Apple’s Co-Founder Takes Dotcom’s Side

July 2, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Entertainment Industry, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Legal P2P News & Issues 

Kim Dotcom in court room

Steve Wozniak argued that the case against Kim Dotcom is “hokey” and an offense to Internet innovation.

Wozniak – Apple’s co-founder – and Kim Dotcom – former headmaster at the school of file-sharing – took a stand by speaking against the federal case that made the news for the past year in various interviews with The Associate Press on Wednesday.

When Wozniak was visiting New Zealand the previous month to give a speech, he found that Dotcom was unable to meet him as he was under house arrest. As such, the American computer engineer and programmer empathized with Dotcom’s situation and decided to keep contact by e-mail.

“It’s just kind of ridiculous what they did to his life,” Wozniak said in a telephone interview.

“An awful lot of Kiwis support him. The U.S. government is on thin ground.”
He also said that a lot of people used Megaupload within the legal boundaries before US authorities decided to shut it down.

“You don’t just shut down the whole street because somebody is speeding,” he said.

US authorities claimed that Dotcom knowingly enabled massive copyright infringement. In an e-mail interview Dotcom denied the charges by saying:

“The more people learn about this case the more they realize that this type of copyright disagreement between Hollywood and new cloud storage technology is a political debate, not something that belongs in the criminal court and certainly not something to justify breaking down the door to my house.”

“What people uploaded and downloaded in their storage areas was up to them. One person’s licensed music MP3 file is potentially another person’s infringing file.”

Apple’s co-founder and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees that people should pay for content, but argues that the internet must be an open space for innovation and creativity. Furthermore, he said that authorities should immediately release at least some of Dotcom’s blocked financial assets so that he can afford a legal team of lawyers.

“If you’ve got a huge steamroller coming, instead of trying to stop it, you should get out of the way,” he said.

However, Wozniak keeps an open mind and ads:

“If I hear details that have credibility, I could totally turn against him,” Wozniak said.

“But I’m not finding it anywhere from what I’ve heard so far.”

As for his extradition, Kim says he’s confident that NZ will deny the request. So confident that he’s already planning on launching a new service called MegaBox.

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