A war has been initiated on the web. The rights of record studios and movie producers have been weighed against the rights of entrepreneurs and Internet users.
On Jan. 20, the founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom was detained by New Zealand police. He is set to be possibly be extradited to the United States, and his cloud storage site was officially removed from the web.
All of this was done under the guise of protecting the rights of movie studios and music producers who are tired of having all of their productions pirated. However, what about the future?
Cloud networks are the file cabinets of the future. People store photo albums, reports, contracts, really anything of importance or sentimental value on them to protect valueble megabytes from loss or deletion.
Megaupload served as this type of cloud network. Besides the albums and the movies, there was a lot of personal and important information stored on these servers that now even legitimate users cannot access.
Shutting down sites like these does not promote, but hinders the future. It’s like in high school when the cops bring their drug dogs through the halls and find a couple of lockers full of drugs. Except in this case, they demand the school lockdown all lockers instead of only locking down those with drugs.
This punishes everyone for the mistakes of a few, while also hurting general school function, as the school’s focus has shifted from learning to preventing illiegal substance. How is such a school supposed to grow and improve and add to society?
However, the police have not finished yet. Imagine the cops grabbing the school principal, throwing him up against a locker and arresting him because he had knowledge regarding kids with drugs in their lockers.
Never mind the fact he did not have specific knowledge of which students had the drugs, and never mind whether or not he caught a student with drugs; he would immediately detain and punish the student.
These details are then ignored by the police and all that matters is that this principal had drugs in his school and knew, thereby allowing students a private, personal locker, which then allows for oppurtunity to abuse this privacy.
If this was really how the police abused their power, would there really be anyone willing to become a principal, to risk getting thrown in jail because of student abuses?
Well, it seems in the computer world, entrepreneurs have become the targeted favorites of the worldwide police. Does anyone really want to be the entrepreneur of an online business now knowing full well the extent of their liability?
And how far does this go? Where will the government draw the line, Internet censorship? Is the government going to create online pirate dogs that dig into my personal information on my computer looking for anything pirated.
If they find material, will there be police busting down my door to confiscate my computer, arrest me and take me to trial?
Online piracy is a real problem, but the legal and political worlds are heading in similar directions to solve it, and this direction is extreme.
Better solutions must be found that don’t just protect the rights of the entertainment industry, but also protect the rights of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet users and promote the future growth of the net.
If the government continues on the path it has been on the past few months, then perhaps it wasn’t the year 1984, but 2014 Orwell should have warned us about.
