You've heard that from your completely paranoid friends. It doesn't happen like that here in the US, where they are based. Oh, there are those who will try to do that, but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and we citizens won't let it happen.

It's no good just being vigilant without action. The media industry have already won a major battle when they bought the DMCA, and they are winning more battles when they have "pursuaded" the US government to force other otherwise sovereign countries like Australia to adopt similar legislation or suffer the consequences.

You have a lot more faith in our system than I do, we have won the first battle but the war is far from over. Dodd is basically out there threatening politicians to pass it or else. MPAA started running support ads on TV.

Most people have their head up their *** (huta). While the shutting down of wiki and a few other sites had an impact this round, I'm not too sure that this will be the case next time around. Huta people will see it as an annoyance rather than a call to action.

You can call me paranoid all you want but with the DOD classifying occupy protesters as low level terrorist threats and NDAA in place, 1984 definitely comes to mind. Then throw in video surveillance, back scatterer xray, and terahertz imaging being used here in NYC, seems like George just had the date wrong.

While I'm glad SOPA and PIPA have been temporarily quelled, those in Europe currently need to be working to smash down APTA, which is some half-assed "Trade Agreement" which more or less comes down to agreeing-to-frak-over-any-and-all-trade-that-may-possibly-entail-patent-copyright-or-trademark-violations. Which included internet data transfer etc.

Anyway, geneven, while Facebook is apparently lacking in appropriate balls and ethics to have protested on principle, and while Google/Wikipedia/etc might be safe, it's not like our USA government doesn't currently bring down sites fairly regularly. Look up "Operation In Our Sites", for example, which is the USA's various agencies grabbing domain names under property forfeiture law. Now, most of those sites are blantant counterfeiting operations, like (pulling name out of my *** here) 100football-nfl-jerseys.com or whatever, but my point is with enough pressure in the right areas, we could see operations to take down sites (not Google/Wikipedia - they do a lot to make sure they're legally safe, but perhaps other file sharing sites).

On the physical side of things, Mike Fila's post is onto something as well, though that's a bit removed as a topic from MegaUpload shutdown.

many other are also shutting down there services.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/...heir-services/

Is Filesonic ever coming back again?