I don't know why anyone is surprised. This is exactly why the RIAA and MPAA lobbied so hard to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
It gives copyright owners the right to shutdown any site they think has misused their material. Even if the charges so not stand up in court the mere threat of legal proceeding is enough to gain compliance.
This is an interesting perversion of the notion of copyright. Until the DMCA came along the copyright holder had to prove harm to win an infringement suit. Now the act of doing anything the copyright holder does not specifically permit has been criminalized. This does not bode well for our future as an information society.
Mordy Comfortably Numb Premium,MVM,ExMod 2004-07 join:2001-12-02 Denver, CO
said by tschmidt:I don't know why anyone is surprised. This is exactly why the RIAA and MPAA lobbied so hard to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
It gives copyright owners the right to shutdown any site they think has misused their material. Even if the charges so not stand up in court the mere threat of legal proceeding is enough to gain compliance.
The reasons I think people are surprised are a) A *site* didn't get shut down - an entire ISP was disconnected by it's network provider, and b) the site didn't contain any copyright infringing works. This was a clear *misuse* of the DMCA. The plug was pulled for all the wrong reasons. -- Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored - Aldous Huxley
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