Does the U.S. government’s shuttering of the file-sharing website Megaupload.com show that new laws are not needed to battle intellectual property piracy? Brookings’s Allan Friedman believes it does.
“Given that the U.S. authorities have just used existing law, I think the answer is a resounding yes,” Friedman says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. He’s a fellow in governance studies and research director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, a Washington think tank.
Federal authorities on Thursday charged the operators of Megaupload with violations of numerous conspiracy laws for pirating copyrighted music. The charges came as Congress suspended consideration of the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act because of public objections of provisions of the bills. Opponents contend the legislation would violate Internet freedom. To protest the legislative proposals, a number of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, staged temporary blackouts this week.
“The interesting thing is that these lockers (such as Megaupload.com), as they’re called, have been cited as reasons why we need these new laws,” Friedman says. But he points out that existing laws, such as those used by federal authorities this week, seem to be adequate.
The charges against Megaupload’s leaders provoked the hacker collective Anonymous to launch on Thursday denial-of-service attacks at Justice Department and FBI websites as well as those of the motion picture and recording industries’ trade associations (see Hackers Target DoJ, FBI Websites).
Tags: Copyright Infingement, Illegal File Sharing, Legislation, PIPA, Piracy, SOPA
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