Streetwise Professor (Craig Pirrong) has an excellent piece up criticizing Robert Amsterdam for taking up Kim Dotcom's case. He takes up the legal and business sides of the case. I had taken up the moral and legal issues; Amsterdam claims he is redefining American corruption with this case; I submit that he is trying to redefine crime and that's wrong.
Pirrong makes the same point I made in my post that Amsterdam's defense of the notorious and flamboyant Dotocom, who is dancing around now edgecasing the law and fleeing US justice, is going to have harmful blowback on the seriousness with which people took Amsterdam's defense of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oligarch who was a victim of Putin's selective prosecution -- which indeed is a human rights problem for the country, even if that doesn't make Khodorkovsky a democratic hero like Sakharov.
It's not about somehow denying that someone like Dotcom shouldn't have a lawyer, or that any lawyer who takes up his case is suspect -- that's nonsense (this is what some of the commenters say). I don't care about Kim Dotcom's other lawyers who are just doing their jobs and of course, working the angles and doing the media circus along with him, which is their right. What I care about is that a prominent human rights lawyer who has taken up cases of demonstrable human rights victims all his life is now trying to convert piracy into a human right. That's creepy.
Let’s not pretend like we all fell off the cabbage truck. It is more than obvious that Megaupload was created to facilitate the uploading and distribution of pirated copyrighted material. That’s what it was used for. Megaupload profited from this by selling premium subscriptions and by selling advertising to those who visited the site to view copyrighted material. It’s not hard to connect the Dotcoms here, though Amsterdam pretends there are none to connect. Megaupload had a direct financial stake in facilitating the uploading and downloading of pirated material. That’s what brought people to the site. That’s what induced them to pay for premium subscriptions. That’s what brought the eyeballs that paid for the ads. That’s what the indictment alleges. That it was, in essence, a fence of stolen property. Intellectual property, yes, but property nonetheless-under United States law. (More on this below.) An entity that facilitated the marketing of stolen property, and made money for providing this service.
It's that deafness, deliberate or not, to the tones of the California Business Model that disturbs me, too, about Amsterdam. I think like a lot of people who use the Internet avidly (he has a blog, although someone else is writing for it now and has for years), he hasn't really become thoroughly aware of just how sordid the whole Google Ad Agency Gambit really is. Google does a lot to disguise this.
BTW, because the usual Mr. X and others show up in the comments there claiming I'm in a "hive mind" with Streetwise Professor, I'll have to give a resounding: no. I'm not a Libertarian at all, in a 100 ways. I support gun control. I support Cuomo's actions and Obama's actions. I think the First Amendment is more important than the Second Amendment to keep this country free. I do not care for the theory of the strenuous, aggressive, and even nasty Libertarians on this subject that what they really care about isn't protecting their homes and families, what they really care about is being able to change the government if it becomes oppressive. I just can't get behind movements of violence that want violent revolution to restore even democracy because they inevitably become unlike their goals.
SWP was really nasty, as were some of his other friends (Liberty Lynx) in the debate around the Newtwon Massacre and I didn't appreciate that nastiness and it was utterly unpersuasive and only reinforced my conviction that Libertarianism is nearly a sect.
I also saw SWP in a fury at the thought that we might need more mandatory court-ordered residential mental health treatment than we currently get from a very liberated and lax system. His rage and fury about this was unsettling, as was the nastiness of some of his alts.
I realized once again why those who oppose the oppression of the Kremlin and Putinization of Russia aren't always very pleasant bedfellows or fellow ideological comrades, if you will. Amsterdam turned out to be disappointing in this regard, after all those years of seeming to be "on the same page" of the human rights movement. Reason magazine, which is constantly aggressively bleating about drug legalization is another disappointment leading even to revulsion for me.
The fact is, the CATO Institute Libertarians with which SWP seems to be more or less alligned on things like gun freedoms and other lesser-government ideals are horrible on the copyright/IP issues. He should go after them and try to persuade them to be more reasonable and rational about their curious embrace of copyleftism, where he might have some success, instead of trying to argue me out of gun control or commitments of the dangerously insane. I just think it's the more important job.
Meanwhile, I find that I have almost no company on the Internet for the liberal positions I take on a variety of cases, as always there are those to the left that share some of them but then go wildly overboard on copyleftism or minimization of terrorism, or they are on the right celebrating gun culture and violent video games.
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