Thursday, February 09, 2012

Money and IP: separated at birth?

So the Feds can take a site like Mega Upload offline, take its contents into custody, just because some copyright holders (granted legitimately) say stolen property is in there. Of course not ALL content was stolen property, just some of it. And after the Feds are done with their investigations they don't give that stuff back to their rightful owners - it's just delete and forget.

Now imagine this, replace intellectual property with money, and Mega Upload with a bank. Suppose some criminal activity was going on, and stolen money entered the bank, would the government seize control over the bank, and take it all, including the savings account of innocent account holders? We are probably not too far off from that reality.

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