. There are good reasons SOPA and PIPA attracted more attention: Instead of “seizing” domains directly at the registry, they would have imposed blocking and filtering obligations on thousands of ISPs and search engines, creating a whole host of technological and security problems. There was also the private right of action, which seemed more susceptible to abuse by overzealous copyright owners who were able to find a friendly judge. But the central power of the government to shut down web domains is already there in PRO-IP, and has been used to seize hundreds of sites already—wrongfully in at least some cases. Incidentally, those absurdly inflated phony statistics I wrote about earlier this month—the ones the Government Accountability Office has debunked, which even the content industries have finally stopped using—were heavily cited as evidence for why PRO-IP was needed, featuring prominently in press releases by the bill’s authors.
Attribution:
FBI Reminds Us Government Already Has MegaPower to Take Down Websites
Julian Sanchez
January 20, 2012
Cato Institute
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/fbi-reminds-us-government-already-has-megapower-to-take-down-websites/#utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Cato-at-liberty+%28Cato+at+Liberty%29
Sanchez also ties this issue to civil asset forfeitures, a topic that has long been an interest here at Estate of Denial®. He says:
Civil forfeiture laws have, frankly, always been subject to abuse. But when a suspected drug dealer’s car is seized, the effects are at least limited to the suspect and his family. The de facto seizure of an entire online platform, by contrast, affects all the users of that site, including many thousands who were using it to engage in legitimate, protected speech. And precisely because the non-pirate uses are less likely to involve public links, it’s extremely hard to know in advance exactly how much collateral damage is inflicted on legitimate activity by the seizure. In this specific case, I’d wager the proportion of illicit to legitimate content was quite high, but I can guarantee there’s also a whole lot of copyright-infringing videos posted to YouTube at any given instant as well; most people, presumably, recognize that shutting down YouTube in order to disable access to those videos would not be worth the enormous cost to protected speech.
Whether government intervention comes in the form of onerous regulations or abusive legal actions (as we see in many probate cases), Americans should be aware of varying fronts from which assaults threatening property rights and economic freedoms are occurring.
Estate of Denial® provides news, analysis and commentary on abusive practices occurring in probate courts and via probate instruments (wills, trusts, guardianships, powers of attorney). We provide original perspective to educate the public regarding this growing threat to both individual freedoms and property rights.
