As I mentioned in my last blog post (I’ve got to stop beginning posts like this, it’s just getting annoying now) the hacking collective Anonymous went after a series of major websites last night. This has happened because US authorities have chosen to close down Megaupload in order to clamp down on piracy.
The scale of the arrest is quite huge: each person arrested have been charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. This includes the founders who were arrested by local police in Auckland, New Zealand. The maximum jail sentence for copyright infringement? Five years. The maximum jail sentence for conspiracy to commit racketeering and money laundering? Twenty years. This is also all rather timely following the SOPA/PIPA outrage and goes to show that perhaps SOPA/PIPA isn’t needed to go after people who are hosting copyrighted material.
The one major problem of this whole battle between the authorities and online anarchists is that it weakens the prospect of proper dialogue between people who have the power to make laws and citizens. If you thought that the idea of a compromise was a stretch before all this kicked off then it seems like a near-impossibility at this moment in time. The longer that this ‘war’ goes on the less likely we are to make major process on an issue that has polarised politicians, the entertainment industry and internet users for at least a decade.
