Internet as Police State

Think groups who oppose SOPA, CISPA, et al are overreacting? Better think again--

World’s Oldest BitTorrent Site Shuts Down | TorrentFreak: "After a lengthy legal process the authorities eventually dropped the charges against the admins in 2011. The court concluded that the evidence was solely provided by FACT and thus unreliable. While this was a huge relief and a welcome victory for the admins, the legal process effectively killed the once-so-vibrant FileSoup community."

Techdirt.: "Back in 2009, we wrote about how anti-piracy organization FACT worked closely with UK law enforcement to have the guy who operated Filesoup arrested. At the time, we noted that it wasn't at all clear what he was doing that was illegal, as the site was merely a forum. Though some people did, in fact, use that forum for the sake of infringement, that shouldn't implicate the forum host. And, in fact, after about a year and a half, the courts dropped the case, realizing that the arguments the industry kept feeding law enforcement didn't add up to anything illegal."

Tell The White House To Stop Illegally Seizing & Shutting Down Websites | Techdirt: "Last week, a White House petition was set up, calling for the White House to put an end to Operation In Our Sites. To date, the administration has done everything possible to hide from the fact that it's censoring websites, while playing up claims that it's "stopping piracy." This needs to stop. Signing the petition is one step in making that happen, along with actually holding the White House responsible for the fact that it is censoring and shutting down websites, even while it's telling the rest of the world that they need to stop censoring the web. Please pass the story around to others, so that they recognize what's already being done by the US government to censor websites under the guise of copyright law."

Feds Tell Megaupload Users to Forget About Their Data | Threat Level | Wired.com: "Federal authorities say they may shut down cloud-storage services without having to assist innocent customers in retrieving data lost in the process. The government is making that argument in the case of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January following federal criminal copyright-infringement indictments targeting its operators. The Obama administration is telling an Ohio man seeking the return of his company’s high school sports footage that he should instead be suing Megaupload — even though the government seized Megaupload’s assets in January."

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