The arrest a few days ago of Kim Shwartz aka Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload.com and the stop-start-stop measures of SOPA- the Stop Online Piracy Act- makes for some interesting mass debating and going back in timeto see why it’s all too much way too late.
Like good sex, it comes down to everything being all in the timing and the arrest of Dotcom in his fortified mansion in Auckland, New Zealand and where he was supposed to have been standing there with a sawed-off shotgun when the cops burst in plus all the ire aimed at SOPA shows how way behind the eight-ball everyone has been in trying to put the genie in the bottle and getting Pandora to sit like a nice girl and close her box.
Now, to add more spice to this script, enter Anonymous and, more importantly, the very confused Prez Obama. Obama desperately wants to have Hollywood on his side. Personally, I think the man is more of a groupie than a world leader and reminds me of a bloke who once ran Universal Music in Asia before he was finally shown the door- Harry Hui.
We called him “The Teflon Man” as he believed that “god was in the details” and that he had the good guy on his side and only focused on the most insignificant crap while fires burnt around him all day. The man was more interested in what type of hors d’oeuvres would be served at a marketing meeting than what one might actually take-away from these useless meetings- other than some stale hors d’oeuvres and the words of Boring John Kennedy ringing in our ears.
Today, Universal Music in the region has a Harry Hui clone in a bloke named Sandy Monteiro, who gets paid the big bucks and drives the big car in Singapore in return for- hell, no one even at UMG knows why- and how. Incompetence and Teflon were promoted. More on Monteiro and, especially, his Lady Gaga gaffe at another time, but let’s stick with the Teflon Man in the White House.
Obama is caught between a rock and a hard place: He wants/needs Hollywood to make him look “cool” and a “celebrity President”, something only Bubba Clinton can ever be ‘cos he is genuinely cool. And fucking smart and takes no prisoners as Fox News’ Chris Wallace once found out.
Obama also wants the “youth vote” which helped him wander into The White House. In 2012, this “youth vote” is looking rickety: No one believes that “Yes We Did It” and all those awful fawning songs about him in 2008 now look and sound even more awful than in their original incarnation. Jeez, they were crap and someone like the multi-talented and multi-tasking Dave A Stewart must have been going through a lean melodic patch when he wrote his “American Dream”.
So, here we have Obama in 2012 not wishing to piss off Hollywood and also not piss off all those young voters who believe that being able to download anything and everything for free is a God-given right. Do they give a shit about SOPA and threats that they could be fined or even jailed? Of course not. Has Obama lost the support of Hollywood? Yes, He Has. Has bursting into an Al Green song given me the willies. Yes It Has. It was embarrassing shtick from “the leader of the free world”. It made Mitt Romney look hip and cool- and which is an oxymoron.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbqNrDacDJg
Cyber world is the new Wild West and where the lawless survive as there are no laws in place. There never have been as all these “entertainment” lawyers and publishing pundits who charge for “advice” are talking through their arses and hope no one notices. As I have always said, especially to newbie artists, “Are you sure you want to upload your great new songs onto YouTube? What’s not to stop someone from ripping them off and do you have the time and money to take people to court while your music could be caught up for years in litigation?” Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time, but it does and one must err on the side of caution.
As for Kim Dotcom, well, he is literally, the Mr. Big of online piracy and whom I have met a few times at the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong and where he lived with his Filipina wife. He flirted with the law as, I think, he saw himself as some sorta Robin Hood character- the fat kid in school who got teDame big Dotcom business.
At the start, however, when he was Kim Shwartz, I am sure he was in his own La La Land and believed he was taking from the rich- Hollywood, the music companies and every producer of content- and spreading this wealth to consumers. He has done everything- and more- which others still continue to do. He just became more larger-than-life and fame and power went to his head and traveled down to his stomach. But the entire raid and his arrest has a certain Keystone Cops element to it as there are far worse pricks and real criminals in this world than Kim Dotcom. It was an arrest usually reserved to capturing a member of the mafia or someone dodgy and bent employee working for The Vatican.
Where will all this lead except Much Ado About Something which should not have reached the epidemic proportions it has been allowed to mutate into for years? It’s mutated so much that it’s no longer recognizable and “the law” will have zero impact on today’s “Occupy” mentality consumers and all the social media giants who will quash a badly-timed initiative like SOPA, turn it into a gnat and refuse to put the genie back into Pandora’s Box.
There might have been a time when this could have been done, but that time has come and gone: Hollywood, the music companies, the television channels etc have allowed illegal downloads to happen thinking this will all just go away. Instead of going away, it has grown, it has become more powerful than ever, the tail is wagging the dog, or the tail has actually BECOME the dog and David has knocked down Goliath by crushin his nuts.
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