This rural New Zealand town is suddenly in the limelight. That is because it is where a German cyber tycoon, nicknamed Mr. Dotcom, has been living.

He is the man behind a website called “Megaupload.” The FBI alleges that the website has carried out massive worldwide online piracy.

The tycoon himself rents a $24 million luxury mansion on a 30 acre rural estate northwest of Auckland.

The mansion is said to be one of the most expensive homes in New Zealand.

It is part of a noveau riche community surrounded by farming towns with names such as Riverhead and Dairy Flat.

Coatesville, New Zealand, is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

It is here that Kim Dotcom, founder of file-sharing website “Megaupload” was arrested.

He is facing an extradition hearing next month as he is wanted for trial in the US on various charges relating to internet piracy.

Anchor Lisa Mullins spoke to Georgina Ball, reporter with Radio New Zealand, to get more details.

• Geo Quiz Podcast on

  iTunes

• Geo Quiz Podcast via RSS
• href="http://www.facebook.com/pritheworld" target="_blank">The World on Facebook
• Follow @geoquiz
  

Spain hasn’t had an effective law against such practice. Now, even writers are starting to complain that their books are being pirated. So Spain’s come up with a law. But its generating controversy, too.

The latest round of that controversy began late one night in December, when Spanish novelist Lucia Etxebarria said she received unnerving news about the sales of her prize-winning books. They were selling like hotcakes. Illegal hotcakes.

“I learned that I have the dubious honor of being among the top writers in Spanish in the world whose works are illegally sold and downloaded online,” she told Spanish TV recently. “I was furious.”

Spain is among the world’s worst offenders for digital piracy, and its breaking new ground, with books. Pirating them is a new phenomenon, since digital books themselves are fairly new.

But there are sites out there now that operate like Napster for Spanish literature lovers. Etxebarria went to her Facebook page and dropped a bomb on the literary world. She would no longer write, she announced. This, from a novelist who’s won some of the top awards for Spanish literature, who’s a household name in many parts of the world.

Lucia Etxebarria (Photo: Xavierphoto/Wiki Commons)

Outgoing socialist Prime Minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero told Spanish radio that he tabled the legislation, after seeing how much controversy it was stirring up among Internet activists.

Controversy, because the law allowed authorities to go after not only sites offering copyrighted material for downloading, but also file sharing – or peer to peer – sites that don’t actually host the materials. Also, it would have empowered a special government commission to shut down law-breaking sites within days – too fast, critics say, for a judge to weigh in, as the legislation also called for.

But Spain’s new government, in power for just three weeks, has taken up the cause, pledging to enact the legislation. Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s new minister for culture, Jose Ignacio Wert, said last week that Spain’s digital pirates’ days are numbered.

“The government will go after anyone and everyone making money off of other people’s creations without permission,” he told reporters. He emphasized that down-loaders themselves would not be targeted.

But Josep Valor, an expert on intellectual property at the IESE business school, says the proposed law is flawed. He says it requires weeks or months of investigation to determine whether a site is in fact guilty of piracy. Plus, he says, the new law puts the onus on virtually all websites to police themselves against what visitors might post. He says that’d be impossible.

“Even if you are a newspaper, or a radio station,” he said in a telephone interview, “and people just write comments, and some of these comments are in fact links, then you are liable for those things?”

Spain’s Internet activists see an even more basic flaw with Spain’s legislation – or any for that matter that seeks to stem the free flow of information online. Victor Domingo, president of the Spanish Association of Internet Users, said digital copies are invisible, and their worth can’t be measured like traditional products.

“If I steal a sausage from you, you no longer have it,” he told Spanish TV. “But if I make a digital copy of something digital of yours, then we both have it. The problem is that the culture industry is based on physical products, for example, books.”

Domingo said the digital reality destroys the old paradigm.

“Instead of accepting that,” he said, “the industry is trying pass a law that tramples on our rights.”

Some Internet activists believe they have a right to share intellectual property online even if it’s copyrighted. They say they won’t give up their struggle to keep the Internet free of restrictions.

One Spanish website, for example, posts videos on how to upload copyrighted material while hiding your own identity, so that authorities can’t catch you.

While activists gear up for more protests, most artists seem pleased. Even the writer Lucia Etxebarria. She now says she’s considering a return to writing, knowing that the government is taking action. Even if its plan is flawed.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  The United Nations had planned to fly desperately needed aid to the Somali capital of Mogadishu today to help feed drought victims, but bureaucratic problems meant the planes couldn’t take off.  The UN declared a famine in two regions of Somalia just last week, and the crisis has brought new attention to a country that is essentially lawless. One artifact of that is the rise of piracy off Somalia’s coast.  Jay Bahadur spent considerable time there researching his new book, it’s called The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World.  In it he profiles a pirate leader known as Boyah.  Bahadur met him in a small town in the Somali region of Puntland.  Boyah exuded an air of superiority.

Jay Bahadur: Boyah was physically an absolutely gigantic specimen.  He was, I’m pretty tall, I’m abouat 6’5″ and Boyah had at least 2″-3″ on me.  But Boyah at our first meeting was completely contemptuous of me.  He very little looked in my direction and just sort of sat there grumbling and looking up at the sky, and complaining about how much time this was taking, the day was over, and so on.

Mullins: Great start for you, huh?

Bahadur: Yeah, he’s sort of the principle character in my book.  But he began in the early 1990s as a lobster fisherman in Eyl.  Eyl is a coastal town in Puntland that became kind of the epicenter of world piracy, the capital I guess you could say. And essentially what happened was foreign fishing came in and used steel pronged dragnets that really devastated the lobster habitats.  So, there’s many documented instances of foreign fishing running over local fishing gear, of shooting local fishermen, even one story I was told when I was in Eyl was a couple of lobster divers were actually swept up in a troller’s net and drowned.  There’s some really harsh depredations committed by foreign fishing.

Mullins: So tell us how that lead to the piracy that we’re seeing today.

Bahadur: Well, the reason that so much foreign fishing congregates around Somalia is essentially more or less the rest of the world has been fished out.  And so when you had foreign fishing that came in to coastal areas like Eyl it made it too dangerous for artisanal divers like Boyah to operate. So they essentially decided to start attacking these fishing ships that were coming into their territory.  And Boyah told me in 1995 he hijacked three South Korean fishing ships.

Mullins: So how reluctant was he to give you this kind of information?  And I wonder what were you able to find out from him, and what you weren’t?  I mean what part of the story is he not telling me?

Bahadur: It wasn’t just Boyah, but a lot of the pirates I felt were feeding me either their corrupted or just plain misinformation.  And one of the reasons for this is I was working for 1) with the government, right.  Working with the son of a man who was basically the head of their sub clan, and who was also the president of Puntland at the time. So, everything was being filtered to tailor to the ears of the president and his son.  So for example, Boyah back in an earlier interview claimed that 30% of all ransom money went to pay off local officials, and this was something I was very interested in.  So when I asked him this question with the president’s son translating for me, of course, he said no, no, no, no money has ever gone to any government official.

Mullins: You did manage to find out a lot about the pirate economy and how pirates divide up the ransoms that are parachuted directly onto the decks of ships.  And there’s one man who told you after the ransom has been divided each pirate has to throw his mobile phone into the ocean before he leaves the ship.

Bahadur: The reason why they toss their cell phones into the water was because they wanted to avoid anyone being able to setup an ambush for the other ones once the ransom came.  So, essentially they all took their money, they got to the shore, they dispersed or maybe stayed in small groups made up of their own family members, and made a mad dash for the capital city. And one kind of pirate insider I was interviewing told me that’s how you know when the ransom has come because you call them and none of their phones work because they’ve tossed them into the ocean.

Mullins: At the bottom of the ocean…  When do they decide and how to they decide to kill hostages?

Bahadur: There’s a recent report put out, a very accurate account of the 62 deaths that have occurred because of, indirectly or directly, because of pirate actions.  Seven of those deaths have been caused by pirates deciding to execute hostages.  One of those instances happened very recently in February when the four American yachters were killed. What happened is that the yacht was surrounded by four US warships and one of the pirates I guess panicked and fired an RPG at a US ship.  So they started loading, basically boarding troops in preparation for launching a rescue operation.  And then a small subset of the pirate group just panicked and shot two of the hostages.  When US forces heard the gunfire and started moving to board the ship the other two hostages were killed. This was a completely botched operation on all sides I think.  Generally though what you’re seeing is a lot more brutality in terms of torture, using them as human shields, tying them up, throwing them in freezers and so on.

Mullins: How did you manage to get out alive?  You were in the den.  You put yourself there.  You were around some very unsavory characters.  Why didn’t they take you hostage?

Bahadur: Well, it all comes down to the clan connections I had I think.  I was with the new government, the president of which is from the same sub clan as the pirates.  So essentially if they had done anything to me it would’ve been like a direct challenge to the ruling authority.  That being said, some of them were very skittish certainly when I showed up and accused me of being a CIA spy.  And when I came in with government troops actually we almost got into a fire fight with pirates. In those instances they were obviously very nervous that we were with the government, but to do something directly against me would’ve been kind of like declaring war on the ruling clan and obviously that was something they wanted to avoid.

Mullins: Jay Bahadur, thank you.

Bahadur: Oh, my pleasure.

Mullins: Jay Bahadur’s new book is called The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: The latest trove of Wikileaks dispatches sheds new light on a controversial arms shipment off the coast of east Africa.  Somali pirates stumbled on the weapons when they captured a Ukrainian freighter in September of 2008.  It was quite a haul.  The cache included 32 Soviet Arab battle tanks, anti aircraft guns, grenade launchers, and other infantry equipment. The cables made clear that the weapons were headed to southern Sudan, although at the time Ukraine and Kenya claimed that the weapons were for Kenya’s military. The New York Times’ Jeffery Gettlemen is in the Sudan capital of Khartoum.  He says that the leaked cables show Washington knew about the arms shipments, but looked the other way.

Jeffery Gettlemen: What the cables reveal is that the Kenyan government had been in consultation, the language used in the revealed cables, had been in consultation with the U.S. government to ship these tanks from Ukraine through Kenya, into south Sudan.  There isn’t an arms embargo on south Sudan.  There are different sanctions and embargoes on other parts of Sudan, but south Sudan is allowed to acquire some weapons.  This is part of a peace treaty that goes back a few years. And the south has been fighting for decades for independence against the north.  They won a semi-autonomous arrangement, and part of that arrangement was allowing them to build up their military.  So part of the deal was that they could then bring in weapons and begin to build up a professional military force. However, they’re supposed to disclose exactly what they’re bringing in.  And that’s what this arrangement through Kenya came to be as circumventing.

Mullins: And why did it have to be a secret operation though? As you say there was no arms embargo against weaponry in southern Sudan.

Gettlemen: That’s a good question.  I think a part of it is maybe they didn’t want anybody know they were building this sizable of a force.  There’s also questions about corruption and kickbacks, and maybe by bringing in the arms secretly, nobody knew exactly how much they were paying, possibly there were over payments.  You never know once, it’s not transparent how this government is being spent.

Mullins: Jeffery, clarify what the United States’ role was in this.  And this is under the Bush administration.

Gettlemen: The United States in 2005 helped broker a peace treaty between north and south Sudan.  There had been a civil war in Sudan for decades, going back to the ’60s.  It was very similar to what happened in Darfur, but actually worse. So in 2005 the United States and some other international players brought the two sides together and said enough, let’s have a peace treaty.  They told northern Sudan you have to grant the south some type of semi autonomy, and you have to allow them to be independent if that’s their choice. Now next month in January they’re finally gonna have this historic moment where they’re going to vote for succession from the north.  And it looks like that’s going to happen. But the upshot is that the United States knew that the south was circumventing this very peace treaty that the United States brokered.  And at the same time, the United States was trying to come across as a peace maker between north and south.  They’re still doing that.  Right now the special envoy of the Obama administration is in Sudan, where I am, and he is negotiating with both sides trying to make sure this referendum goes off okay. So that’s why these cables are interesting because it could be a setback to that effort because it puts the U.S. back in the camp of looking like it blindly sided with the south at the expense of the north, and that’s what the issue is right now.

Mullins: All right, Jeffery Gettlemen, the New York Times correspondent speaking to us from Khartoum, Sudan.  Jeffery, thank you very much.

Gettlemen: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

A Somali refugee helped in the release of the British couple (Photo: 1st Class Edward L. Pruitt, US Navy)

Rachel and Paul Chandler spoke after their release of the horrors of their 388 days of incaptivity. Rachel Chandler said their capture by Somali pirates was terrifying enough. But the pirates would inflict more terror on the couple in the months to come. She says it was traumatic when the pirates separated she and her husband and they were distraught and frightened. She says when they refused to be separated, they were beaten.

Paul Chandler said they knew little of the efforts to free them , until they were finally released. He says it was confirmed that Somalis all over the world were helping them. And Chandler thanked the Somali government for what he called, “bringing things to fruition.”

What the Chandlers didn’t say was that the man who took them to safety that day was indeed a Somalian. He was Dahir Kadiye, a refugee who lives in London and is from the same village as the pirates. Kadiye says he believed he might have influence if he got involved in the hostage negotiations because he was ashamed as a Somali and for every other Somali person that Somali pirates were involved.

The talks went on for months between intermediaries.Kadiye says he kept repeating the same message, “we told them these people are not sheep. These people are not vessel cargo. They are human beings. They are elders, British elders so there was no reason to keep them any longer.”

Finally, two weeks ago, Kadiye drove to a prearranged meeting point. But bandits stopped his car and threatened to kill him. It took another ten hours before he was finally taken to meet the Chandlers at the bush camp where they were being held. Kadiye says he had to convince the couple that he wasn’t another pirate and showed them his British passport.

“I told them, I was from east London and I came here to release you. And from now on, we will be free and you will be free and we will go home together. We hugged each other and cried.”

There are reports that ransom money was paid. But Kadiye says he knows nothing about any funds changing hands. And he says he wasn’t paid a cent for his work to free the couple.

Kadiye is back in London now and he hopes international aid will flow into Somalia so young men there will no longer turn to piracy.
Download MP3 (Photo: 1st Class Edward L. Pruitt, US Navy)

Somali pirates release British couple (Photo: 1st Class Edward L. Pruitt, US Navy)

• Video: Rachel and Paul Chandler speak to the BBC’s Andrew Harding in Mogadishu
• Paul and Rachel Chandler are Free

We also take a look at how some Haitians are working to recycle their trash into charcoal briquettes in a bid to stem the country’s deforestation problem. Reporter Amy Bracken has that story for us.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford will take us into the dark heart of Siberia to try to find out why Russian’s make such good computer criminals. How good, er, bad are they? The Russian government’s warned that they are “the best in the world.”

And speaking of pesky tech problems that won’t go away, how about piracy? It turns out that Hollywood might decide to completely pull out of Spain, because of the country’s horrible track record when it comes to stopping the distribution and sales of pirated DVDs.

Episode 286 also has a shout-out to Cristina Schaver and all the students in the 7th period “Information Technology in a Global Society” class at the American School of Madrid. Apparently, their teacher, Jamie Forslund, is making them listen to the Tech Podcast as homework. The horror…the horror.

Remember, our Facebook campaign (1,000 “likes” by the end of May) is doing great. Keep spreading the word. We’re also on Twitter too.

This episode was brought to you, musically, by that immense guitar talent, Eddie Van Halen. The track, for reasons that will be made clear if you listen to the podcast, or read this, is “Eruption.”

Don’t forget, you can subscribe to our podcast via RSS, iTunes, or email. Hey, we’re full service.

(Photo courtesy of Tesla Motors)

• Jeffrey Gettleman’s story in the New York Times
• World Food Program – Somalia
• BBC World Service Africa

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Nearly two decades of fighting and humanitarian suffering has left Somalia a failed state.  More than a third of the people in the east African nation are hungry.  Now it appears that much of the food aid intended for them is being stolen.  A U.N. Security Council study reportedly concludes that corrupt contractors, Islamist militants and even local U.N. workers are taking up to half the aid meant for the needy.  Jeffrey Gettleman is east African correspondent for the New York Times.  Jeff, to start off with here, what makes food distribution in Somalia so difficult?

JEFFREY GETTLEMAN:  Truly a perfect storm of problems.  For starters there’s no government and as a result, the place has been lawless and chaotic for the last 20 years.  Then you have this new problem of kidnapping of aid workers and threats to Westerners so it’s very hard for any aid agency to monitor what’s going on in Somalia because there’s almost no foreign presence there.  There are no diplomats, there are no aid workers.  Very few journalists go in there and then on top of that you have a country that has been struck by drought after drought, crisis after crisis.  You have millions of people who have been displaced and displaced people can’t farm, they can’t fend for themselves, they can’t feed themselves so as a result you have great need and then on the other side great difficulty in meeting those needs because of the lawlessness and the chaos.

WERMAN:  So in other words, because there are no aid workers there to kind of receive this shipment of aid, the West is essentially sending all of its food aid and not knowing how it’s kind of arriving or where it goes.

GETTLEMAN:  There are local aid organizations and some of them do very heroic work.  Many local aid workers have been killed by different militant groups.  These people are considered spies by some of the militant groups just because they’re working with an American or a British or a foreign aid organization so they’re taking huge risks just to be there.

WERMAN:  Well take us through briefly, Jeff, what happens when that food arrives in Somalia.  Someone in Nairobi rubber-stamps a multi-ton shipment of food aid.  Take us through what happens before it actually gets to the people who need it, once that food aid comes to the port.

GETTLEMAN:  You know I think it’s a really interesting topic.  Once the ships land in Somalia, they have to subcontract the delivery of the aid to a whole bunch of different actors, some with ties to militant groups, some that don’t have the best business reputation but they’re the only guys in town that have the trucks, that have the manpower, that have the experience delivering aid.  Then in between you know, the port and the hungry people are a hundred different checkpoints often, landmines, you know, pirates, militant groups and there’s just a lot of challenges to actually get the aid from the port to the people who need it.

WERMAN:  In other words, the number of potential windows of fraud that that food aid has to pass through are really unknown.  We just don’t know essentially what happens to it once it gets to the port.

GETTLEMAN:  No and some of this is really a cost of doing business.  It would be impossible to hope that all the aid would get to the people who it’s intended for, without some of it being you know, siphoned off by the various actors along the way.  Some of these militant groups like the Shaba, which is a hard-line Islamic group that’s chopped off hands and stoned people to death and has lynched Al Qaeda, they demand payments at the checkpoint.  They might say, hey give me a couple packs of grain so I can sell it in the market for money or so I can use it to eat it so to get the aid through, there’s often, you know, often some of that aid disappears and this isn’t unique to Somalia.  This is true in many consoled zones that if you want to get the aid to the people who need it, you have to play ball with the authorities on the ground.

WERMAN:  The U.N. Security Council study that you reported on today will be presented publicly to the Security Council next Tuesday.  What follow up will there be?

GETTLEMAN:  I think people are going to put pressure on the U.N. Security Council to make more specific action to either open up more investigations into the WFP operations, the World Food Program operations, maybe to hire outside contractors to come in and monitor the aid convoys to make sure this food is getting to where it needs to go.  I think there’s also going to be a lot of criticism and more scrutiny on the Somalia government because it’s basically, the world feels, the Western world feels they don’t have an alternative to the transitional federal government right now and therefore they have to support these guys, no matter what.  Well, this report indicates there’s a lot of corruption going on within that government and there’s going to be some questions raised and then you have this ongoing piracy issue where it looks like some local Somali officials are helping the pirates and there’s going to be a lot more pressure on them to crack down on piracy because it’s really becoming a menace to global trade.

WERMAN: Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa correspondent for the New York Times.  Thank you very much.

GETTLEMAN: Glad to help.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Click on the player below to hear Cyrus Farivar’s report on the global growth of the Pirate Party.

You can find a list of international chapters of the Pirate Party here.

This week’s podcast also includes an in-depth look at a Swedish court’s decision to jail and fine the founders of a website called The Pirate Bay. We start with an explainer on what, exactly, the Pirate Bay website does and does not do, and then have analysis on the global implications of the court’s decision.

And somewhere in there we also talk about President Obama’s pick to be the government’s Chief Information Officer. His name is Vivek Kundra, and his appointment did not come without a touch of controversy. The conversation also strays, strangely enough, into politics. Obama depended heavily on tech tools during the campaign. Now that he’s in Washington, he’s set up a White House blog and Twitter account. But are these technologies really making a difference when it comes to ways US citizens communicate with their leaders? We include a couple of very good clips from Phil Noble, founder of a website called Politics Online

Related articles by Zemanta

• President Obama Names Nation’s First Chief Technology Officer (readwriteweb.com)
• President Obama, Where’s Our CTO? (techcrunch.com)
• Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)