Staff Writer

You wouldn’t download a car; why would you steal a movie?

Being an age where vast amounts of information are as easily accessible as the milk in my refrigerator, most people today, if savvy enough, can get any type of information, or entertainment they want, whether it be attained illicitly or not. Some people use torrents, others file-sharing websites to find what they need, much to the dismay of the Motion Picture Association of America or the Recording Industry Association of America. Internet piracy according to both the MPAA and the RIAA is responsible for the loss of billions of dollars in revenue per year. According to the RIAA, “Since peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. have dropped 53 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7 billion in 2011.”

Internet mogul Kim Dotcom, originally named Kim Schmitz, just launched last week his new Internet locker website, Mega, the successor to his last venture Megaupload, despite being arrested and legally prosecuted for a website of the same type the year before. Megaupload, allowed users to upload any type of file to be shared anywhere in the world and came under fire a year ago when a take-down operation backed by the United States Department of Justice seized all of Dotcom’s data centers and had his website shut down. The data centers, which were raided and seized in different locations around the world, included Dotcom’s estate in New Zealand as well as a location in the state of Virgina. Being that some servers were located on U.S. soil, this gave the government ample leeway to arrest Dotcom in New Zealand. In a letter issued to the Department of Justice, the MPAA cited Megaupload as being one of “the most popular websites on the Internet for streaming and downloading.”

The current industry model does not conform to the way consumers use or share their property. Rather than conform to suit the needs of their customers, the MPAA and the RIAA push legislators and lobbyists to fight their battles by pushing new legislation that cracks down on Internet piracy, and, considering the legislator’s financial stake with the industry itself, legislators are more than willing to help. While Internet piracy does take away from revenue, it is under the entertainment industry’s pretense that people actually want to buy their product, and if people actually do, it’s not the industry’s business to decide for their consumer what they choose to do with their property after legally attaining it.

Chris Dodd, the chairman and CEO of the MPAA stated that “by all estimates, Megaupload.com is the largest and most active criminally operated website targeting creative content in the world,” while also mentioning how the Kim Dotcom’s arrest and indictment “shows [how] law enforcement can take strong action to protect American intellectual property stolen through sites housed in the United States.”

Dotcom is currently on trial for extradition by the DOJ for “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” among a long list of other things, including money laundering and racketeering. Despite all the legal ramifications that Megaupload has brought onto Dotcom, the opening of Mega is his subtle message to those media big-wigs in light of their attempts to control an open Internet.

What’s so different about Mega, some might ask? Before, Megaupload allowed administrators of the site to openly view what was being downloaded and uploaded, which, according to U.S. law, goes against the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Act. Now, rather the allowing administrators of this site permission to openly view the users’ data, every upload will come with an encrypted key that only the user, and whoever the user decides to share it with, will be able to see. Dotcom’s compliance with U.S. law as his refusal house data centers on U.S. soil makes him immune from any legal prosecution.

“I think it’s daring of him, to try again something that he was prosecuted for” said Jacob Yero, a 22-year-old computer science major here at CSUB, who contends that people “will always find a way” to access content. Because Mega promotes sharing files of any type, Yero believes that “what [Dotcom is] doing is important to the process of legislating new piracy laws” that can conform to the Internet users hapless habit of sharing files. As a person who fully enjoys his own personal liberties, the manner in which entities like the MPAA and RIAA go about protecting their “property” loudly proclaims the idea that, even though we as citizens may purchase “intellectual property,” we essentially have no right to share it.

“I take the line that it’s the same as if I were to let my friends borrow a movie, are you gonna throw me in jail for that? No, of course not.” said 23-year-old computer science major Nik Ramsey, who believes that sharing files should be within a person’s own rights, “But now that I have the ability to share it with millions of people, now it’s a crime.”

Ramsey’s interpretation of stealing differs from that of the entertainment industry: “I’m not stealing anything, stealing is the deprecation of someone’s ability to own a product I’m not changing the original file that I copy,” said Ramsey.