Back when I was a kid, to get an eye-popping collection of musical talent like P Diddy, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, Kanye West, Lil John, Jamie Foxx, Mary J Blige, The Game and Will.i.am — with Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather tossed in for some reason (new sex tape?!) — to rally around around a single cause, your cause had to be epic. Like A.I.D.S. or a tsunami or an earthquake or something. Nowadays, things have changed. Take, for instance, that the aforementioned boldfaced names are all participating in a new ad campaign for Megaupload.
Wait, WHAT?!
Yes, THAT Megaupload, the Hong Kong-based cyberlocker service that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) insist is stealing millions from artists like the ones in the ad below.
Can someone please explain what the hell is going on here? After all, Megaupload has been classified as a “rogue site” by the RIAA and here are some of the biggest names in the music business shilling for it through song! Universal Music was so bent about it, in fact, that it issued takedown notices to YouTube to have the video removed, a move that probably doesn’t really serve to back up the claims made by the entertainment industry and its supporters that the entertainment industry would be fair arbiters of any legislation giving it sweeping new powers to police what it deems to be copyright infringement.
TorrentFreak spoke with Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at EFF, who says this type of copyright abuse is nothing new.
“This appears to be yet another example of the kind of takedown abuse we’ve seen under existing law — and another reason why Congress should soundly reject the broad new powers contemplated in the Internet Blacklist Bills, aka SOPA/PIPA.
“If IP rightholders can’t be trusted to use the tools already at their disposal — and they can’t — we shouldn’t be giving them new ways to stifle online speech and creativity,” McSherry concludes.
Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director at Public Knowledge, worries that this type of sweeping power would only be augmented with the arrival of the SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US.
“If UMG took down a video it has no rights to, then what we have here is exactly the sort of abuse that careless, overzealous, or malicious copyright holders can create by abusing a takedown law,” he told us.
“What makes this even worse is that UMG, among others, is pushing to expand its power to shut people down by fiat–SOPA lets rightsholders de-fund entire websites with the same sort of non-reviewed demand that removed this video,” he concludes.
Basically, what UMG is saying is “don’t f*ck with The Jesus,” but let’s not forget that Jesus Quintana was a “pederast.”
(Jesus gif via)
