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We're at a watershed moment for intellectual property. Not a day after online protests drove Congress to shelve SOPA/PIPA, the feds demonstrated that they don't even need new laws to crack down on websites that threaten the interests of moneyed rights holders. They unceremoniously shuttered Megaupload, spooking other services that cloud-host users' files.

TechCrunch reports today that the Megaupload crackdown cut the site off at the knees just before it planned to launch a disruptive and legal music player. Another popular boogeyman for copyright holders, The Pirate Bay, announced a new, legitimate direction yesterday: It's going to host physibles, downloadable models for constructing 3D objects. Are the "pirate" sites actually Big Content's worst nightmare for legitimate reasons?

Ever since peer-to-peer file-sharing technology became popularized, it has been a thorn in the side of the companies who have traditionally profited from the distribution of entertainment-related content. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in killing off Napster, but has waged war against BitTorrent and others ever since. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has waged a similar battle, reportedly costing the film industry more than piracy itself does.

As vilified as file-sharing has historically been, the practice has been gaining favor in somewhat unexpected places lately. The Songwriter's Association of Canada recently threw its support behind the idea of legalizing file-sharing and finding ways to monetize the practice, rather than cracking down on it through legal means.

Once upon a time, Google had a pretty nasty reputation among traditional media companies, many of whom lampooned the search giant for promoting piracy and even "stealing" content outright. Much of the criticism was overblown, but it remains true that there is copyright-infringing content on the Internet and Google is may people's gateway to the Internet.

Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.

In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay, where they're now available as a torrent.

The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR.

If you head over to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay today, you'll notice an important name change. The website has temporarily rebranded itself as "Research Bay" and is asking users to participate in a brief survey about the values of the file-sharing community.

The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal - and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."

As we noted last week when the music industry released an annual report detailing its continued decline in revenue, "piracy" seems to be the go-to scapegoat, the reason that the music industry is struggling. And one of the sites that the industry often points to (and in its recent report, lauded governments for trying to quash) as a major culprit of piracy is The Pirate Bay.

So rumors that The Pirate Bay is launching a music project may strike fear - or at least disconcertment - in the hearts of industry execs. It's apt, perhaps, that a new project - fear.themusicbay.org - is supposedly in the works.

With the news of Pirate Bay convictions upheld in Sweden, website seizures in the U.S., and now threats to "do something" about Wikileaks, it's no surprise that there are now calls for an alternative DNS, one outside the reach of governments and of ICANN.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.

The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.

Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials told media.

The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites.