Honestly never heard of Megaupload before this news broke. Their services remind me of those lockers you see at airports and bus stations. You rent a box and the box owner probably warns you up front not to put anything in there that you wouldn’t want seen on the evening news.

Megaupload could probably claim that it did not know that copyright material was being uploaded and downloaded, but that would be a bit naïve on their part, especially since their technology was replacing an older, less efficient file sharing technology. The “I didn’t know” argument may not hold up against the prosecution’s argument of willful blindness, however. Time for their attorneys to take a look at the Pentalpha and Grokster cases for further guidance on litigation strategy or better yet, guidance on a settlement. Not only won’t willful blindness hold, but their file sharing business model may have induced more consumers to infringe on copyrights.

Fortunately these guys aren’t a public company or else investors would be seeing shares tank.

Wikipedia’s self-imposed blackout over the Stop Online Piracy Act is fine by me. When I taught at a community college, any student who cited Wikipedia qualified for an automatic “F”. I put a few papers into the shredder using that filtering system.

Let’s consider whether freedom of speech means taking another person’s copyrighted material and using it for commercial gain without so much as giving the producer of the content credit for creating it in the first place.

Yes, the Internet facilitates the exchange of information, the ease of which adds great value to the providers of the network and to those information consumers who use the network. If liberals are so concerned about transparency, however, shouldn’t the information consumer have knowledge about where this information is coming from?

The Wall Street Journal reported last Saturday about President Obama’s discomfort with the Stop Online Piracy Act. Seems even if it passes Congress, Mr. Obama will veto it.

Is the Obama Administration saying it’s more concerned about protecting content delivered by rogue web sites? If what is currently on the books was effective against infringement on American copyrights, would this legislation have been brought forward? What alternative legislation has the Obama Administration offered?

Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, Inc., recently referred to HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011, as censorship.

Censorship? Really?

What we have here is an aggregator like Google running scared because of threats to its advertisment revenue. So what if content providers have to sustain an increasingly aggressive attack on their intellectual property. Compound the attacks with the expense of having to defend against a culprit sitting overseas and you can see why Internet piracy is disturbing.

Other critics of SOPA such as Joshua Kopstein are claiming that SOPA will negatively impact the free flow of information and harm the Internet as we know it. Sniff, sniff. I can smell a net neutrality proponent here.

In an evolving economy like ours where citizens are using the Internet as a resource for generating income, the last thing we need is less protection of intellectual property. If we follow the anti-SOPA line of thought, there eventually won’t be any information of worth moving across the Internet.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today issued a notice asking U.S. patent and trademark holders to chime in on the difficulties they may be having enforcing their patents and trademarks in China.

China bashing has been part of the political rhetoric of late, with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney recently laying in to the Asian Tiger for stealing American inventions. For example, as reported by Bloomberg News, Mr. Romney has called for a free-trade zone for countries that don’t go around dissing American inventors. Mr. Romney has also called out China on violating copyright law as well.

I can relate to Mr. Romney’s concerns. I don’t know if I’ve been hit just by spam or something more sinister, but last week I received three e-mails from an alleged Chinese firm claiming that they were in the process of registering my domain name as a “.cn.” They said that while they acknowledge that I would be concerned about this (like, duh, you think), they wanted to go ahead and register my name so that they could sell goods under the domain name.

They also recommended that I buy the domain name, plus some other derivatives of it, and that they would gladly send the price list.

Hmmm. I can hear the theme from “The Godfather” in the background.

Why would any Chinese consumer buy goods and services from an “altondrew.cn” given that the name belongs to a Afro-Carib-Irish guy living in Atlanta with an Anglo-German name, who is a couple shades darker than President Obama?

Also, why should I be forced to buy domain names I don’t want?

I can only conclude that this company wants to bite on whatever intellectual property I produce and pirate it. Granted, intellectual and Alton Drew may not go hand in hand (just ask my four readers), but does that give China the right to force me to buy domain names or steal my writings?