In the blue corner we have the US criminal justice system.
On Thursday, acting on requests from a US federal prosecutor, New Zealand police arrested Kim Dotcom, founder of Hong Kong-based Megaupload Limited, and three other company executives. The company's internet domains were seized and servers shut down. Authorities in Hong Kong froze $39 million in assets.
Megaupload ran a network of internet services, the best-known of which was file hosting site Megaupload.com. Users could upload files for others to download, either anonymously or as registered users with either a free or paid account.
"File sharing", in other words, but I'm avoiding that term because the copyright industries are keen to equate the noble word "sharing" with "stealing". Let's not encourage that fraud.
The feds claim Megaupload's customers were illegally distributing copyrighted material, generating $175 million as proceeds of that crime, and costing copyright owners $500 million in lost revenue.
In the red corner we have Anonymous.
Well, we have a random and unknown collection of people who claim that they support the worldview that is espoused by people who say they espouse the worldview labelled Anonymous. Could be anyone. But for the purposes of lazy reportage we'll just say "Anonymous said" and "Anonymous hacked", m'kay?
Anonymous claims (see previous paragraph) to have conducted "the single largest Internet attack in its history", though no numbers were given.
As usual, it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that flooded a bunch of websites off the grid. As usual, it was a scattergun selection, either "the law" or "the evil industry" or the like, ranging from the US Department of Justice and the FBI, to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its chief executive Chris Dodd, Warner Music Group and so on.
In a way, this story is nothing new. Law enforcement agencies took action against an alleged copyright-infringing operation, and in retaliation there was a DDoS of various big-name sites. Yawn.
But in a week when the blackout protest of some of the world's most popular websites - as well as an estimated 75,000 to 115,000 others - drew attention to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), thinking people's antennas are more finely attuned to the issues.
It's easy to point to Megaupload and say that something dodgy must have been going on. At least some of the more than 180 million registered users are bound to have been distributing copyright material. With those numbers, how could it be otherwise?
And that's without even exploring the site and seeing how easy it was to find the good stuff.
The FBI goes further, alleging that "the conspiracy" had set up their business model specifically to encourage users to upload popular copyrighted material for others to download.
"The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded," said the FBI's media release.
"In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicise infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicise such content on the Megaupload site [itself]."
Other techniques were allegedly used to conceal copyright infringement, or convey the impression that Megaupload was acting to curb such activity when it wasn't.
None of this has yet been proven in court. Yet the sites have been shut down. Megaupload users who were going about their perfectly legitimate business have lost their subscription fees. Families can no longer exchange their home movies. Musicians, filmmakers and software developers can no longer share the files they were working on.
The FBI's timing is remarkably ham-fisted. This is precisely the kind of guilt-by-allegation and collateral damage that the anti-SOPA protestors have been banging on about. And if current laws make it difficult for American authorities to reach out beyond US shores to get the bad guys, um, so what just happened? Why are SOPA and PIPA needed, exactly?
What the FBI has just shown is that they'll pursue the movie, TV, book and music industries' allegations and shut down devices on the internet if it's believed - not proven - that they contain files that someone, somewhere, has an interest in. The device's owners or anyone else with an interest in what else is happening on that device won't be notified or, indeed, worried about at all.
And by "devices" I mean any of the 5 billion internet-connected computers, from a major company's cloud storage service to your businesses' file server, to the shared hosting server where its website lives, to your home media server, to the laptop on your desk, to the smartphone in your pocket.
Warner Music Group's revenue might be protected, but what about the band that just lost access to the master file for its new album? There goes next month's rent. What about your sales team's shared prospect list? There goes next quarter's revenue. Oops.
It's certainly put a dent in IT industry's call to "put it in the cloud".
It's certainly put a big red "must find out more" tag next to open source privacy-enhancing projects like the FreedomBox.
But Anonymous has been (see earlier paragraph) clueless too.
As Chenda Ngak wrote for CBS News, any goodwill in Washington that the anti-SOPA blackout generated has just been wiped out.
"The effort put forth by millions of activists on Wednesday wasn't about promoting piracy. It was about asking congress to write a better bill to protect intellectual property. Anonymous' latest hacking spree changed the conversation," he wrote.
"Thanks a lot, Anonymous. This is why we can't have nice things."
Last week The Greens' Senator Scott Ludlam pointed out that here in Australia, the Government's internet copyright discussions only involve the middle men: the distributors and the internet service providers.
"They appear to have left out the creative people who make the content and the audience... The people who actually matter in that debate aren't in the room," he told the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference in Ballarat.
"We should be in that room, in the copyright debate. Otherwise, we are going to get some kind of dumbed-down Australian-flavoured SOPA. Twelve months after it resolves itself in the United States, it'll pop up here, you can absolutely guarantee it."
But if Anonymous continues to behaves like it does, or if lobby groups like the Pirate Party don't disassociate themselves from this rabble, the audience will never be in that room.
Stilgherrian @'ABC'
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