First, in a sobering display of the abuse of state power, seventy keystone cops armed with assault rifles raid Dotcom, his pregnant wife and nannies, over alleged non-violent crimes. Disgusting. And incompetent given the paperwork was so badly drawn the raid looks to have been illegal anyway.
I say the above as a supporter of IP: it is a valid property right, and copying is theft. Although that is not the case against Dotcom. Rather, merely that he built a platform on which unassociated individuals were trading pirated files - no different than prosecuting the owner of a road for crimes that road was used to commit, or an ISP for crimes committed by it's users.
But it gets worse. To compound the multitude of errors already made by the fumbling crown and FBI, now on the latter body illegally taking clones of Dotcom's hard drives out of the country, they've come with the following justification that hands Dotcom the case, morally, if not in actuality:
FBI agents who copied data from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's computers and took it overseas were not acting illegally because information isn't "physical material", the Crown says. ... Crown lawyer John Pike, for the attorney-general, said the material stored on the hard drives could be shipped overseas for the FBI to examine because it did not constitute "physical" material. The relevant legislation applied only to physical possessions rather than information ..."
Outside of the fact these two government bodies have time and again acted as if they're above the laws they are charged to uphold, they've just used as their justification for taking these files, an argument almost on all fours with the anti-IP anarchist scarcity argument - the nonsense that it is - that IP is not a physical possession, thus taking/copying files is not stealing, or, in this case, against the law. Surely, if there is no law broken by sending such copies, then Dotcom, even if he did copy files/information himself, by their own reasoning, has committed no crime. Alternatively, they have just committed the same crime they are prosecuting. Case over. Dotcom's business destroyed, livelihood taken from him by force, by two out-of-control states, for nothing.
It will be interesting to see if the defence makes something of this.
You wouldn't want these clumsy oafs, sorry, gun welding clumsy oafs, who since the raid have been making it up as they go along, re-scoping each law as they break it, running your life for you. Oh, wait a minute ...
I've just posted the below post to an NBR thread on this topic:
ReplyDeleteIn respect of the point just made, I've written a blog post on just that: the FBI cloning justification is almost on all fours with the anarchist anti-IP scarcity argument, so either, by their own reasoning, copying is not theft/law breaking, and there's no crime for Dotcom to answer to, or, more likely, once again in this case we see the abuse of state power as its officers (crown and FBI) continue to operate above the laws they're supposed to be upholding, then re-scope the laws as they break them. And that goes from that ludicrous brutish, over-the-top, and by the look of it, illegal (by the paperwork) opening raid.
That's a break down of the rule of law, and the signal of the police states we all live in now.
... um, talking of rule of law, and how there is none, while not defending Mark Hotchin in any manner, I also note on my blog that Hotchin is now in his nineteenth month of a state freeze on his, and his families, life, not only without trial, but without even a charge. Viewed dispassionately, what would we think of a country where the state can seemingly apply an eternal, or at least, open-ended, internment without trial? Again, the conclusion seems unavoidable.