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Plenty of folks are quite concerned about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being negotiated in secret. This is a treaty that (from the documents that have leaked so far) is quite troubling. It likely will effectively require various countries, including the US, to update copyright laws in a draconian manner. Furthermore, the negotiators have met with entertainment industry representatives multiple times, and there are indications that those representatives have contributed language and ideas to the treaty. But, the public? The folks actually impacted by all of this? We've been kept in the dark, despite repeated requests for more information.

When the Obama administration took over, there was a public stance that this administration was going to be more transparent -- especially with regards to things like Freedom of Information Act requests. The nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International took that to heart and filed an FOIA request to get more info on ACTA. The US Trade Representative's Office responded denying the request, saying that the information was "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." This is a treaty about changing copyright law, not sending missiles somewhere. To claim that it's a national security matter is just downright scary. As KEI points out, the text of the documents requested have been available to tons of people, including more than 30 governments around the world and lobbyists from the entertainment industry, pharma industry and publishing industry.

But when the public asks for them, we're told they're state secrets?

Following up on The Right to Read, posted in relation to a story yesterday, maybe we also need someone to write a parable about the right to sew.

OK, so somebody "stole" the length/width/heigth (sic) of the iPad.

But the right to sew is imperiled by the fashion copyright bill.

How about get them to write a better bill

The thing is utterly horrible. Issuance of support of this bill will in fact, not help the software patent situation at all. I hope people realize that. We need software patents to go away and guess what? This bill isn't it. It's a doublespeak bill.

So yes, please send to your congresscritters, who will ignore your pleas, water down the bill more, and make the only substantial thing it does be enable first to file which will fuck over people who don't file patents before inventions are created. Which, by the way, is incredibly helpful for anticompetitive patenting (hello medical patents where they patent all the equivalents and generics). Good job america.

There's a good discussion of the issue below. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110609/23171814649/people-realizing-new-anti-streaming-criminal-copyright-bill-could-mean-jail-time-lip-synchers.shtml As usual, the broad language of a bill like this creates the possibility of many unintended consequences. Here's my comment from that discussion:

OK, say a mother is recording her kid's fifth birthday party along with the whole gang singing "Happy Birthday to You!". A mishap occurs that makes it particularly funny, so the uploaded YouTube video goes viral and her personal web page with the embedded movie gets a lot of hits and ad impressions.

Doesn't sound too far-fetched huh? Oops, the song "Happy Birthday to You" is under copyright protection. Looks like Momma is heading to the Big House for a five-year stint. Don't worry, she'll be out just in time for junior's 10th!

Much more detailed than the submitter's link: techdirt's article.

For example in India. If you annoying someone in India through internet media, the Indian police will act on it. It is called the IT Act of India Amended 2008. One example of its application is here: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/15/20100415201004150444035498c0a203/Ecole-Mondiale-staffer-arrested-for-defaming-exBombay-HC-judge.html

(to be read in conjunction with http://techdirt.com/articles/20100718/20510110255.shtml) and failed attempt to ban three school blogs (http://www.techgoss.com/Story/406S11-CERT-refused-to-ban-3-school-blogs.aspx) and finally a case Google Inc USA is fighting in the Delhi court related to the same school.

Because one of these days some manatee is going to come into the restaurant demanding his slaw and this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from drive-thru to drive-thru with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into customers and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

And I'm not going to be fired for venting.

You won't be fired, but you might be arrested. This (among a myriad of other reasons) is why I've begun getting rid of any online profile even associated with my real identity, let alone my employer.

Various U.S. states have a wide array of population densities (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density ) from very low to very high. Yet we consistently have lower bandwidth (at higher prices) compared to many other countries regardless of population density. There is little to no indication that bandwidth speeds are appreciably related to population density.

The U.S. has poor bandwidth for one reason and one reason alone, because the corporations use the government to keep competition out of the market.

Even the FCC admit that U.S. broadband competition sucks.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100721/00274810301.shtml

These corporations have been known to lobby against competition because they know that competition will provide better services at cheaper prices. The problem here is simple, a lack of competition.

Various U.S. states have a wide array of population densities (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density ) from very low to very high. Yet we consistently have lower bandwidth (at higher prices) compared to many other countries regardless of population density. There is little to no indication that bandwidth speeds are appreciably related to population density.

The U.S. has poor bandwidth for one reason and one reason alone, because the corporations use the government to keep competition out of the market.

Even the FCC admit that U.S. broadband competition sucks.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100721/00274810301.shtml

These corporations have been known to lobby against competition because they know that competition will provide better services at cheaper prices. The problem here is simple, a lack of competition.

Yes, it is indiana.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110518/17015914326/what-4th-amendment-indiana-sheriff-says-random-warrantless-house-to-house-searches-are-okay.shtml

I thought the Dems were all about personality andshit. Fuck whoever you want in the ass wherever you want using government condems.

So now they want to fuck everyone in the ass with taxes and no warrent searches.

Had enough Change yet?

This is not really a republican or democrat idea but a recent trend of infringement on American's Fourth Amendment. Indiana has recently passed a bill to have warentless searches. If a police officer suspects any "Funny business" of any sort, they can intrude without a warent. This is fine and dandy when an actual crime is happening, but they can do it at any time, and if you resist in Indiana, you can be arrested for impeding an officer's investigation. If you attack an officer while he/she barges in because you are trying to protect your property, you will be charged with Assault of an Officer (which is a federal crime). It has passed in Indiana, and it is has set forth for similar laws in Texas, California, and anyone else. If someone suspects that you are doing something bad or wrong, they can call the cops and infringe on your fourth amendment.

This is a recent bill passed in indy, so it can be overturned if it is taken to to the feds, but hasn't yet.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110518/17015914326/what-4th-amendment-indiana-sheriff-says-random-warrantless-house-to-house-searches-are-okay.shtml

That's the PROTECT IP act's territory. See: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110513/11210514265/senators-who-say-merely-linking-to-certain-sites-should-be-felony.shtml

Going further, what if I have a NAS with a deduping system, connected to my network via ethernet. Is it ok to store and play music on it? What if I now move it to a colocation facility and access it via the internet? How about if they then plug my NAS into their SAN and its contents become virtualized? Then how about if I sell them the NAS itself but retain control of the contents?

At what point, exactly, does it become unacceptable?

BMI now also contends that cloud playback is public performance, even if sent to only one user!

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/18425714192/bmi-says-single-person-listening-to-his-own-music-via-cloud-is-public-performance.shtml

At what point along the scenario I outlined did it become public?

I can't wait to hear the answers to these questions!

It has already started

Too bad most Congressmen have apparently already been bought out by Comcast,. . . Good luck with that plan!

You might have been saying that facetiously, but in fact Germany has already made it illegal to leave your wifi open:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100512/1116409394.shtml

Techdirt just found that 96% of awards in business vs consumer arbitration go to the business. Still stand by your statement?

from here "The data for the study came from the PsycINFO database, which provides more than 3 million references to the psychological literature from the 1800s to the present, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters or essays, and books."

Something's wrong, I think. 3 million references is a lot!

Three million references to what? It doesn't say that the three million references were to anything related to violence, just that there are three million references.

Wikipedia has over 9 million articles. Not sure how any references the average article has, let's guess low, say 20. So that's 180 million references.

So Wikipedia has 180 million plus references that are irrelevant to the issue at hand, a clear winner.

from here
"The data for the study came from the PsycINFO database, which provides more than 3 million references to the psychological literature from the 1800s to the present, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters or essays, and books."

Something's wrong, I think. 3 million references is a lot!

I wonder what the violent video games from the 1800s looked like.

from here "The data for the study came from the PsycINFO database, which provides more than 3 million references to the psychological literature from the 1800s to the present, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters or essays, and books." Something's wrong, I think. 3 million references is a lot!

They don't make a profit. They do make money.

E.g

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples

A WB receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper.

Following the link

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml

For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting," ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:

The movie cost $150 million. So really it made $788 million income (i.e. $938-150). Profits are income less expenses. Techdirt shows you how they did it. As they put it

The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss).

Now it seems to me like someone - whoever the fee is paid to - will need to pay tax on this income. There's nothing illegal about any of this. If you run a business I think you're obliged to take advantage of any loopholes you can. And they do.

Incidentally Harry Potter was going to make money no matter what. A better example of the effects of piracy would be Serenity. That had a budget of $39 million and gross revenues of $38 million. No one is going to make movies like Serenity if the profit margin is that slim.

Serenity has a target audience - geeky 20-30s males - that is more likely to download than Harry Potter's family audience. And Serenity was the first HD movies to be cracked

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/18/hd-dvd_crack/

Now hardcore fans will insist they'll both download and buy. Of course buying something is lower priority if you've already got a copy for free. It's a lot cheaper to talk loudly about how you're going to do it than actually doing it. More convenient too. So have you wonder whether Serenity would have been profitable if it wasn't for the piracy.

The only people who can't come up with new ways to make money are either a: dinosaurs or b: people who wish to go out of business.

Lots of people have already found successful alternatives, the free product simply makes your other offerings more valuable. This is not a mystery or difficult. these things have worked for hundreds of artists, but it still involves hard work. It's far easier to make money now than it used to be, just not for the labels themselves. Surprise? they need to get over the gatekeeper role and stop trying to kill off anything that tries to make them more successful.

Copyright is by far not the only tried and true business in any sense of the imagination. Have you ever heard of live concerts? That's not a copyrighted thing, and that makes a whole lot more than cd's (copyright) do and has for far longer than copyright ever existed in the first place.

eh, my thinking was:

Doesn't the DOJ have better things to do than make themselves look like morons by trying to seize even more domains? Or did they forget that seizing domains essentially does nothing?

Actually, this has to do with Warner music group holding back spotify with retarded licensing..

You don't need to seize domain names to do that. The ISP wants the sniffers rooted out just as much as the victims.
Don't kid yourself into believing the DOJ/FBI have enough people to actually run a Domain so that no one would notice
its been taken over.

Seizing the domain name has been totally ineffective to date, serving more as a club to beat hapless ISPs than anything else.
Its one thing when you have a pirate warz site. But seizures are now used when ever there is a case with anything to do
with the internet. Even entire hosting companies can be seized with nothing but a bit of paper work.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91460/law-professor-points-out-flaws-in-us-domain-seizure-campaign/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110314/01204913484/more-reasons-why-homeland-security-seizing-domain-names-is-unconstitutional.shtml

For a well-known example, the age-old bar tab should have invalidated Amazon's "One-Click". That was well publicized and still got approved. You can claim to be following some set of guidelines, but that just shifts the blame to whoever is making the idiotic guidelines that adding 'on the internet' or recently 'on a mobile device' is somehow a non-obvious extension of prior art. This is an ongoing problem of having the bar set way too low. I don't care whose fault it is, I just want it fixed.

But to counter your direct claims, what do you say to reports of the patent office clearance quotas ([1] [2]) The idea of hurrying up to clear out the backlog only inflates the problem of companies needing to file defensive patents on every trivial little thing, causing even more backlog...

And then there's the whole aspect of "when in doubt, approve and let the courts figure it out" (e.g. [3]) which certainly isn't helping.

Publishing your own works is made possible by people working for profit.

Yes, I offer my work for free to a website, and the people who run it profit from the advertisments on the site. I win, they win, the readers win.

Given that home entertainment systems have extremely high quality these days, if there was no copyright, no one would go to the cinemas. Instead, they would view the movie at home, in 60" hires TVs, with dolby surround sound, and even with 3d glasses.

Then how do you explain that the film industry's revenues have continued to increase during the 2000's, despite rampant piracy?

Cinemas have always have an edge over home entertainment systems. When TV came, cinemas had colour. When TV got colour, cinemas had stereo sound. When TVs got stereo sound, cinemas got surround sound. When people got home entertainment systems with large, flat screens and surround sound, cinemas got colour 3D. When Joe Average has a 60" hires 3D TV with surround sound in his home, I'm willing to bet the cinemas will come up with something new to compete.

Cinemas also have a social function; they provide a place to meet your friends or your date outside either person's home.

But for the sake of argument, let's say they fail, everyone watches TV instead, and every last movie theatre has to close. What's the worst that could happen? That the film companies would have to produce directly for TV instead? That they would have to insert unobtrusive advertising and put their productions up on BitTorrent themselves?

TV productions are almost entirely financed by advertisements, not future DVD sales.

Not on cable or satellite systems.

It's the same type of films and TV productions on satellite/cable systems as on ad-financed TV. They're just two different ways of getting revenue from them.

Most artists already earn most of their income from concerts, not from CD/downloadable music sales

They would have earned their income from sales if it wasn't for piracy.

Not true. This Norwegian Master's thesis demonstrates that music artists never got more than 20% of their income from CD sales. The rest has always come from other sources, like concerts and merchandise. The figures are based on the Norwegian music market, but they shouldn't be dramatically different in other Western countries.

The same study also shows that during the last decade, the average income of Norwegian music artists has increased by 66%, even though the number of artists has also increased. It's the same period during which music filesharing took off and exploded.

There are many other studies from different countries showing that piracy has a net effect on sales that is roughly zero - sometimes the effect is even positive, since piracy works as free advertising. This is often the case for japanese animation, according to a Japanese government study.

As Mike from techdirt points out:

Am I Violating The DMCA By Visiting The NYTimes With NoScript Enabled?

A quick google search for '"google sues" patent' returns less than 50k result which pretty much means it hasn't happened. First link was this, kind of interesting:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091110/0843176877.shtml

TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)

I hope you washed the money they paid you...a little research suggests that it was probably a lot slimy.

Uh, that's certainly VERY "little research". Essentially, it's an opinion piece that includes two quotes - one from a Stephens Media rep who expresses hope that the lawsuits in question will result in more linkbacks to LVRJ articles online (and, by implication, fewer cops of LVRJ content), and the other from the slimebag that runs Righthaven. Now, since Stephens Media does NOT own Righthaven, I fail entirely to see how this "suggests" in any way, shape, or form that Stephens Media is "probably a lot slimy."

Which brings up the question of why you believe that a freelance writer (i.e. - me) selling a story to a weekly magazine whose editorial management is (as is the case with EVERY ethical news operation) completely divorced and firewalled from the business management side of the operation is in any way unethical, immoral, or "slimy".

My hunch is that you're just a dimwiit who didn't bother to read MY article, who is profoundly unfamiliar with the principle of editorial independence in professional journalism, and who has such a pathetically weak little ego that you have to reach around the block for a pretext to feel morally superior to strangers, based on nothing but someone else's hot air.

Having said that, I want to make clear that I have zero sympathy with Righthaven's handwaving, and I consider Stephens Media to have made a major error in judgement in allowing itself to be linked with those scumbags. Yes, it's getting harder and harder for newspapers to turn a profit as online news aggregators increasingly steal their readers. That's tough (and it's particularly tough on those of us who write for a living, since the very newspapers and magazines that the aggregators are parasitizing are the source of much of our income), but it still doesn't make it a good idea for them to associate themselves with legal bullying. However, I doubt that it will cost them many additional readers, because most people just don't give a damn about copyright trolling.

Anyway, the courts have shown little sympathy with Righthaven's conduct. Copyright trolling has turned out not to be the license to print money that Righthaven expected it to be, and I fully expect it to fold its tent and slink silently back into the slime from which it oozed, RSN.

TFS should have read the "Las Vegas Sun" - the other daily paper in Vegas, and one with a decidedly more leftward tilt than the strongly conservative Review-Journal, whose proxy Righthaven is. The Greenspun Media Group, which owns the Sun, also owns the "Las Vegas Weekly", one of two major alternative weeklies in Vegas (the other is Las Vegas Citylife, a Stephens Media paper, for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I wrote a cover story in 2008.)

I hope you washed the money they paid you...a little research suggests that it was probably a lot slimy.

I believe the mentality goes like this:

"I'm not sure I'd really want a $0.99 'tech' book. However, something free is worth at least looking at - hey this is pretty good I'll tell my tech friends." And some of them buy it.

There was just a guy who lowered his published his fictional eBook from $2.99 to $0.99 and made more money due to higher sales - linky. I think the difference is spending a dollar on recreation is fine for people, but if it's for 'work', I'm going to want to spend a decent amount to make sure I'm getting a quality product. The 'free' stuff gets noticed but the 'super cheap' stuff is still viewed as being lower quality.

bribery, hidden agendas, employee abuse, poor environmental practices

Did you even try googling any of those? Perhaps you've been so poorly bribed that, abused by Microsoft though you may be, your hidden agenda is to astroturf on tech news sites, polluting them?

Bribery:

• 2005-2010 Bing "Loyalty Rewards" program - widely derided as an attempt to grab customers with bribes. If Bing is as good as they want it to be, why do they need to offer cash?
• 2007 OOXML ISO process bribes - you may want to argue about rewarding people for using Microsoft products, by "competitive behavior" maybe you mean offering incentives to a few key people to get things done. But for a standards process, that is bribery. Standards must be evaluated on their technical merit alone. (PDF warning)
• 2006 Bloggers bribed with laptops - when every news site is calling it a bribe, I'd say it's not just "competitive behavior."

Hidden Agendas

• 2010 - Microsoft's shell company, Attachmate, attempted to buy 882 patents from Novell.
• 2007 - Here's the same wired story about OOXML. I'm not going to do your googling for you; this one's obvious.
• 2005 - Microsoft's addition of PDF support. I didn't even know about this one, but it turns up in a google search... Dude, do your own homework next time.

Employee Abuse

• Have you never heard of throwing chairs? Seriously?
• Microsoft's continuing problems with their Chinese workforce - remember, don't hire them directly. Farm it out to a subsidiary to distance yourself from the inevitable PR disaster.

Poor Environmental Practices
Did you mean to suggest Microsoft is a hardware company?

Or can we count all the useless trash they have pushed out the door, forcing users to reformat their machines as soon as they buy them so they can downgrade to a decent OS, Vista ending up straight in the landfill?

> I rather spend $50 and have a great game than small little games for a few dollars.

Fortunately people don't want that $50 over-priced nonsense and show otherwise....

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090219/1124433835.shtml
Valve dropped the price on L4D and sales went up over 200% !

        * 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
        * 25% off = 245% increase in sales
        * 50% off = 320% increase in sales
        * 75% off = 1470% increase in sales

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/live-blog-dice-2009-keynote-gabe-newell-valve-software/

"Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline."

You should have more sympathy. He probably lives in the type of place where the national investigatory authority is liable to attach a GPS tracker to your car for being the wrong kind of person or thinking the wrong kind of thoughts.

They can't even find guns with scanners and full-body gropers and you expect them to be able to know the difference between a real document and a forgery?

No, the reason it is cropping up is because the US is doing it. Once a leading country does, everyone else points at them as the example.

Today's lesson is parents keylogging kids with the aid of the police. How long will it be before the computer savvy among the kids keylog their parents or teachers? Kids learn things quickly. Teach them that spying and dishonesty is the way to treat people and they'll learn the lesson and apply it.

If this commenter at techdirt is to be believed.

On Techdirt. It's a censorship and surveillance map. Notice how Australia already shares the dubious distinction of spying on their Citizens with Russia? Of course we're spied on here to but not to the same degree.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110215/22214113120/once-again-why-homeland-securitys-domain-name-seizures-are-almost-certainly-not-legal.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110216/11305113129/ron-wyden-speaks-out-against-coica-we-shouldnt-toss-out-first-amendment-just-to-go-after-few-bad-actors.shtml

Useful info on getting the straight line on the domain name seizures.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110215/22214113120/once-again-why-homeland-securitys-domain-name-seizures-are-almost-certainly-not-legal.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110216/11305113129/ron-wyden-speaks-out-against-coica-we-shouldnt-toss-out-first-amendment-just-to-go-after-few-bad-actors.shtml

Useful info on getting the straight line on the domain name seizures.

Openness != Lawlessness

Precisely. Which is why the MafiAA, who employ illegal tactics, have been caught numerous times engaging in "investigation" using unlicensed personnel who have tainted evidence, have been caught fabricating evidence, have been caught persecuting people that they knew, or should have known had they done anything resembling due diligence, to be innocent (to wit: EXTORTION), and who have been caught on a regular basis defrauding the artists they claim to "represent" not to mention cooking the books to try to claim that movies/albums/etc "lose money", ought to be forcibly disbanded by the courts.

What does work is Bing's approach of using actual user data.

No, that's spammable, too. See "click fraud". Anonymous crowdsourcing in competitive environments only works if you're a little player and nobody cares enough to spam you. If Blekko gets enough market share to attract SEO efforts, their "slashtags" will be overwhelmed by junk.

Read how Craigslist lost the battle against spam. They tried CAPTCHAs. They tried requiring unique email accounts. They tried phone verification. Nothing worked. There are power tools for defeating each of those. Most of the recommendation systems have similar problems. To check this out, read Citysearch recommendations for some category like carpet cleaning or locksmiths, cut out some unique phrase from a recommendation, and search for it to see in how many other recommendations it appears.

The only recommendation systems that really work are ones where either the number of recommendations per item is huge (as with movies and TV), or recommendations are tied to transactions (as with eBay or Amazon.)

Who said wikileaks hastily and carelesly released anythng?

1: you cannot redact everything, or it's not a document. That's worse than a FOIA redaction, in which case people can't figure out a goddamn thing.

2: the only people they allow to be identified are the tyrants who should be identified, not anyone else. Military has already admitted that just about nobody has been harmed from wikileaks releases, if you'd take your head out of your ass and read.

From the second article:

when Congress asked the State Department to back up those statements, officials told them it really wasn't that big of a deal:
"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

so who are they causing to die, exactly?

Who said wikileaks hastily and carelesly released anythng?

1: you cannot redact everything, or it's not a document. That's worse than a FOIA redaction, in which case people can't figure out a goddamn thing.

2: the only people they allow to be identified are the tyrants who should be identified, not anyone else. Military has already admitted that just about nobody has been harmed from wikileaks releases, if you'd take your head out of your ass and read.

From the second article:

when Congress asked the State Department to back up those statements, officials told them it really wasn't that big of a deal:
"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

so who are they causing to die, exactly?

your argument is not even remotely on center. Hotfile is a storage locker. They are paying for the bandwidth in advance and just charging users to use it.

This has nothing to do with IP or even copyright infringement for that matter. Additionally, the lawsuit here is another of MPAA's "we hope the judge is a technology moron" lawsuit.

It's not Hotfile's job to give two shits what is on their website, and it's also not their job to watch or monitor it for illegal or other activities. Section 230 among others covers them from that in it's entirety.

That's a point of view (or several). Saying that there is no reasonable other views possible, just shows your own narrow-mindedness.

Those "reasonable other views" as you put it should carry a high burden of proof (of their own validity) when they want to ruin peoples' livelihood with big lawsuits. The "point of view" that doesn't want to do that is not trying to force anyone to adhere to it, and thus needs to meet no such burden of proof.

You relativist bastard.

your argument is not even remotely on center. Hotfile is a storage locker. They are paying for the bandwidth in advance and just charging users to use it.

This has nothing to do with IP or even copyright infringement for that matter. Additionally, the lawsuit here is another of MPAA's "we hope the judge is a technology moron" lawsuit.

It's not Hotfile's job to give two shits what is on their website, and it's also not their job to watch or monitor it for illegal or other activities. Section 230 among others covers them from that in it's entirety.

That's a point of view (or several). Saying that there is no reasonable other views possible, just shows your own narrow-mindedness.

your argument is not even remotely on center. Hotfile is a storage locker. They are paying for the bandwidth in advance and just charging users to use it.

This has nothing to do with IP or even copyright infringement for that matter. Additionally, the lawsuit here is another of MPAA's "we hope the judge is a technology moron" lawsuit.

It's not Hotfile's job to give two shits what is on their website, and it's also not their job to watch or monitor it for illegal or other activities. Section 230 among others covers them from that in it's entirety.

However, the summary is misleading here:

And because the site charges membership fees before people can download the content uploaded by others, ...

Hotfiles allows for downloads (though at limited speeds) for non-premium accounts too.

Congress can't do that, because it violates due process. We have to give "the bad guys" a trial. They are presumed innocent, until proven guilty.

Agreed. Violating due process is best left to the professionals.