By now, most Staples students have noticed the massive black hole in the interwebs. But for those who don’t know (the old and Amish), Megaupload (also known as Megavideo) was taken down by the Justice Department last week after the arrests of at least three company employees on accusations of mass piracy and money laundering.
Unsurprisingly, digital entertainment based lobby groups have long been trying to bring the gavel down on the company which had allegedly made over half a billion dollars on pirated movies, shows, and music. And Kim Dotcom, the site’s founder, was really begging for backlash fromHollywoodand the Music Industry; he had not exactly stayed under the radar with his luxury cars, paintings, and guns which were seized from his mansion inAuckland,New Zealand.
And I am angry too. What this company was doing was ridiculous and illegal…. Which is why these guys should have had the wits to keep all their servers inChina, where piracy goes unregulated.
Don’t get me wrong, I cannot see any moral justification for what the company was allowing to happen. But for the life of me, I couldn’t quit using that site anymore than Lindsay Lohan can quit cocaine (it’s not libel if it’s true).
To illustrate, we download pirated material for the same reason people loot. Temptation oozes from the unguarded store filled with plasma screen TV’s, and is then blown to new proportions by the others who are doing it. Conformity is in our DNA. The only difference is that the store is amplified to hold millions of songs, movies, and shows, while millions of coconspirators justify what we’re doing.
But we must recognize that in this case, millions of rights (legally uploaded files) did not justify half a billion dollars worth of wrong (copyrighted material). It would be pretty farfetched to defend Dotcom at this point. Yes, SOPA infringed on freedom of speech; it would allow websites to be expunged on the basis of users who had posted copyrighted material, without the website admen knowing. But this case was very different. For those of you who enjoyed the site like I did, let’s have some integrity and look at the facts.
According to USA Today, federal investigators estimate that the company made at least $500 million off pirated downloads. This number alone trumps the company’s claims that “the vast majority of Mega’s Internet traffic [was] legitimate”.
Even if this were true, it would be irrelevant- Megaupload would still have been profiting off illegal content at an unprecedented rate.
Many former users of the site claim the company held no responsibility in the stolen content; rather, their site was merely a defenseless bookshelf which strangers decided to put ransacked movies, albums, and shows on. And this line of thought would make sense if Megaupload was truly oblivious to the illegal activity taking place, or was powerless in stopping it.
But Dotcom is not as incompetent as one might think based on arbitrary photos of him doing god-father poses in bubble baths and next to Roles Royces’ with license plates that say “guilty”. He, and the other seven indicted executives knew exactly what they were doing; users who uploaded popular content, which was generally pirated, were paid by Megaupload for attracting awesome people like me. Not to mention, the Justice Department, along with various entertainment groups assert that the site refused to remove illegally uploaded material when contacted by the rightful distributors.
The prosecuted individuals were indirectly, yet purposefully profiting from theft. These men disobeyed the law as much as the cartel leader, Gustavo Fring did in Breaking Bad. Although Fring personally never touched or distributed Crystal Meth while running a cover fast- food chain which also performed legal services, he still worked to profit off the illegal product.
To be clear, I’m not happy that Megaupload was taken down. I’m just being an honest Samaritan in saying there is no moral justification for what the business became. If Dotcom wanted to be a successful mafia- like criminal, he probably should have watched more pirated Martin Scorsese movies.
