DSMatticus wrote:They are taking intellectual property law out of the hands of government and putting it into the hands of the decisions of a corporate oligarchy. It looks vaguely legitimate because the corporate oligarchy is only currently punishing things that happen to be illegal, but they aren't actually restricted to only punishing things that would be illegal in a court of law and they certainly aren't restraining themself to proving you guilty of a crime or taking you to civil court before taking action against you.
A bunch of special interests are getting together and leveraging their overwhelming monopolies to force you to participate in their personal clown courts.
Well already, any time they do actually make a court case out of it, they specifically make sure not to make it a criminal case. Because that involves:
[*]Getting the police to investigate it rather than the murderer they'd rather catch - and they need to get a warrant for that.
[*]Finding evidence that shows beyond reasonable doubt that it was you - if "Someone used this wireless connection to pirate stuff" is the best they have, that's not good enough to go to trial.
[*]Having the court actually look at the cost of the stuff you pirated, then setting a jail term and/or damages based on this. Even if they say "You pirated 10 songs, each from a separate CD, we're making you pay the cost of individual CDs, so that's $300" that's smaller than what they want.
By not actually treating piracy as a crime (despite all the ads telling you it's a crime), they can just put the burden of proof on you, and then be awarded damages of eleventy billion dollars. The only part where they use the actual criminal courts and such is where they strongarm the US police into charging into other countries (NZ) to arrest people for them and put pressure on to get illegal court cases going (Sweden).
