Hardly anyone know who Kim Dotcom was (aside from celebs like P. Diddy and Kim Kardashian who appeared in a viral MegaUpload video), but most knew of his site MegaUpload. When the FBI shut it down people assumed it was over, but Dotcom is fighting back with his open letter to Hollywood and gaining supporters.
Kim Dotcom has become the face of anti-piracy for the FBI, and after his arrest and seizure of all his assets by both the United States and New Zealand, it seemed like another site was out of business, but then the flamboyant owner took to the internet on Twitter and has a growing legion of fans supporting him, making this a little more difficult for what originally seemed a very simple case for the MPAA and FBI. There are a multitude of file uploading site like MediaFire, and I thought it was interesting that only MegaUpload was the one to be shut down. Naturally, after creating a viral video which included celebrities like Will.i.am, P Diddy, Kanye West, Chris Brown, Jamie Foxx, Kim Kardashian, Lil John, The Game, Floyd Mayweather, Serena Williams and Ciara, he suddenly became as high profile as his MegaUpload site, and now he’s become known as the MPAA’s number one enemy in their anti-piracy fight.
Rather than just giving in, Dotcom is fighting back, and he put out an open letter to Hollywood which makes for an interesting read along with Ten Facts about the United States case against him. Recently the New Zealand District Court Judge David Harvey, overseeing the case stepped down after discussing Internet copyright at a conference last week he told an audience, “We have met the enemy, and he is U.S.” This has been an interesting case we’ve been following, and after the US delayed his extradition hearing, it’s bound to slowly leak more and more into the mainstream media. Below is the open letter.
You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently. And the economic benefits of high-speed Internet and unlimited cloud storage are so great that we need to plan for the day when the transfer of terabytes of data will be measured in seconds.
Businesses and individuals will keep looking for faster connectivity, more robust online storage and more privacy. Transferring large pieces of content over the Internet will become common — not because global citizens are evil but because economic forces leading to “speed of light” data transfer and storage are so beneficial to societal growth.
Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie.
I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.
Providing “freemium” cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views. The fact remains that the benefits of Megaupload to society outweigh the burdens. But instead of adapting, you imported one of your action-conspiracy movie scripts into the real world. In my view, MPAA CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd lobbied his friends in the White House to turn me into a villain who has to be destroyed. Due process? Rule of law? Eliminate me and my innovation and worry about the consequences later. Never mind that millions of Megaupload users lost access to cloud data like their wedding photos. Well done, Hollywood, everyone with similar innovations got the message. But wait … You did not read the end of the script.
The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.
As you should have known, our Mega services operated within the boundaries of the law. We had users that spanned from the military to Hollywood to lawyers and doctors. If you are unhappy with that, it is up to you to convince Congress to amend legislation. You tried with SOPA and you failed. As an alternative, you chose to lobby the Justice Department to ignore the law and stage a global show of force and destruction. The only parties a New Zealand court has found to have violated the law in this case are the local police and the FBI.
Regardless of the issues you have with new technologies, you can’t just engage armed forces halfway around the world, rip a peaceful man from his family, throw him in jail, terminate his business without a trial, take everything he owns without a hearing, deprive him of a fair chance to defend himself and do all that while your propaganda machine is destroying him in the media. Is that who you want to be?
There can still be a happy ending. I am working on solutions. Just call me or my lawyers. You know where to find me. Unfortunately I can only do lunch in New Zealand.
This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.
Here are the facts that Kim Dotcom posted on his Twitter about the case.
- All of his assets are still frozen and he cannot pay for his legal fees because of it.
- The NZ court ruled that the restraining order and the search warrants used to seize his property were illegal.
- The NZ court ruled that the FBI / NZ law enforcement removed data from the country illegally and did not return the hard drives it seized after reviewing them.
- The U.S. Department of Justice argued in a U.S. court that DotCom should not have access to frozen assets for his defense.
- The U.S. Department of Justice argued in a U.S. court that DotCom should not have lawyers of his choosing because of “a conflict of interest with rights holders.”
- DotCom says that there is no criminal statute for secondary copyright infringement in the U.S.
- DotCom claims that only 10 percent of Megaupload users and 15 percent of the site’s revenue came from US users. But the DOJ argued in U.S. court that all the assets on the site are “tainted.”
- The U.S. Department of Justice told the Grand Jury that Megaupload employs 30 , but DotCom claims that 220 jobs were lost when Megaupload was shut down.
- The U.S. Department of Justice has made mistakes in shutting down companies “for alleged copyright infringement including N1 Limited – A fashion label making clothing.”
- The U.S. Department of Justice is charging Megaupload’s founders with “Money Laundering and Racketeering cause Copyright Infringement isn’t enough for Extradition from NZ.”
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