Kim Dotcom on TPP: Hollywood trying to control web, totally censor it

Hollywood hasn’t woken up to the changing world, refusing to evolve their business model into something that works better with the internet, Kim Dotcom, internet entrepreneur and businessman, told Max Keiser.

In the latest episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Kim Dotcom discussed copyright issues, crypto currencies, Edward Snowden’s revelations and the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP].

‘I’m not against copyright, I’m against copyright extremism. I think people who create something, they have a right to make money but it shouldn’t override innovation, it shouldn’t override things that make society function better,’ Kim Dotcom said, speaking about the ongoing Megaupload court battle. He added: “What Hollywood is trying to do is basically to turn the internet into a totally censored and controlled network to their liking, and that’s what I’m fighting against.”

Kim Dotcom on crypto currency: “It’s a very exciting development, it might lead to the world of currencies, it might lead to something that unifies, the global transaction system.”

According to statistics, uploads to Torrent web-sites were up 50 percent in 2013, and despite all efforts by the MPAA, people are still going to Torrent sites and it’s still transforming the industry. Kim Dotcom considers that MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is “putting his hand into a giant river and is trying to stop it but this is never going to happen and it’s never going to work.”

“They [Hollywood] are spending a lot of energy, time and money on fighting something that they can’t defeat. The only way they can defeat it is by adapting to the new reality by changing their business model to something that works and functions better with the internet: worldwide release of content on the same day, fair pricing, the content needs to work on any device. There are so many things that Hollywood can do to improve its business model to be more compatible with the internet, but they haven’t really woken up to this yet,” Dotcom told Max Keiser.

Kim Dotcom said that “even if Hollywood wanted today to create a website where we just go and find any movie and stream it from any country, they couldn’t do it because they have created a model that has made it impossible.”

The reason for this is “a fundraising model that Hollywood has,” according to Dotcom. “It basically has a network of thousands of license partners around the world. So whenever they shoot a new movie, they send the script around to all these licensing partners around the world and pitch that movie to them, telling who is the director and who are the actors, and then they are raising the majority of the money that it cost them to produce that movie from foreign licensing partners,” he explained at RT’s Keiser Report.

“So their risk to invest in movies is very minimal and it’s basically a license to print money. But the tradeoff is that these foreign license holders then own the license, and you can’t anymore say ‘we are doing a global release of this content,’ because the license holders have their own interests: they want to put it out when they want, they want a movie premier, they want to have the rights for this market and control it,” Kim Dotcom said.

‘There’s huge opportunity to cut off a massive slice of internet economy from the US’

Kim Dotcom on TPP: “A TPP is basically a world domination treaty for American corporations. They want to control patents, they want to control copyright, they want to control medicine around the globe.”

Snowden's revelations led to American corporations losing billions of dollars because of the overreach by the NSA. Commenting on that, Dotcom said that it means bad news for the US economy as a whole.

“This is a really dangerous development for the US economy, because everyone is waking up to all these American tech products being ‘backdoored’ and web-services being ‘trojanized’. And this is something that is going to lead to more and more countries, governments and large corporations moving away from services that they have to deem untrustworthy. The effect that this is going to have over the next decade on the US economy is going to be significant,” he told Max Keiser.

On the other hand, Kim Dotcom believes, “there is a huge opportunity for other countries, especially smaller countries, to not enter into the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), but do their own thing and establish laws that are pro-innovation, pro-technology that protect the internet, that give operators safe harbors. So there is a huge opportunity here to cut off a massive slice of internet economy from the US government.”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.