Meh. Butthurt pirate is butthurt.
Regardless of one's opinion with respect to the morality of intellectual property laws, the U.S. government has always had a constitutional mandate to create and enforce such laws. (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, if you're interested.) And by those laws, uploading copyrighted material to the Internet without the copyright holder's permission is obviously a Bad Thing, modulo fair use. The question is, and always has been, what to do with dual-use services that can be used for both legitimate and infringing purposes. Originally, the Internet was governed by 1984's
Sony v. Universal, which said that as long as there was the potential for a legitimate use, the service provider was off the hook. The problem with that logic in the digital age is that Napster can control what's hosted by its servers a lot more easily than Sony could control what was being recorded with its VCRs. So we got the DMCA, which, while draconian in its restrictions of anti-DRM tools (but that's another story), was fairly evenhanded toward hosting services. Sure, they could be held liable for infringing content, but as long as they made a good faith effort to keep such content off their networks, they were untouchable under the so-called "safe harbor" provision. One of the many problems with SOPA/PIPA is that it would effectively strip service providers of this protection, allowing copyright holders to shut down every site that hosts or even links to infringing content without the goddamn common courtesy to give them a reacharound... I mean workaround.
So where does Megaupload fit into this whole story? Well, what
los federales are alleging is that the site failed to live up to its obligations under the safe harbor rule. Among other things they claim that the site's staff, which they awesomely call the "Mega Conspiracy", knowingly hosted pirated works without doing anything about them (bad), encouraged users to upload pirated works in order to drum up traffic (also bad), and did not actually delete pirated works when hit with a C&D (also also bad). If these allegations pan out, the Mega Conspiracy will be held as culpable as any other software pirate, and rightly so in my opinion. Does it suck for all the people who used Megaupload for legitimate ends, ignorant or perhaps just heedless of its shady practices? Sure. But there are dozens of other file-sharing services out there, and if you've only been using the one all this time I reserve the right to call you an idiot. Websites can go down for any number of reasons (bankruptcy, hackers, terrorists,... meteors?), so redundancy is just common sense. And honestly, who uses
any of these sites except to flout copyright? Seriously, raise your hand. Now put it down, you liar.
As for Bradley Manning, well, the wheels of justice turn slowly when they turn at all. O.J. Simpson: arrested June 17, 1994, indicted July 7, trial started January 25, 1995. And that's with lawyers for both sides working around the clock to give the man a speedy trial. More recently, Casey Anthony: first arrested July 16, 2008, arraigned October 14, trial started
May 24, 2011!
As for the Occupy Whatever hippies, they're cute, really. They think they're people. And they're learning an important lesson about politics: if you want to play the game, you have to play by the rules -- or else you get a faceful of pepper spray. Don't get me wrong, the corruption and oppression they're protesting are real, but they're also inevitable and, in this country at least, strangely harmless. Everyone knows the system is messed up, but most of the people on the bottom don't care enough to revolt, and most of the people on the top don't care enough to abuse their power except on the few who get out of line. It's a very self-aware and indifferent form of tyranny, like if hipsters wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four. ("'Concentration camps were too mainstream,' O'Brien said between sips of PBR.")
As for The Amazing Atheist (TM) himself, if anyone from DHS is monitoring this website, first of all, start posting more, and second of all, if you do ever want to ship
him off to GTMO... hey, more power to you. I should be against it on principle, but I think I can let it slide in this case. Just, uh, try to keep him in one piece so you don't have to deal with the bitchy e-mails from Amnesty International.