By Ryan Stephens

Like a phoenix from the ashes, Megaupload rises once again. Kim Dotcom unveiled his latest project, Mega.com, after the United States government took Megaupload down early last year. A year of downtime and lengthy legal battles preceded the recent revival of Mega.com and the future did not look bright for the file sharing site. Amongst all this controversy, a long winded debate received new sparks from the incident. Piracy advocates viewed the takedown as an unjustified attack on internet freedoms while those far more critical of pirates viewed the takedown as necessary. The incident drew plenty of criticism, so what side stands on greater ground? In this particular case, the government was clearly in the wrong. The Internet requires the concept of file sharing, the industry, specifically the recording industry, corrodes the creativity of the author, but there remains an additional caveat. Dotcom does not have the right strategy to tackle the file sharing issue and will end up causing more problems for future movements.

Despite what you might think, the Internet still persists in its infancy. Legislators and even large amounts of people know very little of the Internet and what it stands for. Considering most do not use it past social networking, the true sophistications of the Internet remain hidden from public view. With that in mind, most people will overlook the fact that the Internet remains one of the few places left in the world where freedom of speech is truly free. The typical bindings and limitations placed upon users in the real world mostly fall apart once on the Internet. Some legal restrictions remain in place, one of those being theft. The common consensus considers piracy as theft so therefore, the law must be enforced upon the perpetrators. However, how practical is that?

Law enforcement tracks down the actual crime happening, then find the user, and finally, go through a long-winded legal process. They do this for just one instance so imagine how thinly spread the police will be after attempting to track every instance of file sharing. So, the solution to this problem, unfortunately, will have to be allowing file sharing to persist. For one to stop piracy, they must also stop all trade. It will always be impossible to stop piracy, so companies must outsmart their problem. The only way they would go about doing that is to make their product more valuable. After all, what sounds easier, illegally downloading an entire album and not having to deal any digital rights management software or purchasing an album only for you to lose it once you switch computers?

So, what about the people who spend their hard earned time writing music? The starving artist stereotype is one that often proves itself to be true. Now, of course, your big-earning artists will likely never feel the repercussions of piracy but the new, upcoming artists will be trampled underneath the pirates. However, that simply does not hold up, especially once looking at the Do-It-Yourself punk attitude. Henry Rollins and Steve Albini heralded this attitude for a great deal of their career. They remained independent of record labels for many years and brought plenty of success with it. Now, punk does not claim ownership over it. Any genre or artist may take up this frame of mind and it is rather easy to achieve. Places like Kickstarter, BandCamp, and file sharing services allow musicians to get their product out and give them the ability to make money on them. It’s just a matter of cutting down on dependency on the record label and making monetary sacrifices in the name of artistic creativity.

While the recording industry hurts the artistic ground musicians stand on, the other extreme does not end up helping musicians either. Dotcom takes the role of a martyr and uses the takedown of Megaupload as a jumping off point for his agenda. Videos, posters, and poorly explained stances on the entire file sharing issue delegitimize the pro-piracy people. It comes off sounding childish and will hurt any future movement. It also gives anti-piracy advocates more ammunition. It’s counter productive, especially when Dotcom touts file sharing as a god-given right. The lack of action taken against it has been previously explained with it being hard to enforce and also, the legislation against it does not really directly tackle the issue. It’s less of a right and more of a lack of laws against it. So by drawing more attention to this fact, Dotcom undermines everything he stands for.

Ultimately, the issue of file sharing does create an interesting question. The question being, could one actually end piracy? As history shows, no, piracy is an inevitability and once the ball starts rolling, you might as well just give up. This applies not only to maritime piracy but also music piracy. With enforcement being near impossible and the fact that file sharing helps budding musicians, there seems to be no justification for actually taking a harder stance against this facet of the Internet. However, the rallying cry led by Dotcom and his Megaupload revival will end up breaking the foundation of the file sharing argument. The concept of file sharing and the internet will always be married together and the government assumes the role of the in-laws. They may not like you and you may not like them but you will have to get used to them, which is something the government will have to learn.