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Anti-SOPA advocate: Kim Dotcom raid has few links with pending piracy law

My kneejerk take on today's Kim Dotcom raid: US authorites managed to engineer the arrest of the alleged pirate, and his site was taken offline, despite the German living in Auckland.

From the outside, 76 police officers seemed heavy handed. But, heck, it worked.

Why then, does the US Congress need to pass the controversial SOPA (the Stop Anti-Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). It seems the US Department of Justice, and FBI (which had four agents assisting with today's raid) have all the tools they need already.

On Twitter, and in comments after NBR's original story, others had a similar sentiment. 

I expected a leading anti-SOPA advocate, InternetNZ chief executive Vikram Kumar, to lean in a similar direction. But the InternetNZ boss was keeping cooler-headed counsel.

"Kim Dotcom's arrest is for extradition proceedings to the United States. It is on the basis that he broke US law. US jurisdiction is being claimed on the basis of the thousands of servers that Megaupload has inside the US," Mr Kumar said.

"On the other hand, SOPA and SOPA-like laws are meant to provide Hollywood and the music industry with the ability to go after 'rogue' websites outside US jurisdiction.

"While the timing of Kim Dotcom's arrest may or may not be coincidence with the SOPA protests (and the recent unannounced visit of US businesses people to New Zealand), I believe they are two different scenarios and therefore the pressure for SOPA-like laws is not lessened in any way.

"All of that is not to say that InternetNZ in any way supports the disproportionate response in the law to alleged copyright violations in the first place."

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Comments and questions
2

While it's true that SOPA and PIPA target non US "rogue" sites, whereas the Megaupload site is apparently hosted in the US, you can see a consistent theme - that is the taking down of *allegedly* infringing websites before the site owner has had the opportunity to defend itself, or, in some cases, even before the site owner knows it is charged with anything.

Obviously, this can be damaging to the online business in question but consider also the serious problems for those who have stored legitimate material in the cloud and can no longer access it. Whether or not you agree with this particular action, the ease with which such sites are being taken down with little or no independent scrutiny is concerning.

In response to Rick Shera | Friday, January 20, 2012 - 5:14pm

Thanks for your very sensible input on all of this, Rick. The US and FBI need to pull their heads in as their arrogance is embarrassing to me, as an expat Yank. Although I have no reason to admire Dotcom, I suspect (and fervently hope) the US forces get put in their place by his lawyers.

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