Thursday 26 January 2012

Megavideo/Megaupload Killed by New Global Police: Masters Happy, Slaves to Pay

The oligarchs (some (not me, I am too nice for that ;) ) would say: capitalist/corporate pigs) ruling the US of A do very well even without any SOPA. Without a trial, a US judge just killed a Hong Kong-based company last week and "deported" (some would say: kidnapped) non-American citizens living outside his country from (supposedly) sovereign countries to the US so that they can stand trial there and pay for their terrible crimes against American media corporations (apparently some of their customers/users (i.e. not the arrested people) were sharing content without authorization from the copyright holders (youtube anyone?)). Are you feeling like you are a character in a dystopian novel right now? I know I am. Now let us wait for SOPA to be enacted (I am sure it will... under this or different name... in a few months or after a decade... they will not give up).

Follow this link in case you are curious and want to see for yourself the results of work of the new Global Police (formerly known as FBI): http://www.megaupload.com

Below some interesting excerpts. The last one shows that many legitimate (even according to the US law) users and companies were hit by this action. I would argue, that the combined loses of those (unimportant, powerless and poor - at least when compared to the oligarchs) people are much higher than the alleged loses of the American media industry whose interest was represented by the US judicial system and the US politicians. Who is going to fight for justice for those slaves? Certainly not the system built to police them.

This proves that offshore operations can still be reached by the long arm of the U.S. law. Also, none of these folks were Americans as far as I can tell. Dotcom is German and Finnish. The lot of them will be extradited to the U.S. to be tried for what are essentially crimes against the state. Citizens of the world, beware!This, to me, is the most interesting situation since the days when the leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, was dragged out of his bed and thrown in a Florida prison for trafficking drugs.
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Web organisations have raised concerns about possible effects of the Megaupload case on the future of file sharing, cloud storage, and Internet commerce.[60][61][62] Various commentators including John C. Dvorak, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Sanchez have written on the topic as well, particularly as it relates US government powers to take down a web site without a trial, even without new laws like SOPA.[63][64][65][66] In fact, the U.S. Dept of Justice was able to rely on PRO-IP, a law passed back in 2008, in order to shut down Megaupload.[67]
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People who used Megaupload for personal and business storage, such as large audio and video files for family and work, have also voiced their complaints about the fact that they no longer had access to their files on the service.[68][69] Examples cited in the media included staff at public interest group Public Knowledge who used it for large files, and Android cellphone software writers who described it as "one of the best ways to distribute [software] ... There are a number of similar sites for this use, but Megaupload was always the fastest".[68]
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