I personally don't care for it.
All logic games aside, I believe part of the whole point of The Internet is the freedom it allows. I understand the concerns of rights olders, but at the same time making the internet safe for businesses requires creating and enforcing a degree of order that undermines the strengths of The Internet to begin with.
This kind of a suit also has a lot of potential for sheer harassment, because intellectual property rights and who can do what with what things is a gray area, and this kind of ruling could lead to people attacking competing sites, or ones that don't like, simply by making claims of violations that never occured. This is not to say of messes caused by suits and counter suits when two groups are fighting over an IP and neither has an official resolution on who controls it, no matter who wins, knocking everything off line means everyone loses (so to speak).
I could be understanding it, but that's my thought.
Besides, honestly, for all my dislike of piracy, I believe there is a need for common sense, and businesses and law enforcement are almost never guided by common sense and what's reasonable. A set of laws largely conceived to prevent people from making money off of someone else's work is largely going to be used to terrorize fan sites. Some kid creates an "I like Carnage Combat Turbo Gold XII" website, and the businessmen holding the right to "Carnage Combat Turbo Gold" are going to come waltzing up and kick over his sand castle and make his life miserable for "daring" to make a fan site, since they want all traffic involving their IP to come through their official sites so they can make money. I look at the conflicts between Viacom and Star Trek fan sites as an example of this. Once upon a time IP holders would have been ecstatic that people cared enough to create such sites and keep the hype going, now it's all about traffic, hits, and making sure to funnel people through their own advertisements, propaganda, and sales pitches. This law is going to spread a lot of ultimatly pointless misery as I understand it.
I think that anti-piracy and IP protection legislature needs to be extremely focused in scope to go after serious pirates, without basically providing overly broad tools that are going to be used for the worst kind of bullying. See, I can understand getting all upset about some guy who cracks your game and say sells it for $5 off his website, or passes it around for free through torrents so nobody is going to buy your game when they can steal it for free... but going after some guy for putting the same video you had on MTV on his site, acting in worship of you, or for making a personal site all about your game because he's that invested in it... sorry, I can understand the logic, but I can't get behind that. That's exactly the kind of garbage that is going to turn the Internet from a place of freedom and expression into a corperate police state with everyone peering through beedly little terrified eyes, afraid of what accidently stepping ont he toes of some corperate collossus whenever they do anything.
IMO businesses just need to accept the internet as it is, chaos and losses and all, or stay off of it entirely and put it out of their minds.
I know many people will disagree with me, and I'm not sure if I'm conveying the distinction appropriatly... and it's possible I misunderstand this, but I'm largely thinking of Viacom going after all the Trek fan sites, especially years ago. I understand their business logic, but at the same time I just can't really bring myself to equate having a "Captain Kirk Rocks" site with pictures of Captain Kirk from the TV series all over it, with say cracking a video game and putting it up on the internet as a free download. To me at least it seems like apples and oranges no matter how it's presented.
Likewise, when it comes to media, I think the changing times and technology need to cause some re-evaluation of when IPs become public domain... again looking at the Viacom vs. Trekkies incidents, when your looking at material that anyone has been able to access at no personal cost other than a viewing device like a TV for ages, I have some trouble with Viacome screaming bloody murder because someone dared to put up a picture of Captain Kirk from the TV series on their site. Stop and think about how much of this there is through the entire inteneet, and if this goes where I think they want it to go, just imagine the massive godzilla rampage we're about to see as every business with any kind of an audio-visual IP takes a wrecking ball to fan sites, youtube, and everything else. Heck, with some of the pictures used in Escapist articles, I can't help but wonder if this law could be used to go after The Escapist as a group of pirates if some IP holder got his dander up for some reason... for you know, using an unliscenced picture of Darth Vader in an article TALKING about Darth Vader (and of course the question arises that without specific permission to market Darth Vader, does talking about him on a site that has paid advertisements fall under this venue?).
Ahh well, I'm tired. I probably have this wrong somewhere. It sounds pretty crazy to me at the moment.
