MegaUpload Is Now Launching a Music Service Called MegaBox …There’s another gigantic wrinkle in the MegaUpload drama. Not only is MegaUpload fighting tooth-and-nail against Universal Music Group, but they’re now planning the launch of a cloud-based music locker, download store, and do-it-yourself artist service. It’s called MegaBox, and it’s already up in beta with listed partners 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon MP3. Actually, this is technically a relaunch of an earlier concept, and a perfect re-stab at major label opponents. “UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz told Torrentfreak this week. – Digital Musical Upload
Dominant Social Theme: Megaupload was just a bunch of crooks on the make. We’re glad we got ’em, and you should be too.
Free-Market Analysis: Whoops. Turns out that Megaupload was planning to launch its own music service to compete with Hollywood’s music monopoly – and that may have been the reason for the recent raid that shut down one of the largest websites in the world.
This news has percolated on the Internet – of course – via a slew of extraordinary articles and even found a perch onAlex Jones popular anti-elite website. It is an extraordinary item because it shows that the Megaupload “takedown” by the US Justice Dept and the FBI may be even more complicated than it already seems.
The idea that the only way to counteract whatever it was that Megaupload was doing was to arrest its principals, shut down its business and confiscate its assets is seen as increasingly suspect in an Internet Age.
People aware of these actions – and probably literally hundreds of millions are – are increasingly apt to ask why such Draconian actions took place without first establishing the guilt or innocence of those involved.
This fits into a larger paradigm that we have been presenting here at the Daily Bell: It is the idea that the meme of Western justice will eventually come under the same scrutiny as other elite dominant social themes such as global warming, the war on terror and scarcity promotions involving such basics as food and water.
People, in our view, will begin to ask once again – as they have before – whether there are ways to deal with human conflicts and potential or perceived “crime” other than shutting down whole companies, inconveniencing millions and incarcerating people who may or may not be guilty of any specific offense.
Megaupload’s principals stand accused of aiding and abetting thievery of intellectual property. Yet in recent years, the whole idea of intellectual property has come under attack, especially by the libertarian community.
The idea is that people can charge for a chair because it cannot be sold, say, electronically. But for some reason Hollywood and the elites who run it insist that easily mimicked intellectual property must recognize artist compensation regardless of the iteration. The artist does not get compensated once, but nearly forever, as do the producers of intellectual property.
This paradigm does not conform to natural law, which is why it is so difficult to enforce. But in the era of the Internet, such enforcement activities are worse than counter-productive for the Anglosphere power elite that is actually behind these activities.
We have written previously – and pointed out – that copyright law came into existence after the advent of theGutenberg Press and was frankly aimed at minimizing the distribution of books that carried information detrimental to the social control of the elites of the day.
It’s simply a fact. Today, of course, those who enforce such laws are slightly more subtle and do not indicate the real reason for copyright is to make the migration of ideas more difficult. But the results, of course, are the same.
The real problem that the Anglosphere has with laws such as these is that the Internet itself is continually exposing them even as they are applied. In other words, when the power elite has the MOST NEED to apply such laws to retard innovation and education, it runs the risk of exposing the IRRATIONALITY of these legal paradigms to the scrutiny of a new information revolution.
Laws and regulations that were specifically created to extend and maintaIn elite control over society are now undermined by the very facilities that they were supposed to guard against. Worse still, the utilization of these questionable tactics actually incites the very skepticism and “lawlessness” that they were supposed to retard.
Megaupload’s solution-in-the-making that would perhaps have compensated artists for perceived loss of copyright is a good example of the private justice paradigm. The way the powers-that-be have chosen to deal with Megaupload is to shut down its facilities and put its owners in jail.
But the takedown not only ruined the company, it also upset and inconvenienced millions of users. Of course, the actors in the enforcement drama were state sponsored and state funded. Everyone involved on the judicial side works for state – public – justice.
Contrast this with the “private” solution that Megaupload had apparently discovered and was … perhaps … about to implement. This is possibly an example of the kinds of “private justice” solutions that we regularly present on this website.
Private justice within this context is a dispute-resolution paradigm. For tens of thousands of years, people implemented private justice to solve their problems without having to resort to the Gulag-environment that can be found in larger Western states and China, too.
The US has some six million people in lockdown at any given time – about half of the world’s penal population. In fact, this is not a sustainable situation but is the result of the 20th century central banking sickness that gave the elites access to trillions of dollars with which to build their-long desired global government.
The penal colony mentality is part of the larger authoritarian approach to the Anglosphere elite’s vaunted New World Order that is supposed to be enforced by fear, intimidation and forcible incarceration of massive numbers of people.
It is perhaps failing in the 21st century with the advent of the Internet and subsequent deflation of the fear-based dominant social themes that the elites counted on to control populations in the 20th century when they still ran the media.
Like the Gutenberg Press before it, the Internet (it seems to us) is gradually waking up people to the Way the World Really Works and to what is evidently and obviously a matrix of promotional elements designed to buttress state control of people’s lives. Without the state, the Anglosphere power elite that runs much of the world cannot exercise its control or expand its sway.
State-sponsored justice is a fundamental meme of the elites that have managed to convince people that laws passed by the state, enforced by the state, adjudicated by the state and inflicted on unfortunate penitents by the state constitutes “justice.”
There is nothing much “just” about state-monopoly justice however. Every single aspect is controlled by the state, which is in turn controlled by an Anglosphere power elite that exercises its dominion via various secretive back channels.
This handful of elites funds its emergent New World Order via trillions that are available to it through its control of central banking and the money-from-nothing they are able to print. These elites were able to convince people in the 20th century that only the state was capable of being an impartial judge-and-jury.
But every time the elites seek to utilize certain kinds of state justice in the 21st century, the actions will inevitably prove counterproductive, in our view. They will give rise to the very questions that they are supposed to suppress.
This is happening in the case of Megauploads. It is yet another outgrowth of what we call the Internet Reformation – that has many years or even decades to run its course.
We don’t know that Megaupload had the solution to the current copyright dilemma. We do know that using the awesome power of state force to enforce one’s perception of legal theory – as Hollywood was able to do – is not helping the cause that the elites seek to buttress.
Ultimately, it is all about the control of information – which is even more important to Money Power than money itself. But in using pre-Internet formulas of repression, the elites are provoking uncomfortable questions. What gives Hollywood the right, after all, to leverage the FBI, Justice Department and Washington DC generally for an increasingly suspect theory of jurisprudence?
Once upon a time, people used to settle their grievances privately, using tribal chiefs, third-party solons with appropriate reputations or simply concluding agreements among themselves with the threat of clan force hanging over the negotiations. It was better to settle, for the most part, than to expose oneself to violent consequences unto the sixth generation.
Thousands of years of building up a delicate system of private justice – including the threat of vendettas, duels, etc. – has been lost in the past several hundred years with the unfortunate rise of state-sponsored justice and British style “common law.”
There is, however, a REAL body of common law that people can recover if they choose to and it is one that will doubtless become more accessible on the Internet as time goes on – no matter how the elites try to retard such knowledge.
The public justice is likely one of the last to come under scrutiny as we have long predicted. But ironically, the more that the powers-that-be utilize state-sponsored “justice” against modern information facilities such as Megaupload, the more questions will arise not about “criminals” such as Kim Dotcom but about the appropriateness of the legal strategies themselves and the brutal methodologies being used to enforce them.
Conclusion: At the very least, it should not be too much ask that people like Dotcom (as much of a criminal as he may be in the eyes of the law) be allowed their day in court BEFORE their lives are destroyed rather than afterward
SOURCE: The Daily Bell
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