Foes become best of enemies sharing the applied Utu of the United States entertainment industry.
Question. What do the National Party and Kim Dotcom have in common apart from both being domiciled in New Zealand, and both being each other’s nemesis?
Answer. They are both targets of the entertainment industry’s determination to demonstrate the power and the long reach of its copyright enforcement.
Kim Dotcom was arraigned in New Zealand at the behest of the United States entertainment industry on the grounds that his gigantic computerised transit warehouse was being used to handle US entertainment products.
The National Party was similarly constrained to appear in court over the similarity of its 2014 campaign jingle with that of the output of a United States performing artist.
Now we encounter the divergence between the two unlikely parties in that Kim Dotcom’s enforced presence in the United States remains on hold, while the National Party must wear a fine of $600,000 for lifting a snarling, tattooed US warbler’s rhythm.
These two entities, the National Party and the Dotcom one also share the distinction in that in the same 2014 election they both fielded competing political parties –the Dotcom Party known as the Internet Party and the National one
Similarly these two rather disparate entities share several mysteries. Among them:-
- Why did the National government deem it necessary to be party to an SAS-style raid on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland residential headquarters when the subsequent evidence indicated that Mr Dotcom would have come quietly?
- Why did Mr Dotcom, if he believed himself guilty of anything, have had his digital storage company’s servers – the virtual warehouse-located in the United States which he must have known has an extradition agreement with New Zealand?
The degree to which the courtroom proceedings in Wellington leading up to the National Party copyright decision will be a presence in the continuation of the proceedings against Mr Dotcom will of course be an element for the jurists involved to conjure with.
The two defendants resemble two bruised and bloodied martial arts combatants, tag wrestlers, obliged to lean on each other to remain standing up.
The Kim Dotcom corner murmuring to the effect that it was encouraged to settle in New Zealand by a National government viewing the burly digital genius as an avatar who would encourage others of that stripe to set up shop here
The National Party corner meanwhile rumbling away how their various professional imaging advisers had let them down and after all, they only wanted to get the younger vote in their corner anyway---the same people who were supposed to pick up the Dotcom digital entrepreneurship follow-me message
The fact that these two, the hunters and the hunted, now find themselves in the same copyright corner again underlines the bizarre nature of the general election of 2017.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk || Friday October 27, 2017 |||
