Earlier quoted context omitted.
It very much does matter if you're protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA. The problem is that Kim Schmitz and his team did things, including paying contributors to upload copyrighted material, that forfeited their protections. Prosecutors didn't make this stuff up; the requirements for claiming service provider protections are right there in the law. The prosecution has Schmitz and associates in their…
That is for a court to establish in what we call due process. But what happened instead was that a prosecutor found they were not protected under safe harbor. With the stroke of a pen, that turned the business into a criminal racket. Overly general mafia and drug war laws then allow the prosecutor to confiscate property and freeze funds, killing the business. Of course a judge still has to sign off, but there are no…
If you don't believe commercial piracy on an industrial scale should be criminalized, then naturally you'd believe that there aren't enough due process constraints on the DoJ to pursue those cases. But if you accept the fact that creating hugely profitable high-volume piracy applications is a crime under US law, it's hard to see the "due process" problem here.