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Who is Kim Dotcom?
The police and the discographic companies called him “The King Of Pirates”; on the other hand most of the tech blogs and newspapers defined him as a huge fat man. Is he really like the way he was described? No. Kim Dotcom is just a person, an individual like you.
The only thing that distinguished him from the others is intuition and intelligence. Without considering his “black” background in Computer Science, he was able to understand one of the main concern for the web 2.0 users. What he saw was that people wanted to share things without thumb drives and heavy and slow emails. For this reason he founded what soon became one of the most popular website in the world, Megaupload. Thanks to this intuition users could share files in an easier and fast way, by sending the right link for the download. This tiny and powerful idea transformed a company in an empire. Megaupload was the 13th most popular site on the internet. With more than 150 employees, 50 million visitors daily and 175$ million revenues, Megaupload changed the sharing industry in better. Moreover it was responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.
Why Did The Police Arrest Him?
On January 19 2012 the site was shut down by the police and Kim Dotcom was arrested. He was accused of copyright infringement. Although Megaupload was a site populated by many copyrighted files, most of the users used the service for good reasons and in a useful way. Further the site was continuosly working on Copyright infringments by removing these files. At the same time as Kim Dotcome later said, in the US, a site like Megaupload was advocated by the DMCA. A law that defends the services, such as Megaupload and Youtube, and condemns the users that have violated the copyright. For this reason, Youtube used it and won Viacom copyright lawsuit.
There weren’t any grounds to shut down Megaupload and to close the service definetely. Moreover no one asked Megaupload to do something before the arrest and the shutting down. There were no cease and desist letters and no warnings.
What it has to be underlined is that there are thousands of services like Megaupload. With this idea in mind, it is simple to see that this attack, without even a trial, doesn’t make any sense and it is against users’ freedom. The only possible explanation is that police saw in Kim Dotcom an easy target. Instead of being the classic figure of CEO, he enjoys life, he loves money and he has previously had problems with justice; thanks to this ‘uncommon behavior’, it is easier to say that he is a criminal and to discriminate him in every form.
In my opinion this is an act that has to be pointed out in order to prevent a direct attack to the freedom to share and live in a decent and regular ecosystem, which is the internet.
Should We Be Worried?
Yes and No. We should be worried, because what they did to Megaupload is awful. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t help to solve the problem and it is against our freedom. If we see the problem from this point of view, we can easily agree that it is a huge threat that has to be condemned.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be worried at all. Why? Because we are Human Beings. We are able to think, interact, share and understand. When we saw these acts against our freedoms, we stand in front of them. We are not stupid and we are going to fight them. The Human Being has been able to understand the difference between Good and Evil. We have been able to gather in communities. We are perfectly able to protest.
Until groups such as Anonymous are alive, we are safe. No matter what way or tool they use, they are defending our freedom to share what we think it is right to share. Until we remain critical thinkers, we are safe. If we start to bend in front of these injustices, we will be overwhelmed by the system.
The more we read, the more we think.
