The biggest lies of all, ‘a free world’
Last week I wrote an article titled “Why censorship is easy in Turkey.” After this week’s events maybe I should write an article with the title “Why censorship is easy all around the world.”
You must have all heard of the French National Assembly’s ban on refusing the Armenian genocide claims. This was something to be expected. After all, it is not the first time a person like Sarkozy leading a country far greater than him takes decisions like this. The most surprising news to me was the arrest made by Dutch authorities.
I lived two years in Holland and thought it was a country of regulated freedoms where it was possible to do everything under the supervision of the state. That was magical, I thought. However, even the Dutch have to obey American requests, I guess. According to Hürriyet Daily News, an Estonian citizen has been jailed for 60 days after being arrested by Dutch police at the request of American authorities investigating the file-sharing website Megaupload.
New Zealand police arrested four other suspects last week: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, Bram van der Kolk, 29 (from the Netherlands but a New Zealand resident), Finn Batato, 38, and Mathias Ortmann, 40, the latter two both from Germany. All will be handed over to American authorities in order to be prosecuted in the United States.
Dotcom was arrested by the FBI on Friday while celebrating his 38th birthday party inside his rented $30 million Auckland mansion. Dotcom, a German native who legally changed his name from Kim Schmitz in the last decade, has been charged with criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit racketeering.
According to Billboard magazine, computers and documents were also retrieved and more than NZ$10 million ($8 million) was seized from financial institutions. Luxury cars, including a pink Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe, were removed from the property, which Dotcom had been blocked from buying by NZ authorities last year as he did not meet the criteria of the “good character” test.
The FBI said those arrested have been accused of “running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites.” The alleged copyright theft generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners.
“This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and facilitating intellectual property crime,” the FBI said.
The FBI shut down the Hong Kong-based website, Megaupload.com, posting an anti-piracy notice on the site saying the domain name has been seized and that a federal grand jury has indicted several individuals and entities, charging them with conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering and criminal copyright infringement.
According to the New Zealand Herald, Dotcom’s lawyer Paul Davison told the court today that Dotcom will not try to restart Megaupload or any other website while he is on bail and the matter is before the courts.
It seems to me that the world leaders really cannot stand for information to be shared equally and cannot stand matters being discussed as freely as possible. With these types of extensive measures they are saying people of the world can discuss things so-called “leaders” allow and share information as long as the leaders control the content and the method of sharing. What a wonderful world it is, isn’t it?