Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (53 page)

NP:
The U.S. Government has virtually unlimited resources, so to drag a 22-year-old student through the courts like this, it feels like they’re choosing a test case that they thought would be easy pickings.

JD:
Well this happened when they were doing this big clamp down called “Operation in Our Sites” in America. I only know this now, afterwards … they seized several domain names on that same day, the 29th of November, 2010. After this had all happened, after the police came here, we received through the post documents about the domain name seizure. It wasn’t just a document about Richard’s website, it was a big document where all these other websites were listed as well. It was like a group thing, and it showed the addresses of the owners of all the websites. Richard’s was the only one that had his name and address at the side of it. All of the others had post office box numbers. So in that group, he was easy because they had his name and address, whereas the others, they didn’t. Because Richard did it as a hobby, he wasn’t thinking he needed to conceal anything … if it was criminal, he wouldn’t put his name and address on it, would he?

NP:
It’s also chilling that the website was seized first and questions were asked later. It was seized and shut down without any due process. They wouldn’t do that to a terrestrial business.

JD:
Well he wasn’t running it as a business. It was a hobby. He did make money out of it, but he didn’t set out to make money from it. The ad companies approached him. He didn’t go looking to make money. When the advertising companies, who by the way were American, approached him, he just thought, “Yeah, that will be alright. It will pay for my servers and stuff.” He didn’t think it was going to grow into this massively popular website—that just happened by the fact of how the Internet works and how things spread. He never set out to make money from it at all. So yes, they did, they seized the domain with no due process.

NP:
Basically it would be the equivalent of seizing a shop and all its contents and closing it down without so much as a court hearing, or even a formal mailed warning.

JD:
No warning, no takedown notice. I mean when these documents came … eventually, we got one saying if you want to show any interest in this domain name you’ll have to come over here. He just signed to say he wasn’t interested in it because we obviously didn’t want to go over there. But yes, no warnings, no takedown, just that banner slapped on his domain … No correspondence, no communication about takedowns or anything.

NP:
Again, this is worrying for anyone who run a website anywhere in the world. If you apply the precedent America is attempting to set, other countries could start doing the same with the various other national domains, and any online business that falls in the sights of a government agency can just be taken down without any due process and people’s livelihoods ruined.

JD:
Yes, I mean they have been doing that, haven’t they? I know they have. I’ve been watching. There have been lots of domain seizures and I’ve seen people having to go to court to get their domains back.

NP:
How let down do you feel by the UK government? Because they don’t seem to be standing by their own citizen—which is unconscionable when you consider Richard hasn’t done any crime that any English court is remotely interested in prosecuting.

JD:
Very let down. But I’m not the only one in that position. They’re just following the law that the previous government created. That’s what I’m doing as well, campaigning for that law to be changed … I thought extradition was for fugitives, people who had gone to America, committed a crime, and then ran away. That’s what a fugitive is. Not to go and get somebody who’s never set foot in America, which is what they’re doing. America can do that because the British side of the extradition law allows them to. They protect their own citizens in America; the UK does not. If an American was to be requested to be extradited to this country, they would have the right to a proper hearing and bit of a trial beforehand … the government, they’ve done nothing … there’s a few good MPs who are fighting for reform, and they have been very good. But, historically, nobody wins this fight because the British government and the judiciary have got an obligation to stand by their extradition arrangements with America.

NP:
Which are one-sided.

JD:
Which are lopsided, yes.

NP:
How can people help Richard?

JD:
Well we’ve really had loads of support. Richard keeps out of the way mostly. I just wanted him to make sure that he continued his university courses and that that wasn’t going to be disrupted. He is doing that; he’s on his final year now.

There’s a few other people in the same position, and people that have been extradited and come back. We’re all working together lobbying the MPs and getting plenty of stories into the media. A friend has launched a fighting fund recently, we’re just trying to get some money together … I have had lots of offers through Twitter from American lawyers who have said don’t worry, there’s loads of people here who would take this case for free. I’m not worried about that, but I am worried about other costs that might appear if we have to go there.

If you get extradited, you are put straight into a federal prison in America, because they consider that you’re a flight risk—even though they take your passport. You are taken straight to a federal prison and you have to fight then to get bail. And if you haven’t got an address in America, somewhere to live, then you’re not going to get bail. And if you don’t get bail, they leave you there to stew in until they are ready for a trial. Part of the rationale for doing that … well firstly, they’re not ready for a trial, and secondly, they leave you in prison until you get so fed up and want to go home that you agree to a plea bargain. That’s
how they resolve ninty-seven percent of their cases in America. Also, if they did grant him bail, they’d want a load of money. So it’s going to be costly enough going to America, because if Richard goes to America I’m going to be going there … I’m just trying to anticipate and plan ahead really … if you fail your appeal, they don’t give you long before they take you. You can be gone within two weeks.

NP:
I cannot imagine what you’ve been through and how much of a shock this must be.

JD:
It was terrifying at the beginning … I’ve got a bit used to it now because I’ve spent the last six months of my life on the Internet finding out more, finding out about copyright law in America, about copyright law in the UK, finding out about the extradition law.

NP:
It’s just staggering, the fact that lobbying by bodies such as the RIAA and MPAA have turned something that would otherwise be a civil matter into a criminal one.

JD:
Yes. They buy what they want, don’t they, from the government, from the law enforcement agencies by lobbying and stuff. It’s legalized bribery, isn’t it? And they have got people working for them that used to work for the Department of Justice and vice-versa. It’s all a bit incestuous, that relationship between America’s law enforcement agencies and the MPAA. I’m not saying that people should commit copyright infringement, but that organization, those industries need to move with the times … Richard in one of his Guardian interviews said there’s nothing better than watching a movie at the cinema. He has always been a big cinemagoer. He still is. He was there yesterday. He goes there as often as he can. He loves movies. Yes, he’ll watch movies on his computer, but if he wants to see a movie proper, he’ll go out to cinema like everybody else does.

NP:
People may think that this is never going to affect them, that this is some arcane copyright infringement case. But if they can go after Richard, they can go after anyone with a Wordpress blog. No one is safe.

JD:
That’s right. I mean, what is Richard to them? He’s just a little nobody in England. He’s nothing really. Why pick on him? He’s small fry … It’s not even clear that Richard has broken a law in America. It’s questionable whether he’s broken one in the UK. But you see you just get shipped over there and you have to fight that in a court.

NP:
In effect, it’s guilty until proven innocent.

JD:
That’s the way he’s being treated. Because extradition is another punishment, which is given to you before you’ve even had a chance to go into a court to defend yourself. Putting you and your family through this whole process, and then taking you to America and putting you in jail when you haven’t even been found guilty of anything … and just for something like this. He’s not a murderer or a rapist or terrorist or anything.

Kim Dotcom at home in New Zealand, celebrating the launch of his newest venture.

One day after the January 18, 2012 SOPA/PIPA blackouts, Demand Progress and its allied organizations were busy celebrating a successful day of protests against Internet censorship and plotting our next moves. But in spite of our victory in Congress, we would soon discover that our content industry foes and their political allies already had contingencies in place. On January 19th—merely hours after the end of the SOPA/PIPA blackouts—the United States Department of Justice announced it was going after the popular cloud storage website Megaupload using novel legal theories to allege a criminal conspiracy for copyright infringement because the site allows file sharing.

Our government had decided to take matters into its own hands. The DOJ seized Megaupload’s domain—using the powers it claims from the PRO-IP Act, described at the beginning of this book—and servers, along with the assets of the company and its leaders. The website was one of the world’s most popular online services at the time, and never mind that it wasn’t even a U.S. company, or that Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom was living in New Zealand. Demand Progress couldn’t help but wonder if the timing of the U.S. Government’s actions was deliberate.

We had seen plenty of signs that the content industry apparatchiks who pushed SOPA/PIPA were employing an “any means necessary” approach to preserving their business models, but the Megaupload takedown was above and beyond. The case is currently tied up in courts of law on either ends of the world, as Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom fights his extradition from New Zealand to the United States.

As it turned out, in the course of shutting down Megaupload, the U. S. Government created massive collateral damage by cutting innocent users of Megaupload off from their non-infringing content. In short, untold businesses and ordinary Megaupload users who stored their family photos, business documents and other data on Megaupload were out of luck and without any way of recovering their files. This would never happen, for instance, if the government filed charges against a bank: depositors would get to access their money.

Our allies at EFF are in on the fray, opposite our legislative nemeses at the MPAA. Demand Progress even filed a brief in the case to decry the content industry’s attempts to deprive innocent Megaupload users of their files—and we “crowd-backed” it, with nearly one hundred thousand Internet users signing on to make sure the judge understands that his decision could affect millions of people who use cloud storage.

On the day of the U.S. Government raids on Megaupload, Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick wrote about the alarming developments: