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Uncategorized Friday, July 20th 2012 at 11:35 am

Kim Dotcom’s Hokey New Single is Self-Indulgent and Dangerous, Still Catchy

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Before all the MegaUpload takedown garbage started, there was a MegaUpload song. It was a weird endorsement of the site, filled with crazy celebrity cameos. It was a goofy little PSA. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Now, Kim Dotcom has dropped another single, and while similarly catchy, it’s a lot more serious in tone, serious to the point of being self-defeatingly pompous. The man has some valid points, but it’s just, well, see for yourself.

Doesn’t it kind of make you think “delusions of grandeur?” Sure, Dotcom makes some very good points here. Copyright maximalism is a huge problem, and it will only get worse if we don’t do anything about it, and while the direct reference to “Mr. President” seems a little over the top, the United States’ adoption of ACTA was an executive order.

All that aside, the video pretty much screams “propaganda!” unabashedly, at the top of its lungs. Go watch this off-base anti-piracy PSA and you’ll see this one isn’t that much less nakedly manipulative. Sure, all the footage of the ACTA protests is ostensibly related to the problems Kim Dotcom is having, but the footage of war, and of Martin Luther King Jr. — with whom Dotcom is trying to draw a direct personal comparison, it seems — is just a little bit overblown. And the shots of him with the beret and sunglasses? What is up with that? Anything the man has to say is completely undercut by his bald attempts to make this all about him. I mean, watch the first few seconds of that video again. What is that? Who is he supposed to be? Who does he think he’s being?

Copyright law is a huge deal right now, both because it’s already a big problem and it’s in danger of getting worse. The MegaUpload takedown was a symptom of that, but it’s not the first, nor the last, nor the worst result of problematic legislation. Don’t forget that the whole MegaUpload thing — whether its takedown was legal or not — was kind of shady, and Kim Dotcom has been known to be a crazy playboy and, dare I say, kind of a douche. And where was he before copyright law started to cramp his own personal style? Sure he is the victim, and he’s not about to let you forget that, but he’s not the only victim, and hell, he’s not even the most important victim, we all are. Dotcom’s just a dude on the right side who happens to have a whole lot of skin (read: cash) in the game.

So if you’re looking for someone to rally around, please keep looking. Don’t let Kim Dotcom hijack this movement. He may be in the right, but for the right reasons? Meanwhile, real heroes like the American Library Association have been fighting for you from the shadows for ages. Don’t let some dude with good PR make himself the figurehead of this movement with stock footage and a boatload of hyperbole. A fight worth fighting deserves a leader worth following; Kim Dotcom is just a clown.

(h/t TorrentFreak)

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  • Anonymous

    I hate that the internet freedom movement is rallying around a con man like Dotcom.

  • Anonymous

    what a bullshit article?
    who the fuck owns geekosystem i wonder….
    probably some mainstream media outlet
    Eric Limer do humanity a favor and go kill yourself

  • Jack Bond

    Copyright infringement is a big deal. We can’t just let our good times get in the way of running real businesses, otherwise those businesses will stop providing and our good times will end anyway.

  • Jack Bond

    Oh by the way, this has nothing to do with free speech. Distributing something you don’t have the rights to is not speech, it’s smuggling.

  • Anonymous

    Cloud storage service providers and ISP’s have safe harbor provisions under the dmca, you are not liable for what users do with your service… as long as you respond to dmca takedown notices like they did, you don’t see the fbi raiding and attacking Youtube do you…. and fyi hollywood is retarded and provides no one out side the north American hell hole of a continent with entertainment, the sooner it dies a miserable death the better
    we just need more shooters like the batman guy to attack Hollywood and it’s consumers/supporters!

  • Anonymous

    also from my research geekosystem is pwned by “Abrams Media” who have many affiliations with ABC so this is hardly unbiased reporting…
    go kill yourself eric limer!

  • Luv2ProtestStupidThings

    Get real, I mean you have to have an IQ of 10 to think that Dotcom and his buddies started Megaupload as a ‘cloud file storage site’ for hosting of non-copyrighted material. He wanted to profit from this faux unaccountable method of servicing the needs of underground filesharers and in the mean time make a big slice of profit. 

    While I don’t agree with how far the US has taken trying to prosecute him (when in reality just seizing the domain and servers would have been sufficient) – Dotcom and his buddies made millions in a system that an early Rapidshare perfected but later changed – big affiliate commissions, high membership prices  and slow takedown response times. Rapidshare fixed their act because they were an accountable, but Megaupload and the others kept it the same so they could take Rapidshares user base after their changes.  NZ Gov will play tow to the US (as if they won’t) and Dotcom will serve a lengthy prison term.

  • Hsun

    Spot on! Well said. At last someone who sees the bigger picture.

  • Megaarts

    what a bullshit.
    kim dotcom is totally right.
    its time to change.
    those politics are outdated.
    watch “thrive movement” from foster gamble on youtube.

  • Anonymous

     you sir are retarded