Just for asking this question on Twitter, I got a slew of hate mail, including one Anonymous tweeter who asked "Why aren't you in your grave"?
I'm going to keep asking this question right through to August, however, because the Internet mogul *is* indicted, and faces another hearing then.
He's obviously a very flamboyant, aggressive, and cunning character who gets his way by just one outrageous stunt after another. It reminds me so very much of Anonymous in Second Life in the early days, where all these things were seemingly prototyped...
All that dancing around and pretending innocence, that Eddie Haskell shuffle. Oh, laff riot: when the FBI copied some of his discs (they were ordered by the court to do so in 21 days) as evidence of his theft in the indictment, he and his lawyers screamed "theft". LOL! Wait, I thought if somebody copies something, and you keep your original, it's not theft? What, you get to copy content at will regardless of intellectual property rights, and the FBI which is responding to lawful complaints of those IP holders, can't copy the evidence? Huh?
Annoyances on Twitter like this fellow @LeoLouisIV, a lawfaring lawyer with an obviously highly political organization called "People over Politics" i.e. a "progressive" lawyer -- pastes "lessons" for me about how piracy "isn't" copying -- this is the meme the script kiddies all think is so "brilliant" lol -- to wit:
But here's my (admittedly primitive -- I'm not an artist) infographics that shows what really happens and the difference between digital commerce and piracy:
If your digital art is sold and someone pays for it -- it retains its value -- picture the first frame going into the shopping cart. The Lessig Creative Communism shill says that if you just release it for free, and just ask for attribution, you "contribute" and "get your name out". But you "contribute" and "get your name out" by selling copies, too -- people still see your content and still see your name and they are free to buy it again and keep distributing it. There's this fallacy that somehow you get no recognition or distribution if you put a price tag and a PAY ME on your digital content -- or that you distribute less. Even if you do, obviously getting *paid* for what you do makes up for that "free spreading of your name" that you supposedly got out of CC.
More to the point, look at what stealing actually does in the bottom frame: it steals the intrinsic value of your digital commodity -- the ability to sell it. Piracy goes beyond even the Creative Commons shill -- it says you get to share whatever the fuck you want because *you can* technically and the owner still has his original. Yet it decouples copying from commerce and breaks that connection -- deliberately. Hence the dead cat. The commodification essence of the content is stripped out for you, and you can't sell it any more successfully, even if you technically "retain your original" (the specious argumentation of the copyleftists). The juice is gone.
Worse, as those dollars leak out of your pocket, they go into the Kim Dotcoms of the world because the pirates then put your purloined content next to ads, get people to click on those ads, and use your stolen content to make ad revenue for themselves (or even sell the stolen content itself).
That's why Kim Dotcom is a millionaire, and you aren't. Dotcom makes the interesting point that what he did by running MegaUpload -- letting everybody do whatever while he sold ads and the storage services for whatever -- was no different than Google. Google looks the other way while you upload whatever you feel like to Youtube or your blog, and then sells the ads against that. This is the notorious "California Business Model" -- and catch-me-if-you-can with the DMCA takedown notice. He's right Google does exactly the same thing, but didn't your mother ever tell you that just because "everyone" is doing it, it's "not" okay? what if "everyone" were jumping off a bridge?
I'm not going to get into the merits of the case now, and all the twists and turns of Dotcom making himself a dramatic victim so his lawyers could make solemn and noble speeches in court, but I want to make three points:
1. All those people who were gasping in horror over what prosecutors asked for Aaron Swartz -- which really was a six months plea bargain on charges that only theoretically added up to "35 years" -- are now found to be hypocritical They all found the indictment scary and the prosecutors guilty of overreach in *that* case.
But those same types -- when you ask why Kim Dotcom isn't in jail -- RUSH to tell you that he is innocent until proven guilty, that an indictment isn't a sentence, and it all doesn't matter.
Oh? Well, why couldn't you say that about Aaron Swartz's case, then, you nit? Here's another lawyer @botolo86 posturing around the copyleftist myth with exactly this point. Don't these types see their horrid internal contradictions? If prosecutors don't matter for Kim Dotcom, who scoffed at them, why do they matter for Aaron Swartz, who supposedly killed himself over them? Well?
2. I was really disappointed to see Robert Amsterdam, a prominent human rights lawyer who has a blog on Russia and has been involved in Eurasian issues for years, sign up with the Kim Dotcom team.
I see this as all part of the "march through the institutions" that the copyleftists have been waging -- as they get into organizations like Committee to Protect Journalists (from Electronic Frontier Foundation) or National Democratic Institute or Human Rights Watch or whatever. The Mitch Kapor-funded gang have always had a very deliberate plan to try to spin the entire anti-copyright fight as a "human rights struggle" -- and they've played that card constantly with the anti-SOPA fight with regrettably some success -- they can win over more mainstream people by bleating about "a chill on free speech" or "human rights" than they can about "due process for pirates and hackers" obviously.
What they really do is undermine the rule of law and deliberately destroy the ability to commodify digital property as if that were something evil -- and they destroy choice on the Internet to have either open source/copyleftist OR a walled garden and pay wall. Given a choice, most people chose the walled garden; given an option, many people pay. Creative Commons "licenses" are not used anywhere near as widely as people imagine, and those who use them do not get revenue in some convoluted way from this giveaway in anything like the amounts the boosters claim.
Amsterdam took up the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which was the right thing to do. Many criticized him and others for defending Khodorkovsky, from that same leftist perspective that hates commerce and capitalism that brought us Creative Communism. The pro-Kremlin "progressives" had trouble understanding that even if he wasn't some sort of human rights activist but an oligarch, when Khodorkovsky became a victim of the regime for very political reasons, and his case involved all kinds of due process violations and punitive practices, then he did indeed rightly became a human rights case.
By taking up the case of the notorious Dotcom, who is widely conceded to be a properly indicted pirate (even those hipsters at the Wall Street Journal think so), Amsterdam risks having those same critics claim then that his defense of Khodorkovsky wasn't warranted.
Of course, human rights lawyers always tell you that they defend clients like this precisely because if it were up to society, they would not be just; if you have principles, you can't chose your victims. Well, whatever. It's one thing to defend Kim Dotcom from excessive state interference -- if the charges that the New Zealand police wrongfully spied on him and intruded on his privacy stick.
But it's another to pretend that piracy is a form of free speech, which now Amsterdam is doing -- and that's awful. That's just extreme leftist or libertarian agitprop. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't say that you can use your claim to freedom of expression to endlessly hide from the police or steal property. In fact, Art. 30 says that no one right may be used to trump another. The UN is constructed as such that it does not defend the right to private property -- at the time it was formed this would have been impossible to get past the Soviet delegation, and today remains impossible because of the Soviet Union's many apt pupils who remain in the world. Even so, the UDHR isn't a document you can use to bless piracy, child pornography, purchase of illegal drugs online and all the rest.
3. What's funny is that there are already quite a few complaints about Dotcom's new service. First, there's that horrid script kiddy @kaepora, who is able to silence legitimate criticism of his excesses, who has complained about it not functioning as it claims, i.e. it breaks his own Cryptocat thingy -- or perhaps is a competitor to it that won't play nice with it or something. You tell me.
Other Anonymous types quickly figured out the downside -- they are now on the hook for responsibility for theft by signing the TOS, not the site owner. Supposedly the encrypted key you get to your "locker" will prevent the feds from snooping on your stolen stuff. I wonder if I should make an account and have a challenge quest to see who can hack into it first.
See the Softpedia article by Eduard Kovacs in the recommended pieces below, he recounts how Anonymous is already hacking and DDOSing Mega -- which is why it has been down, not only because of the "huge demand" -- and they are most pissed about what they claim is Dotcom's "snitching" on another pirate. No honour among thieves, including Anonymous!
The Register, my favourite tech publication, has obviously trashed Dotcom's claims to various new "business models".
Orlowski always takes a position against copyleftism, which is generally El Reg's line -- and that's a good thing -- but as soon as they see his name, the copyleftists discount him. For the rest of us, he makes all the cogent arguments. I'd love to read that UK government paper that got "revised down" with the fake claims of "openness" being "good for business".
BTW, I should start a count-down site on the outrageous claim made by Alec Ross, the "innovation" official at the State Department, who claimed at the OSCE conference in Dublin in June 2012 that engineers in Silicon Valley had assured him they could indeed engineer against copyright theft -- and that this was just a matter of time (and money). Nonsense. We've all been told by these same engineers not only that they can't, they won't, for ideological reasons. When they are ready to -- we'll see the Internet become liveable.
And frankly, while not mentioning Dotcom, this Pando Daily article, despite the title, also questions that airy "find a new business model" claptrap -- it lets us know that these streaming services just aren't doing that well. It seems that the really big acts like Taylor Swift don't release their new songs to these services precisely because they fear they won't sell then. And it seems the record companies still have a lock over these streamers -- and I think that's a good thing. I honestly don't see how all those urging "new business models" have ANYTHING to offer except more belly fat click ads. And that's an old and annoying business model and eventually it will go away, nobody can live on it.
Once again, cases that are meant to serve as "models" are the result of the copyleftist thugs on the Internet refusing to allow Congress to draft and pass a law like SOPA and/or PIPA.
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