Protecting intellectual plant sounds like such a noble cause that you'd have to be a anarchistic free-market extremist to be against the idea, right? Actually, we don't think Google CEO Eric Schmidt is particularly extreme in any definable way, yet this past week he spoke with gusto, railing against the design Protect IP Act, which is was designed to "prevent online threats to being careful of resources' creativity and theft of intellectual property." If passed into law, it would give the empire the right to shut down any "Internet site cpanel to infringing activities" -- "infringing activities" largely being of the sort that allows dude A to log out copyrighted item B from dude C when it's unclear whether dude C has legal rights to be distributing B in the first place.



So, you know, it's targeting the Pirate Bay and its ilk, giving empire company hq greater power to sweep in and snag the domains of such sites. Schmidt calls this coming a set of "arbitrarily simple solutions to complex problems" that "sets a very bad precedent." The precedent? That it's okay for public


copyrights:cite this source synonym stock v1.1copyright © 2008 by lexico issue group governments to go and kill any site they doesn't like, thing Schmidt says would only reassure restrictive policies in underdeveloped except those with communist authority (north america like China. While we don't think China really needs any sort of encouragement at all to keep on pile up its Great Firewall, we tend to agree that this is a much more tangled problem than the Act makes it out to be. That said, one must admit that Schmidt's opinions are accordingly somewhat swayed by the wisdom that any such law would also have a unadvantageous impact on the mã©tier of search engines in general.



But of course no such volley of words could go unanswered from the two shining knights of copyright protection, the MPAA and RIAA, which mounted up their concerted blogs, rode down from twin castles full of lawyers, and collectively told Schmidt he's full of it. The MPAA spun Schmidt's info* into some sort of act of civil disobedience, saying that "Google seems to think it's above America's laws." Meanwhile, the RIAA called the utterance "a confusing step backwards by one of the most influential dossier superhighway companies." without doubt it's only going to get nastier from here, so buckle your seatbelts, place your bets, and hang on to your BitTorrent clients.

The Protect IP Act: Google's Eric Schmidt squares off against RIAA and MPAA at first appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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