Kim is surely in this for himself but if he can irritate the plutocrats I can't help but smile.

I agree.

I kinda agree, although I don't agree that family estates should be able to live off the proceeds of inherited rights. Once a creator dies, the copyright should expire with them. The current establishment breeds laziness.

One of the biggest failings of copyright law at the moment is that the real creator seldom actually benefits from the copyright. Most works are created as part of a business, which means that the employer receives the lion's share of the licence income and the creator receives a one-off lump sum or standard salary - either of which is usually a pittance.

If anyone believes that copyright law - at least in its current state - serves to protect creators, they are seriously delusional.

I also do have a little problem with the rights living on beyond death. However, the rationale explained to me was that it was to protect families where the creator died "early" - so if a gifted artist dies when he's say 25 and has a young child, it would at least ensure the child has that income while he's growing up.

It's not a perfect system.

When he got arrested I took a glance at some of the papers and there was evidence that he was actually paying people for delivering "hot stuff" to his site. Here is a link:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98441696/Demand-Progress-Legal-Brief-Against-MPAA-in-U-S-vs-Kim-Dotcom-6-27-2012
To be fair, I only took a quick glance and I didn't follow the incident any further, but even to the casual observer it should be clear that this was not just some guy putting out a system and saying "whatever happens happens".

A copyright is never a guarantee of income. In fact, it rarely brings in anything resembling a livable income, and those rights still need to be asserted, licence fees still need to be collected by the rightsholder or an agent thereof. The money doesn't just flow in.

There are other more established mechanisms in place to provide financial support to families of survivors, namely life insurance and survivor/bereavement benefits and pensions.

Anybody that starts a file sharing/locker service knows what they're getting into and are therefore complicit in a way. Is it really likely that in a 24 hour period 3000 people requested to download somebody's home video? If this were any other industry, such activity would be flagged as suspicious and shut-down until they establish contact with the account owner.

I so hate those fileserver pay for a faster connection sites. I usually avoid them at all costs.

Kim Dotcom ego is too large to have any sympathy for, but it's fun to laugh at his antics.

I'm not naive in thinking that file storage should be free. I'm more than willing to pay a small amount to use a file storage system - like $5 a month. The problem, however, is that the entire file storage ring is filled with dubious activities.

For example:

I paid for Rapidshare - until suddenly, without warning it went down and my payments for a year got lost. I didn't get compensated. This was the THIRD site to do this to me - not to mention that there's so many different sites around, that any site using these sites, always seems to use a different site meaning it's simply not worth paying any amount because you'd have to pay for 6-7-8-9 sites to get a decent coverage. On top of that, download speed are often poor anyway, due to Russian servers.

I don't like him. But I dislike his opponents even more. So it's a lesser of two evils kinda thing.