>  it already has those powers anyway.

Generally speaking, "due process" does not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement. It means the accused had an open trial in court at which they were allowed to defend themselves.

  > sentence first, trial afterwards

  > It means the accused had an open trial in court
  > at which they were allowed to defend themselves.

"Officer? Why are you arresting me? I haven't been convicted yet! Where's my trial? Where's my due process? I'm not supposed to be arrested before my trial, right?"

The Feds seem to be treating this like any other illegal business and busting it up prior to taking it to court. The only difference here is that whether or not the business is illegitimate or not is in a bit of a legal grey area.

If the Feds think that you're using your storefront to smuggle drugs, do you think that they'll wait for a trial to bust you up? Busting your business up is part of the process of taking you to trial.

  > Generally speaking, "due process" does
  > not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement

  > It means the accused had an open trial
  > in court at which they were allowed to
  > defend themselves.

The site is down. The company has all its assets seized and is unable to pay hosting bills. FBI "gave permission" to delete the data (never mind it's evidence, BTW), inducing the hosting to get rid of this unpaid-for burden. The damage to their brand is enormous - mainstream media parrot the FBI line and report Megaupload as taken down pirate site, clear-cut case. The trust of legitimate users is forever lost. Even if found not guilty, when the case finally gets to trial in a few years, the company will never be able to recover and restart its business.

How do you not call that sentenced without trial?

The law, and due process, were followed to the letter. A grand jury indicted MegaUpload of racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit copyright amongst other charges.

As someone once said, you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

As much as prosecutors would love to, we don't put people to death before they are found guilty. We should not allow the equivalent to happen to websites without giving them the opportunity to present counterarguments to a judge. They should be given notice that the domain is going to be seized, and arguments should be scheduled. Domain seizures are far too easy to obtain given that they mean the absolute and total destruction of the target business, without recourse, regardless of the ultimate outcome of any trial. That is hardly fair and certainly not the way the US system of "justice" is supposed to operate.

I find that difficult to believe. If tomorrow, the people behind MegaUpload were released, and their assets were released, and they were told they could go back to running MegaUpload as they had done so, I suspect they would, and the users would flock back to it.

Your claim is that websites require unique protection with regards to seizures. I have difficulty granting that, because if you seize all of the assets of any business, that business is, at the least [1], temporarily on hold. So, unless you can provide an argument for why websites are unique, then the process you propose would have to apply to all businesses. I have difficulty with that.

[1] I mean "at the least" literally, as a lower-bound. I don't want to get into a side argument about the likely fate of MegaUpload, since my point is that MegaUpload's fate is no different from that of other businesses.

The real world equivalent of domain seizure isn't temporarily restraining a business from certain questionable activities. It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty. If they are found not guilty, then, after more legal wrangling, they'll get the empty lot back. They are then "free" to resume their former operation.

If they open up, they might have trouble getting business if everyone thinks there are probably still rat turds in the food. So they need to advertise, maybe "change management", maybe change the name.

Who cares if the old domain is dead, if a new one can be set up that runs the same way and is just as popular?

I find that characterization both hyperbolic and inaccurate. An analogy I am much more comfortable with is seizing a business's physical store, locking the doors and keeping the key during the trial. I'm more comfortable with it because it smells like the kind of analogy a judge would make when interpreting how existing laws should apply to the internet.

So, can you provide an argument for why seizing the physical building is okay, while seizing the domain and servers is not okay? If you cannot, then what you propose would have to also apply to physical buildings, which means you're proposing a fundamental change to how seizures work before a criminal trial.

Corporations are not people, and by seizing assets and personnel the authorities have committed no murder. If anything MU has now become a household name and I find it very hard to believe their business would simply vanish overnight if acquitted.

As to your comment about Corporations not being people...may I introduce you to Corporate Personhood. According to Wikipedia....

Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person.....

In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a headnote—not part of the opinion—the reporter noted that the Chief Justice began oral argument by stating, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

If you sold 10,000 widgets to FooCorp you don't want FooCorp to claim your contract was really with one specific person within FooCorp that is no longer there. If they do something wrong, you want to be able to sue FooCorp and not its 67123 employees.

If so, it seems you are mistaken about the outrage regarding SOPA. The outrage was not defending our right to free movies. When Megaupload got taken down I started seeing all these posts that seem to be under the impression that the Internet had rallied around the right to get everything digital for free/cheap against the creators' wishes, which is not the case.

Where's the injustice?

Is there any evidence that anyone made btjunkie shut down? It sounds voluntary. Presumably they know they are doing something illegal and have chosen to shut down.

> For another analogy, this is like a pawn show deciding to close because some unrelated guys makes drug dealing inside. In this situation does governments go after pawn shops? or only after dealers?

If it can be shown that the pawn show was designed primarily to facilitate illegal conduct inside, then it's not really "some unrelated guys".

> Better yet why not make drugs legal and receive taxes for this deals?

Why not make murder-for-hire legal and tax it? Let's not make analogies just so that we can appeal to whether some other activity should or should not be legal in the analogy. And I don't even know what your point about taxes would since btjunkie likely paid taxes on their ad revenue and donations.

We can just discuss whether copyright should exist rather than resorting to silly analogies. I am not even close to happy with the current situation with copyright. My personal view is that copying for personal consumption should not be illegal. But copying or enabling copying for profit is much more nefarious to me.

I gather you think copyright should be entirely abolished and it should be legal to profit from distributing content created by someone else against their wishes. I'll respect that opinion. But it has nothing to do with SOPA, and nothing to do with people engaged in entirely legal activities being pursued.

If you believe the current laws are unjust, then please be clear that this is your stance rather than pretending that they aren't being broken. And please don't pretend that Wiki pedia and thousands of other sites blacked out for a day in support of illegal file sharing.

File sharing must be a right and this desire should be fulfilled via content producers. Making people ache for buying content and going after people making it easier is not a way to make consumers happy.

Nobody wants to watch 15 minutes of undesired videos and adds. Instead they go pirate. Nobody wants to buy physical media anymore. Nobody likes DRM content which disables them even using two different players for their enjoyment. Even yet, Hollywood and Music producers are making more and more money.

This is where the producers are making the wrong. They believe they have the every sole right to put their consumers to agony. And if someone tries to lower this pain, it's in no way can be rightful. They just try to punish them for their efforts. As we have seen with Hulu.com, Groveshark.com or last.fm. The producers are greedy. If these sites pay royalties or not, they are not happy and they do want more. They want them to make their way of restriction for their customers. In the first place these sites are here for not using that restrictions.

So everytime the consumers lose. Government and producers could sit on a table with piratebay or btjunkie and think how could the situation be solved by working together. Everybody could win.

For the SOPA side of the story, I'm living in Turkey. And I do know what could SOPA do to Internet. Because we have 5651 and BTK and living in agony. Turkish government department for information security mails websites to do self-censorship. They do hijack dns without court orders and without reasoning. SOPA is not about filesharing. It's about Governments and Producers right for censorship.

And by the way these two subjects are really not related.

However!

> This is where the producers are making the wrong. They believe they have the every sole right to put their consumers to agony.

They are not putting us through agony by producing content and then fumbling the delivery. They have no obligation to us to produce the content we want in the way we want to consume it: At worst they are not affecting us at all. We can simply not consume the content. If you consume content in a way that agonizes you, that is your own decision.

> And by the way these two subjects are really not related.

Presumably you mean SOPA and btjunkie are not related?

This discussion thread is stemming from the claim that they are related. I assumed that was where you were coming from.

But consumers are why these producers are in business. They must fulfil their needs and desires to stay in business. But you are right about not consuming. But this would be possible if there are alternatives. But there is a war on alternatives because they can not be legal, or they are pushed to their limits where they can not compete with the mainstream players.

By the way, by saying producers, most of the time I mean, distributors or production companies. Not actors or musicians.

A lot of the times, and for a lot of popular content, the production company IS the producer/artist and not the actor or director. I.e the whole "vision" of the thing is not artistic in any way, just a scheme by some marketing guys in a production company to make some dough. Like almost all blockbuster movies, lots of top-10 billboard artists, teen idols, etc. Those aren't much "created" as they are "produced", usually by committee.

I'm merely pasting numbers on a website, which isn't illegal.

But that's alright. What's important is that first we stop this trend - not a single law like this passes anymore. And then we try to reverse the trend - repeal Pro IP, overhaul copyright laws, etc.