You are conflating different things in a way that does not make sense to me.
Is the RIAA claiming that the songs distributed by their constituent organizations are somehow private? No. They are claiming that they have the right to determine what happens to the bits after they have sold them on to another party. The arguments are over the extent of those rights of long term control.
The right to privacy of unsold, unpublished bits held by a third party under contract is what is being discussed here. The question is whether by storing your property in the safekeeping of a third party, do you lose your right of privacy?
It's a complex question. Among other facets, we need to consider what people think of as "private" -- because, ultimately, law ought to match up with the general opinion of the community it serves.
Privacy protection of the citizens and intellectual property protection have preciously little to do with each other. Storing your data in the cloud should come with automatic extension of the rights that you'd normally have to data stored on your own devices. Anything less will be a disaster, not just for the citizens but also for all those that earn a living building cloud services. A ruling like this has enormous implications that extend far beyond the piracy debate.
The RIAA doesn't have any bits worth protecting in the same way that people's private information warrants protection.
So artist 'x' is a citizen and their privacy (and hence their private data) warrants protection just as much as any other citizens privacy. Whether or not the data they produce and release into mainstream culture (which is in the end an affair between citizens) warrants economic protection is an entirely different matter.
That is an erroneous comparison. Regarding our own bits, it is the right to access information that we store on devices that we own or rent. Regarding "RIAA's bits" it is our right to copy information that was made publicly available. Regardless of political opinions, the contradiction that I think you are suggesting does not exist.
There is no hypocrisy: those people would continue thinking that if they put "their" bits in the public, they would also be free. That has nothing to do with the government being able to interfere with your private relationship with a cloud service. Here, since you brought up physical items perhaps I can make it clearer:
I have a manuscript for a new book which I keep in a safe at home. I may believe that once a book is "out in the wild", anyone should be allowed to copy it. However, that does not mean I think it is OK for the government to have the right to open up my security box at a bank and read the manuscript if I choose to use "cloud safes" (AKA banks) instead of my own personal safe at home. The problem here is not really the reading of the book, but interfering with my agreement with the bank that only I should be allowed into the safe, regardless of what may or may not be in there.
Not shared anywhere. Something I upload to Dropbox is private data. Something I upload to youtube is public data. If a piece of media is being sold, 99.9% chance it's not private.
Now, about being 'stolen'. The argument about bits being free is that you can copy them anywhere. I think you can see how deleting from someone else's server is not the same thing.
The government is not causing problems by copying the drives, they are causing problems by confiscating them.
The argument is usually not that "bits can't be stolen" but that "copying is not theft". If people broke into RIAA's servers and removed their data, I think most pirates would agree that it's comparable to theft.
The "tech community" doesn't have a single opinion. Proof: you're part of the tech community.
Personally, I don't believe the government is stealing anything. They're violating people's privacy, which is a different thing and does not require the data to be property.
Love it. The idea that musicians and moviemakers and their sponsors have property rights to their output is so alien to HN that it's perceived as a troll.
Content publishers in the recorded music business are the biggest abusers of content creators, with crooked contracts and phony bookkeeping. They hardly represent the rights of creators.
I don't think anyone is worries about the government copying the evidence drives. There are two issues here. First the government is (edit: in some cases, not necessarily megaupload) inspecting the files without a warrant. Second, the government is taking away user access to primary/key copies of a lot of data. Neither of those apply to copyright infringement, where someone that legally obtained ownership to a copy starts abusing that access.
Yes, clearly the only reason someone would want to continue accessing files they uploaded to a cloud service is to re-affirm their "property rights" to the data. Nobody would possibly use this service to collaborate with other people, or make legally allowed backups of music or movies they already have the physical media for. No sir-ee.
