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Originally Posted by DirtyWhiteBoy
It makes total sense. 
But here is a better idea.... lets just do away with all laws because some people think they are a waste of time. Drunk drivers would love to do away with drinking and driving laws, total waste of time according to them. Rapist would LOVE to not have consequences. It would kick ass if I could buy machine guns at the local market. I think gun laws are stupid. Hell, lets all sell porn with 15 year old girls, fuck it, why wait until they are 18? If there is grass on the field, play ball, right? No laws!!!! It will be GREAT!
We need laws and they need to be enforced. That simple
Weed should be legalized and taxed. Hemp should be allowed to be grown all around the world. Hard drugs (coke, heroin, meth) should be illegal and that war should be fought. Because if it's not, it will be a million times worse.
Just because it is a drain on resources doesn't mean it is a waste of time. It is just an ongoing battle, but it has to be fought regardless.
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The points you make are accurate. But obviously it is a lot more complex then that. It is a matter of what laws and Government actions are most appropriate. The argument isn't whether the Government has a role, it is a matter of what role we trust them with. Additionally, as much as the US would like to think it controls the internet it doesn't and cannot effectively - that is a fact. Even if they control the root servers, if they start seizing country codes TLD's, etc you can believe that alternative DNS systems will rise immediately.
In any event seizing domains at the moment will prove ineffective past the few headlines it gains at the moment, people will operate from IPs or from the many alternate TLDs the US doesn't have direct control over, in addition to the never ending whack a mole. Not saying it is completely useless, but it will not be effective.
The most effective strategy would be blocking sites at an ISP level in the US (given the size of the market), but even then it will eventually be circumvented on such a scale that it won't even matter, if someone is willing to download utorrent to get their favorite movies, you think they won't download the inevitable circumvention software? That said it will have some effect.
At the end of both these policies though we will be left with laws that leave a dangerous precedent - especially for adult. Domains will be seized regularly in the future for anyone accused of obscenity, or other such matters, and sites will be filtered. This will become normal practice. When they pushed to introduce a child porn ISP filter in Australia, by the time it was about to come to fruition the filtered content included regular porn websites which were viewed as obscene, euthanasia websites, drug advocation websites (include for weed), etc. The US does have constitutional protections in place, but as every adult webmaster is aware the legality of porn, and certain types of porn, is still very much in question in the US.
In reality content owners have to be prepared for a long battle, and it will take international treaties such as ACTA, or the US giving up control of ICANN to an international body that represents all WTO nations, that has a process similar to the UDRP for dealing with infringement, to make any real difference given the nature of the internet. Everything in the mean time will have limited success. Unfortunately it takes years to negotiate such treaties. But 10-20+ years of rampant infringement is a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things given the revolutionary and global nature of the internet. In the mean time have patience and remain vigilant against *bad law past the short term "benefits".