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August 10, 2012

Kim Dotcom

Imagine yourself enjoying a quiet morning when the noise of a helicopter sounds from your driveway, you can hear the pebbles kicked up from the massive wind force of the propellers.

As you look out the window, you see men with automatic machine guns, donned in in black helmets and full body armor smash down your front door. A government several continents away decided they didn’t like your business model.

This was the reality for internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, who made billions by creating Megaupload, solving the problem of file sharing for millions of users.

There are plenty of other file-sharing services like DropBox, OneNote, Google Docs but Megaupload overstepped their bounds and grew too big…

So naturally, the FBI raided his servers and showed up at his house with machine guns to take him under the custody of the law. They flew in by helicopter, and New Zealand’s elite police force put him in handcuffs

What did Mr. Dotcom do to be arrested at his home, have a boot stamped in his face, and face up to 55 years in prison?

He hosted a website that provided digital file sharing where individuals could gather to share media files.

The case is ongoing, but shows the dramatic lengths which governments will go to protect corporate interests and industry.

Jeffrey Tucker in the Weekend Edition:

“Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content: not piracy but creativity. As Wired.uk wrote, this crackdown came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz – married to Alicia Keys – as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians including Will.i.am, P Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content.”

So naturally, the music industry did not appreciate the newcomer threatening their business…

Per usual, it is the government eliminating private enterprise that benefits maximum amount of people. It is a shocking case of the US government reaching their long arm overseas, extending past jurisdictional lines to fulfill a corporate objective.

Here’s a recent court proceeding, which explains in greater detail the egregious manner in which the arrest took place with elite police forces and an invalid warrant.

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You can be arrested for “tweets”.

That’s right, a man in England was recently tracked down, placed in handcuffs, and put in a jail cell for insulting use of Twitter. We are talking about a guy that was clearly being an ass.

Regardless, should governments really be able to throw you in jail because of a twitter remark?

It’s unbelievable the lengths at which governments monitor all that their citizens do. George Orwell was spot on in 1984, he was just a few years early.

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