To re-phrase another recent comment of mine:

There's content on TV?

They should've been less greedy and put a strict (and much lower) limit on how much advertisement they show. They would've found that people are quite willing to put up with a bit of advertisement, but not with tons of it.
Whenever I turn off AdBlock, I ask myself why people without AdBlock even use the Internet anymore.

So far, all I've read on /. is from people who know very little about the law whining about how evil everything the government does is by default.

He has more than enough resources to retain a bunch of really good lawyers. Don't you think that they will be happy to bring up absolutely everything that's not kosher?

This will be sorted out in court, don't you worry about it. Read up my other responses here for more details.

Like the fence who turned out to not be a fence, he'd get compensation and his shop back.

That's the dilemma the cops and courts find themselves in all the time. The solution is that if they are reasonably certain, they shut you down, put you in jail, and take the risk of having to pay compensation. If they aren't so sure, they don't and only try you in the court.

I think it also depends on the case. The fence would have his inventory seized because it also serves as evidence. The guy jailed for shooting someone would also have to close his shop since he's now in jail, but his inventory has no bearing on the case and thus would remain.

Of course, in the US, if it's a drug case, then all bets are off due to the crazy laws specifically written for the "war on drugs", i.e. your car gets seized if you're jailed for drug dealing, even if nobody even alleges that you ever used your car in relation to that.

The closest physical-world equivalent to Megaupload is a fence - not doing any stealing himself, but a knowing part of the process.

Would the police seize the goods of the fence and close his shop? Yes, they would.
Would they close it even if he runs a newspaper shop as a front? Yes, they would.
Would it suck for the honest and probably unknowning customers of his legal shop? Yepp.

And still, that's how the system works. It's not perfect, I have plenty of stories to tell myself where it fails or falls short. But frankly, I'll take this one over any out of Africa or most of the rest of the world.

So what about due process? Why does it work like this?

Because there are the rights of the accused on the one hand, and then there are the rights of the victims on the other. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not mean what you think it does. Otherwise he wouldn't be in jail, for example. The fence isn't exactly free to continue fencing until the court case has run its course. If the government busts an illegal business, it gets shut down. Because the accused isn't the only person in the world having rights. The rest of society has rights, too. Not having to put up with criminal activities is one of them.

The courts will decide that, not /.

Which is being followed, otherwise his lawyer wouldn't be able to ask the court for anything, he'd be in a small box somewhere with no lawyer and no court.

Have you considered that everyone who is reporting things is biased?

You're either ignorant, or an asshole.

When you're a con-man, your image determines how many fresh marks you can find. Once your image is ruined, it's time to move. Tech scene or not doesn't matter, any scene will do.

And yes, it makes me angry when I see people get behind sleazebags while they could be rooting for someone who's worth it, and there are more than enough of those people in jail.

They didn't jail Al Capone for running the Mafia. Sometimes, you simply can't prove what everyone knows, so you get the guy on what you can prove.

We are doing things fair. He will be convicted for something he's actually done, I'm pretty sure of that. But the reason they went after him full force for a comparatively minor crime is that they know he has a dozen other skeletons in the closet.

He won't be jailed for them, because there's too little evidence. But it's the reason they didn't just say "oh, fuck it, too much trouble".

I'm sorry, but I have an understanding of justice that goes beyond the letter of the law. If my country were to legalize, say, rape tomorrow, I would nevertheless physically assault any attempted rape I come across, even if it means that I am the criminal in the eye of the law.

I do agree with your stance on copyright enforcement, with some reservations for large-scale infringement - just like a shop owner not sending me the right item is a civil matter, but if he makes a business out of it then he's into the area of fraud and that's a criminal matter. Same for copyright infringement, all those filesharing cases belong into civil courts, not criminal courts. But someone running a factory producing counterfeit DVDs is a criminal, period. And the scale on which Megaupload operated certainly falls into that category.

Yours? Have they really put LSD into the tap water? Every western country today and a lot of countries back to ancient Rome were built on that principle.

There are ads on the Internet?

Oh, I see.

And it took you this long to realize that?

How many small-time investors do you know that made a bucket of cash on the stock market? Don't say "nobody", I'm sure you know someone if you think about it. I'm not talking filthy-rich, but someone who doubled their investment or something.

See, told you that you'd know someone. Every casino knows it needs the occasional winner so all the other marks think they could be the next one.

Now check how much banks, hedge fonds and other big financial players make at the stock market. Yepp, pretty much all their profits. Even for many banks, unfortunately. Now if you know one thing about the stock market, it should be this: It's a zero-sum game. No money gets ever created or destroyed at the stock exchange, it only changes hands.

So where do the corporations make their money from? Same as any other business: Fools.