Kim Dotcom guns for the White House

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has released a whitepaper excoriating the White House, accusing the US administration of selling out to corporate interests.

Earlier this year, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom won the rights to sue both the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau and the New Zealand police for illegal surveillance and property raids.

The file-sharing advocate is not stopping there, however. Together with his two lawyers, Robert Amsterdam and Ira Rothken, Dotcom has released a whitepaper accusing the US government of selling out to corporations in exchange for campaign contributions.

The paper stated:

The criminal prosecution of Megaupload and Kim Dotcom is purportedly the "largest copyright case in history", involving tens of millions of users around the world, and yet it is founded on highly dubious legal principles and apparently propelled by the White House's desire to mollify the motion picture industry in exchange for campaign contributions and political support.

The 39-page paper, which was released at midnight, New Zealand time, then goes into detail describing the US government's investigation of Megaupload, and why the case built thereon is not consistent with US law.

The US government's case against Megaupload is grounded in a theory of criminal secondary copyright infringement. In other words, the prosecution seeks to hold Megaupload and its executives criminally responsible for alleged infringement by the company's third-party cloud storage users. The problem with the theory, however, is that secondary copyright infringement is not — nor has it ever been — a crime in the United States.

Megaupload, the paper said, both complied with DMCA notices and voluntarily gave copyright holders access to its servers, so that they could police their own copyright violations. Moreover, most of Megaupload's activities occurred outside of the US — and yet the investigation still seized the entirety of the company's and its users' global assets, servers and data.

These unprecedented actions, Dotcom and his lawyers allege, occurred at the instigation of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The outside motivating factor in this case stems from Motion Picture Association of America's (erroneous) view of Megaupload as "the very top of the piracy pyramid", coupled with the current administration's desire to placate an association whose members, as a group, are some of the Democratic Party's strongest political supporters and most generous campaign contributors.

You can read the full whitepaper, "Megaupload, the Copyright Lobby and the Future of Digital Rights: The United Stated vs You (and Kim Dotcom)", online at kim.com.