Feds Team With NFL To Use "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" Web Law To Seize Internet Domains

According to a report in tecca.com, and picked up by Yahoo News, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has had a recent flurry of Web enforcement activity. Using laws whose premise is seemingly "guilty until proven innocent," the Feds shut down over 300 Internet domains "suspected of violating NFL copyrights."

It is not comforting to know that the federales have worked overtime to mollify the anxieties of the powerful NFL-industrial complex. There are simply far more important issues to resolve than the aggressive protection of greedy football teams. The recent embarrassing hacking of a Scotland Yard-FBI conference call by Anonymous hints at the folly of putting commercial interests ahead of international security.

Far more disturbing is the serious wedge into civil liberties that the Feds' use of two civil statutes invites. Both liberals and conservatives (in the American political sense) should be alarmed by this development. The notion that the law is really being used as a hammer to protect powerful commercial enterprises makes one suspicious of the law's true purpose. (As I understand it, the legal references are 18 USC 981 and 18 USC 2323.)

The Feds' crackdown on NFL copyright violators comes on the heels of proposed SOPA legislation in Washington. The proposed law, a legal love child spawned by major entertainment firms, was shelved when a web-aware public deluged Congress with protest e-mail and phone calls, and major tech players brought out its heavy lobbying artillery against SOPA.

The law would have permitted a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to websites fingered for alleged "copyright violations." This approach emasculates Internet freedom of expression so that media moguls can sleep more comfortably at night. Meanwhile, despite all the whining from Hollywood (and its financial enablers on the East Coast), the movie makers and cable monopolists are making more money than ever. It is illuminating to watch back-to-back TV segments in which movie flaks complain about piracy, followed by a review of the week's box office receipts for new releases. Sadly, the irony of the juxtaposition is lost on the entertainment business' far from innocent power brokers.

I don't mean to diminish commercial piracy as an issue. However, "guilty until proven innocent" is the wrong way to stop the pilferage. To my mind, the law, as it was applied in the NFL case, is the guilty party. Of course, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and the NFL are welcome to prove their innocence in the online court of public opinion.