A Political Prisoner of America

Kim Dotcom is truly a man to be looked up to. Not because of his enormous stature, and not because he has made millions off of a website responsible for 4% of all Internet traffic. Not even because looking a little like the offspring of Chunk from the Goonies and Grimace from McDonald’s he somehow landed a supermodel wife. And not because he won the Gumball 3000. No, he should be looked up to because he is fighting the good fight against governments of the world, especially America, for the freedom of the Internet.

The case against Dotcom is certainly a peculiar one. He himself is a German Finnish businessman who has been granted permanent residency is New Zealand. The Megaupload company that he founded is a Hong Kong based business that offers free file sharing. So where does the American government come in? They decided that it is their right to prosecute Dotcom because they claim American copyrights were broken.

The real question is did Dotcom break any laws with his Megaupload website? The answer is no. Megaupload is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the DMCA. The DMCA is an American copyright law passed in October of 1998 to combat Internet copyright infringement, while protecting online service providers, or OSPs from liability for copyright infringement by their users.

This means the law was passed to stop copyright infringement but protect websites like YouTube from being prosecuted for copyright infringement because of videos and audio posted by their users. There are certain guidelines that a website must adhere to in order to be protected by the DMCA. The first is that they must remove any content that is brought to their attention that is in violation of a copyright. Since there were no cease and desist letters or legal letters sent to Dotcom or Megaupload before his surprise arrest, the company complied with the first guideline.

The second is a provision that protects OSPs from liability if their users claim the material that was uploaded does not violate copyrights. Since Megaupload had a warning on their site about copyrighted material, and asked users before uploading if the content violated copyrights they also adhered to this guideline.

Since Megaupload complied with the DMCA and should therefore be protected by the law, there is no legal standing against Kim Dotcom. They violated no laws. Therefore, an elaborate arrest involving helicopters, special units, and tons of police officers being lowered from ropes through windows and skylights carrying assault rifles pointed at Dotcom and his pregnant wife were probably not necessary. In fact even if intellectual property laws were violated these actions would still have been excessive force taken by the police. Good thing they seized surveillance video of the raids off Dotcom’s home security that could show the world the excessive force that was used.

Copyright infringement is typically a civil matter, where entertainment groups would sue a site like Megaupload and force them to either take the content down or pay substantial amounts of money. If copyright infringement is typically handled in a civil way, why has the American government gone to great lengths to prosecute Dotcom to the full extent of the law (and probably past that)?

The answer is that the music and film industries have powerful allies in the United States government. #INN has already reported that at least $32.1 million was spent on lobbying against Internet piracy in the first quarter of this year alone. When that much money is spent by powerful people, the U.S. government has no choice but to do anything to satisfy them, including confiscating everything from the house of a man in New Zealand, shipping most of the evidence to the U.S., prohibiting the man from being able to prepare a proper legal defense, and then denying him his human rights in the process.

Kim Dotcom has broken no laws, has certainly not been convicted of copyright infringement, and does not deserve to be treated like a man convicted of mass murder or terrorism. There is certainly no reason why he should be extradited to the United States. The New Zealand government should take a stand against the U.S. government and deny the extradition. There is certainly no reason why he should be facing 50 years in prison. Although, I’m sure if the trial does not go well, groups such a Anonymous and LulzSec will take action to get justice for Dotcom, and I can’t say I would blame them.