72 Minutes of silence for Megaupload

On January 19th, right after the international blackout strike followed the day before by more than 60.000 websites against the new anti-piracy laws proposed in the United States, the Department of Justice executed a court order through which they shut down the services of Megaupload and charged seven persons, five of which , including the founders and some employees, have already been arrested.

The Pirate Parties defend the free exchange of information, and considering the arguments exposed in the indictment and the press release submitted by the United States Department of Justice, we claim that the big majority of the accusations have no legal basis or are blatant U.S. government interference in other countries.

Though we may not agree completely with the practices of Megaupload in regard to the management of reported files, we believe that it has never been the responsability of an archive locker as Megaupload to ensure the correctness of the material that people upload, but to diligently respond as required by law to any complaint regarding the illegality of the content.

Furthermore, we are worried as we observe some of the statements in the warrant, like the one stating that the absence of a search engine would be reliable indication of criminal intent.

We also consider that the loses the cultural industries say they have endured because of the activity of Megaupload are unreal and biased, as shown by different studies by the Harvard and London Business Schools or the governments of Canada, The Netherlands and Switzerland.

Numerous studies have denied in recent years that a download equates to a lost sale. This has not prevented the cultural industries and the media, controlled up to 70% by only 7 multinationals, from promoting the creation of laws such as SOPA, PIPA or Sinde-Wert (Spain) by the constant pressure exerted and even writing the drafts of some of them.

This indictment has been carried out in collaboration with different authorities on four continents, showing that even without SOPA, PIPA and other anti-piracy laws there is no limit to the wants of the content industries. But they seek to further streamline procedures, even if they have to resort to violating privacy and hindering technological development on the internet.

In this particular case, there are thousands of affected citizens who have lost their own work and creations hosted on Megaupload. The number of people and data that have been affected by this closure is uncalculable: we just witnessed the indiscriminate dumping of a significant part of human knowledge by simple court order.

In short, with this proof has been delivered that whenever music and film producers strive to toughen antipiracy laws, they do so only because they desire to continue profiteering from the work of others (artists). Today we have seen that there is a no need for new legislation to close pages that contain copyrighted material. However, new laws proposed from the United States (SOPA, PIPA, Sinde-Wert) go one step further and allow the shutdown of websites that, be they in compliance with the law or not, are not to their liking.