BitTorrent News : Kim Dotcom Wrote “The United States vs. You”

The 48-pages long white paper titled “The United States vs. You”, signed and written by Kim Dotcom, is breaking the MegaUpload case into small pieces, once again. The paper is Dotcom’s story on how the US decided to seize his file-sharing service MegaUpload. Kim claims that the story represents one of the clearest examples of prosecutorial overreach in recent history.

The white paper reminds everyone about the failure of SOPA, and how the American government chose MegaUpload as a target. It tells about a legal precedent, when a month ago a court ruled that YouTube holds no responsibility for what its users upload, and for some reason the same clemency hasn’t been given to MegaUpload last year.

Dotcom points out that the government’s prosecution of MegaUpload shows the implications of the government acting as a proxy for large corporations. He says that the government is using its enforcement powers to accomplish what rightsholders haven’t been willing to do in civil court (for example, sue MegaUpload for copyright violation). Kim Dotcom admits he made a terrible mistake when deciding to collaborate with American authorities in another case. It later turned out that the US investigators were collecting incriminating data on Kim’s file-sharing service, ultimately leading to the controversial seizure of the domain.

“The United States vs. You” contains a lot of interesting details about the whole fiasco and suggests a number of really wild ideas about why MegaUpload was targeted by the US authorities and not Rapidshare instead. In addition, the paper reminds everyone about Aaron Swartz, a young genius who killed himself under US authorities’ pressure.

Aaron was a young online entrepreneur, he was known worldwide as a founder of Infogami, co-founder of Reddit and RSS co-developer, as well as an activist for government reform, digital rights and civil liberties. The young man was indicted back in 2011 for allegedly stealing MIT’s articles from an archive of academic journals.

Tragically, Aaron took his own life this past January, about a fortnight before a significant evidence suppression hearing in his case. It turned out that the investigators offered Aaron Swartz 4 to 6 months in prison for a guilty plea and threatened to seek more than 7 years jail time if he chose to go to trial.