mega

[pirate cinema berlin]

As some of our subscribers have questioned our assertion that Pirate Cinema's 
participation in the recycling of daily affairs was entirely unneeded, we have 
decided to make another exception, and to address the seemingly burning question 
if Kim Dotcom's new dotconz is a good thing or a bad thing.

Our answer is short. If you're interested in mega.co.nz as a platform to share 
copyrighted materials with millions of others, while retaining your anonymity 
and privacy, then -- as with any other offer that puts profit first and piracy 
second -- you're probably wasting your time. If you're just looking for a way to 
store your personal data on a computer that's beyond your control, then we might 
be wasting ours as well. However, as far as we can tell, you're probably asking 
about the man, not his mission.

Obviously, Kim Dotcom is more than just an opportunistic businessman. He is the 
truly megalomanic version of that: not only even more opportunistic, but also 
completely unaffected by the restraints that usually come with commercial 
success or corporate crime, namely to never publicly display one's wealth, 
celebrate the cheap joys it provides, or reveal the bad taste it entails. As the 
utter clown he makes of himself, as an ongoing parody of entrepreneurial ethics 
that in its very dishonesty appears more honest than any other enterprise, we 
find it hard not to love him -- just as it's hard to deny that the U.S. 
authorities, by showing such an unusual amount of overambition and incompetence 
when they seized his previous venture, have dealt his new one a very good hand. 
But in the end, that's all entertainment, and while the show must go on, it 
remains a matter of personal taste. Many spectators want to see the world saved 
by a good guy on the right side of a just cause, while others are happy to 
delegate that to the small-time crook who takes on the big-time crook, just for 
fun and profit.

Given all that, we find it perfectly understandable why, in the case at hand, 
one may prefer to side with more respectable internet entrepreneurs or venture 
capitalists, who will articulate their issues with copyright, or their growing 
frustration with the entertainment industry, in a much more nuanced and 
understated fashion. Like Paul Graham, arguably one of the most highly respected 
of them all, who exactly one year ago, when the U.S. Congress debated the final 
crackdown on piracy, when Wikipedia went all lights out, and just while Mr. 
Dotcom was busy getting his ass busted in the safe room of his mansion, proved 
smart enough not to make any public statement at all, other than, as archived 
under http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html, issuing a modest "Request for start-ups: 
Kill Hollywood".



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