"Blah, Blah, Blah, Pickles, Tomato, Because We Say So": The Language The Government Uses To (Legally) Steal From Citizens
The point is, the government can say just about anything to steal your money as long as they contend that it is proceeds from a crime -- even if they have zero proof of any such thing. That's right. ZERO.

Oh, and they don't like to use the word "steal." "Civil asset forfeiture" sounds so much nicer.

And yes, in a case where the poor victim tries to fight back, it does help to have a cooperative judge, and that's exactly what they have in the Kim Dotcom case. (Dotcom is the founder of MegaUpload.)

Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt:

Back in November, the DOJ argued that it should get to keep all of Kim Dotcom's money and stuff because he's a "fugitive," which is a bizarre and ridiculous way to portray Kim Dotcom, who has been going through a long and protracted legal process over his potential extradition from New Zealand (though he's offered to come to the US willingly if the government lets him mount a real defense by releasing his money). Dotcom's lawyers told the court that it's ridiculous to call him a fugitive, but it appears that Judge Liam O'Grady didn't buy it.

In a ruling that was just posted a little while ago, O'Grady sided with the government, and gave the DOJ all of Dotcom's things. You can read the full reasoning here and it seems to take on some troubling logic. Dotcom's lawyers pointed out, as many of us have, that there is no secondary copyright infringement under criminal law, but the judge insists that there's enough to show "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement." But the reasoning here is bizarre. Part of it is the fact that Megaupload did remove links to infringing content from its top 100 downloads list. To me, that seems like evidence of the company being a good actor in the space, and not trying to serve up more infringing downloads. To Judge O'Grady and the DOJ, it's somehow evidence of a conspiracy. No joke.

Oh, and Paypal's cutting off Dotcom's new site, Mega -- that didn't just occur to the Paypal execs one day out of the blue. Also from Masnick at Techdirt:

This all goes back to this dangerous effort by the White House a few years ago to set up these "voluntary agreements" in which payment companies would agree to cut off service to sites that the entertainment industry declared "bad." There's no due process. There's no adjudication. There's just one industry getting to declare websites it doesn't like as "bad" and all payment companies refusing to serve it. This seems like a pretty big problem.