MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. – Following a New Zealand judge’s ruling that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants can be extradited to the U.S. to face criminal copyright infringement, racketeering and other charges, college students, copyright-reform advocates and other Dotcom supporters took to the web to express outrage and dismay.
“This ruling is total bullshit,” wrote Central Michigan University student Greg Nikolos on his blog. “I am not a lawyer (yet!), but I’m pretty sure this ruling violates the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighteenth Amendments, not to mention the Golden Rule and several unspoken tenets of the Bro Code.”
“Information wants to be free,” Nikolos continued. “The problem is all these big entertainment corporations filled with racist, fascist music and movie executives are buying off corrupt judges to get favorable rulings like this one, which puts a great man, a true cyber-pioneer like Kim Dotcom, in harm’s way, all at the behest of the judge’s Big Content overlords at the MPAA and RIAA.”
In a subsequent post, Nikolos denied being biased against rights-holders in response to being fined $300 by CMU for allegedly downloading pirated copies of several Ben Affleck movies in 2013.
“First of all, as I have always maintained, those movies were downloaded by my ex-girlfriend and I was totally unaware of her actions at the time, especially when she downloaded Gigli,” Nikolos said. “Second, even though these two bloated corporate shills represent a force of pure, unmitigated, censorship-happy evil, my opinion of the RIAA and MPAA has no bearing on my well-reasoned legal analysis of the New Zealand extradition decision — a ruling I’m sure is absolutely wrong on every point, despite not having read it yet, nor having the first clue how extradition questions are handled under New Zealand law.”
Ezekiel Daniel, a self-employed interpretative dancer from Grand Rapids, said “all true artists should rise up to demand the end of this persecution” of Dotcom.
“Those who are committed to the act of expression and to pursuing a passion rather than the crass creation of corporate products merely masquerading as art all understand how unjust and unjustifiable copyright law is,” Daniel said while waving a handful of burning sage and rhythmically gyrating his hips in a disconcerting-to-nearby journalists fashion.
“Personally, I haven’t had a paid dancing gig since the ’80s, and I can tell you I’ve never felt more fulfilled as an artist,” Daniel said. “By the way, do any of you have a couple bucks I can borrow to catch the bus back to my mom’s place?”
Cyber-rights activists and anti-censorship groups also denounced the decision, pointing out the legal battle has only just begun.
“While it’s certainly disappointing and in stark, direct contradiction to every published prediction I made about the eventual outcome of this hearing, I’m not at all surprised the judge found there’s enough evidence for U.S. prosecutors to move ahead with the case,” said Angelo McCollum, a staff attorney with the Cyber Rights Activism Project. “The next step is to appeal the extradition ruling, in which I’m even more confident Dotcom’s legal team will prevail than I was back when they first filed for dismissal of the obviously bogus charges, let alone the slam-dunk win I forecast in the recent extradition hearing with the shocking, but predictable, outcome.”
Purported Los Angeles-area attorney Earnest S. Hitter said he’s not sure Dotcom will win the case as easily as McCollum projects, noting the prosecutors “probably have, like, a ton of evidence or something, because they generally don’t just go around indicting rich people for the fun of it.
“It’s one thing to fuck over some Joe Schmoe who works at Pep Boys, but a guy so rich he has shitty fast food restaurants in his house, that’s a whole different story,” Hitter said. “If they want to convict a guy like Dotcom, they know they need to catch him while he still has his stubby, greasy fingers jammed inside the McDonaldland cookie jar, so to speak.”
Naturally, not everybody is unhappy with the judge’s ruling in the extradition matter, particularly those whose work has been uploaded, downloaded, shared and traded countless times through the Megaupload platform.
“Good — I’m glad they’re going to extradite that fat, arrogant, Bavarian cyber-turd,” said Herm Daza, owner of the porn production company Flawless 7 Studios. “You know what I’d like? I’d like him to be ‘extradited’ straight into my office, so I could watch as all the employees I’ve had to lay off over the last several years due to losses from piracy take turns beating him with a 53-inch cast iron pipe wrench.”
