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."
© All content copyright NBR. Do not reproduce in any form without permission, even if you have a paid subscription.
Anti-SOPA advocate: Kim Dotcom raid has few links with pending piracy law
18530