Dozens of New Zealand police officers stormed Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion on Sunday. The many officers, backed by helicopters, broke through a series of electronic locks in order to arrest a pistol-wielding Dotcom. Immediately following the arrest, U.S. authorities successfully extradited the founder to the United States to be tried under federal law. Something is very wrong with this picture. Amid the nationwide fervor surrounding SOPA and the debate that followed about Internet freedom, the arrest seems to render the whole issue moot. After all, there is no point in enacting anti-piracy legislation when the police can take down offending websites at gunpoint. It is cleaner and quicker. More efficient.

And yet the inevitable legal battle will be anything but. If the name wasn’t a dead giveaway, Kim Dotcom’s actions have made it clear that he simply doesn’t care about playing by the rules set down by the government. After all, this is the same man who, prior to founding Megaupload, made millions through insider trading and embezzlement. Doctom is also a whale: Megaupload is a giant among file-hosting websites and even more so among those that are known for hosting copyrighted material. So it’s understandable that the government, after witnessing the intense opposition to SOPA, decided to attack online copyright infringement from the other side. Legislation in the spirit of SOPA has popped up from time to time in the past, under monikers such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 and the PRO-IP Act of 2008. SOPA is simply a reiteration of anti-piracy legislation, all designed to restrict the scope of legal activity on the Internet.

However, the track record for the courts is just as bad. Cases such as MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.; A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.; and Patti Santangelo v. RIAA all point to an unsatisfying answer to the issue of copyright infringement: It depends. Even if the charges pan out against Megaupload, the resulting decision will have a limited reach. The U.S. government cannot hope to get the kind of broad power that SOPA would grant it by appealing to the judicial branch. So why do it at all?

One answer is that it wanted to send a message. By taking down a large, publicly visible corporation, the U.S. sends an anti-piracy message that is necessary after backing down from the passage of SOPA. If slinking away from SOPA made the government seem weak at all, surely the arrest would save face and retain the image of the U.S. as tough on crime.

But if this was the goal, it too was an immense failure. In response to the Megaupload arrests, hacker group Anonymous launched a series of distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and took down the Department of Justice and other government websites. In one of the larger attacks made by the group, the DoS made it clear that sending a signal is not enough: As long as the government wants to significantly interfere with the Internet, there will be people who will fight until their last breath.

If there’s something to be taken away from these events, it is that no piece of legislation or government action will effectively curtail Internet piracy. We as a society must fundamentally rethink the way we view copyright in light of the Internet and change the way we deal with the commerce of intellectual property. Until we do, pointless disputes of this kind will continue to occur, and the Kim Dotcoms around the world will be vainly arrested, only for others to spring up in their place. We can no longer hold onto our archaic intellectual property laws. We may not need to get rid of them altogether. But they must change.