[HN Gopher] Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green lig...
___________________________________________________________________
Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New
Zealand
Author : wut42
Score : 590 points
Date : 2024-08-15 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| popcalc wrote:
| One-way flight to Russia? His Twitter feed for the last decade
| does give merit to the idea that he's been on the payroll.
| snapcaster wrote:
| What other options does he have? I really wish people wouldn't
| cheer when smallfolk like us get crushed by the state. Not
| saying he's perfect, but what him and others have to suffer
| seems vastly out of proportion to what they did
| wepple wrote:
| I do not categorize him as "small folk like us"
| popcalc wrote:
| Agree.
|
| "Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato,
| Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in
| Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an
| armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two
| helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars,
| large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash.
| Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to
| 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
|
| No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the
| realm of dictators and drug lords.
| finikytou wrote:
| how old are you? did you live through the megaupload era?
| for a few years it was ubiquitous and def a cashcow
| machine
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes, but converting that cashcow to a hundred million
| dollars in actual bills, is something special.
| Gormo wrote:
| If someone's a weirdo and wants to stuff their millions
| into a mattress, that by itself should not be sufficient
| to presume them guilty of any illegal activity, or
| justify seizing their money.
| queuebert wrote:
| Wait til you hear about this new startup called Google.
| They are going to launch yet another search engine. I
| doubt there's much money in it, though. They'll be lucky
| to make a few million.
| diggan wrote:
| How much physical cash (actual notes/bills) do you think
| Google founders have in their home? Close to $175
| million?
|
| Not that that justifies anything, people should be free
| to keep as much physical cash as they want.
| echoangle wrote:
| Are you missing the point on purpose? The suspicious
| thing isn't that he has money, it's that he's storing the
| money physically as cash in his home. You think Google
| has a safe at the HQ filled with dollar notes?
| dmantis wrote:
| Sounds pretty logical in a world where banking secrecy
| doesn't exist and most banks are compliant with a single
| jurisdiction which doesn't respects other ones.
|
| Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside
| of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
| echoangle wrote:
| I'm not even necessarily agreeing that it's suspicious
| (ok, it is a bit suspicious but not so weird that I would
| immediately proclaim that he's guilty), I just don't
| think it's productive to post sarcastic comments
| rebutting strawman arguments. If the commenter wanted to
| say that having a lot of cash isn't suspicious, they
| should have just said that instead of making a point
| about google making a lot of money, too.
| finikytou wrote:
| he got banned from banks before and he doesnt want his
| money seized. anyone with the slightest understand of how
| us government operates would understand why hes storing
| the money physically.. Even bitcoiners do it....
| popcalc wrote:
| He's an example to be made of by rights-holders. People
| smarter than him decided to quit the business or go into
| becoming IP owners themselves: see Manwin -> MindGeek ->
| Aylo. It was a calculated risk.
| finikytou wrote:
| it was. he chose freedom and trusting people. if you go
| to jail for that you can be sure that it already created
| a precedent that put into jail a lot of innocent people
| account42 wrote:
| Since when is file hosting a cash cow?
|
| But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of
| other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for
| things they did while physically outside the US.
| Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes
| to its citizens.
| rout39574 wrote:
| If that logic sounds sketch when the police take $10K
| from a man going to buy a car, it should also be sketch
| when you add zeros somewhere else.
|
| In general "That's really unusual behavior" shouldn't be
| enough to forfeit a fortune.
| popcalc wrote:
| He hasn't been sentenced, let alone seen court yet. You
| don't have a right to flee a warrant for your arrest?
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't think the money in question was forfeited in the
| sense that the US uses, only seized pending an
| investigation. The lack of a corrupting incentive alone
| makes the seizure less suspicious in my eyes.
| newswasboring wrote:
| I don't know about you, but where I come from this looks
| like punishment through process. Not even trying to
| defend this Kim dude, just pointing out just because the
| process is "fair" doesn't mean its fair. Yes that is not
| a very well articulated point, but this is something
| which many people should have a feeling for in their
| bones.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I agree that process can be used as punishment. But I
| don't see any evidence that Dotcom has been uniquely or
| unfaithfully subjected to processes, or that his
| treatment is unusual given the charges he's facing.
|
| Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright
| infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would
| be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and
| racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of
| money.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| A man's labor and intelligence can eventually earn him
| $10k to buy a car. Over a long career, one might
| eventually amass a fortune on the order of $1M. Kim might
| (hypothetically) have an IQ of 150 and be willing to work
| punishingly long hours where our analogous car buyer went
| home to be with his family. But it's completely farcical
| to state that he's 10,000 times smarter or harder-working
| than a baseline human, that's absurd - it's far more
| reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the
| efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated,
| scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
| And that's ignoring that it was $175M in cash, as if it
| was pocket change to him; there's no good explanation for
| him to have that much in investments much less in
| physical money lying around.
|
| I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling
| fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his
| exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles
| on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's
| foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at
| hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest.
| Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth
| $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
| bhy wrote:
| Sounds like you rediscovered Marxism?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Your accusative tone implies that's a bad thing, is that
| the case?
| cvwright wrote:
| According to the last 107 years of history, yes.
| bhy wrote:
| No. I don't mean to imply it's bad or any accusations.
| Just trying to point out some fact.
| SXX wrote:
| I have no sympathy for Kim Dotcom, but he is not proven
| to be some drug cartel boss or criminal overlord. Reason
| he had so much cash is obvious - because back in 2012
| crypto wasn't yet so successful. And the guy was US
| government target for a long time before arrest so he had
| good reason not to keep money in banks where it's easy to
| arrest them.
|
| Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other
| than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely
| be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's non-sensical.
|
| Bezos and Musk provided more value to society than one of
| their employees.
|
| The convenience of Amazon wouldn't exist and it saved
| normal people a ridiculous amount of man-hours.
|
| If you contributed something more valuable to the world
| you could also get more than $1M for your lifetime.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000
| times smarter
|
| That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101
| isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can
| easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than
| some average shlob.
|
| > it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the
| value of the efforts of others to himself, stole,
| manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M
| illegitimately.
|
| Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing
| Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's
| savings. He had a service that other people wanted to
| use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that
| he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the
| US government, claiming they seized his own personal
| documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of
| it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would
| consider legitimate.
|
| > I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling
| fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his
| exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles
| on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's
| foregoing all human needs and limits,
|
| Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is
| what happens when your economics education consisted of a
| dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
|
| Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more
| than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably
| making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of
| many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth
| of many billions depending on share price on any given
| day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because
| your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and
| only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a
| bit less).
| Geee wrote:
| That's not how it works. The majority of their wealth is
| in the stock of their companies. They don't earn anything
| until they sell their shares, and then the money comes
| from whoever wants to own the shares.
| earnesti wrote:
| The guy has a lot of money, so therefore he is more
| guilty than normal men?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The guy has a lot of money, so therefore it's very
| tedious when people characterize him as a smol bean who
| just wanted to help people share their data. It's a
| smokescreen for the real position (which I recognize some
| people do legitimately hold) that copying and selling
| movies without compensating the people who made them is a
| legitimate business model and it's OK to make lots of
| money doing it.
| criddell wrote:
| I think they were just backing up the "he's not small
| folk like us" statement.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The thing about that word "smallfolk", is that there is a
| very heavy connotation that someone remains smallfolk no
| matter how positively fortune smiles upon them. No matter
| how wealthy they might become, not even if they can ride
| a dragon, do they suddenly become nobles.
|
| The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't
| smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they
| favor.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Assuming $100 bills, that's nearly _two tons_ of cash.
| (3800 pounds.)
|
| Definitely not "small folk like us".
| DSingularity wrote:
| Please. It fits his personality perfectly to do something
| like keep all his money in cash.
|
| If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely
| connected to malicious security services he would have
| been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > It fits his personality perfectly to do something like
| keep all his money in cash
|
| How do you explain this part then:
|
| > Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access
| to 64 bank accounts world-wide
| DSingularity wrote:
| Why is it so odd that an anti authoritarian individual
| would keep large sums of money in cash and distribute
| whatever cash he does keep in as many bank accounts as
| possible?
|
| Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much
| money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal
| case being prosecuted? If there was something there
| wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years
| ago?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I'm not interested in arguing for or against him because
| I don't care about him or this case.
|
| I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where
| you just assert that it was perfect in line with is
| character to have ALL is money in cash while literally
| the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all
| over the globe.
| DSingularity wrote:
| I'm just saying that this guy distrusts authority so it's
| not surprising that he was caught with a lot of cash or
| that he has a web of accounts. My larger point is about
| the fact that these insinuations should be dismissed
| because it's reasonable to assume that if there was major
| wrong doing in his finances (eg drug lord) they would
| have included the evidence in the extradition request.
|
| Feels like we are being a bit pedantic.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I guess we can wait and see what the outcome of the
| eventual trial is.
| phyalow wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4TXAaqmj0E
|
| This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out
| origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a
| stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or
| maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
| swozey wrote:
| I feel like I'm watching satire of what a 2000s mega rich
| nerd would be like but it's really him. He even has a
| basket/hanger on the wall for all of his ... canes.
| Didn't see the fedoras nearby, though.
|
| "At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the
| top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
|
| His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This
| is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their
| security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train
| their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay
| thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like
| kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers
| that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a
| single hit.
|
| Gold bricks are here https://youtu.be/A4TXAaqmj0E?t=365
| karmonhardan wrote:
| I think it's purposely meant to be camp.
| phyalow wrote:
| Absolutely.
| biztos wrote:
| Large TVs?
|
| I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing.
| Anything under about 100" is going to cost more to seize
| than it's worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do
| they seize the cookware?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| At least with local departments, yes police will seize
| kitchen appliances if they are high dollar. Then it all
| goes up for auction. Maybe a cop likes the look of it,
| picks it up for pennies on the dollar at the auction.
| Maybe no one bids and it all gets junked. While the
| primary purpose of civil forfeiture is to seize
| valuables, there are sometimes secondary concerns... the
| cops like to fuck with certain people, and if they can
| just make them paupers by taking their belongings then
| that alone can be enough motivation. Paperwork's pretty
| light because jewelry or cash never has lawyers to defend
| itself.
|
| Feds _seem_ to be a bit more discriminating, tending
| towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and
| real estate. But I 've seen more than a few news articles
| over the years where they seized property you might call
| petty.
| biztos wrote:
| These are the _New Zealand_ police, right?
|
| I get that there's a lot of corruption, but "nice
| GameBoy, my kid'll love it after auction" seems like a
| stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper
| trail, right?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| They are. I suppose. I guess to know which police they
| are, one might have to see who they get their marching
| orders from. TVs were seized of course, and while an
| extraditing authority might request/demand evidence to be
| seized too, what were they hoping to find in the
| televisions do you think?
|
| > I get that there's a lot of corruption, but "nice
| GameBoy, my kid'll love it after auction" seems like a
| stretch even for the US.
|
| Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would
| point you at the many mainstream news articles of places
| that make road trips through where the local police shake
| people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and
| sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as
| squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they
| make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the
| holding cell?
| herendin2 wrote:
| $175M quickly becomes meaningless in this context,
| believe me. It's already much more than you need.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| It's still a human. He just shared songs on the the
| internet. He's treated like a war criminal.
| diggan wrote:
| Maybe I don't know the full story, but as far as I
| understand, it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring
| DMCA takedown requests for a long time, was aware there
| was a ton of piracy on the site and didn't give any
| indication whatsoever that they were even trying to react
| to it by banning accounts that were uploading infringing
| content.
|
| I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from
| your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor
| in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just
| sharing songs on the internet".
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| He shared a lot of them. Still absolutely not something
| that should lead to this multiple-state sanctioned
| response.
| diggan wrote:
| Agree, disproportionate response for sure. Still,
| flagrantly ignoring the law will get you in trouble.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Getting in the way of powerful people getting more power
| is always punished more harshly than anything else,
| including murder.
|
| In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those
| people in our current society are as powerful as they
| get.
| immibis wrote:
| Your comment appears to have been downvoted for being
| inconvenient, despite its truth.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says,
| his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively,
| which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum
| of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded
| directly, but in my experience commenters who start
| talking about things like "powerful people getting more
| power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about
| whether the claims they make are true.)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and
| legal arm wrestling.
|
| That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
|
| And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for
| assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the
| service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have
| been debunking for years.
|
| When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the
| content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
|
| This is not about justice, this is about power.
| lukan wrote:
| As far as I remember, not only aware, but activly
| uploading warez themself (not officially).
| account42 wrote:
| So? If that's a crime under NZ law he can be prosecuted
| there. If it isn't then too bad for the US.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA
| takedown requests for a long time,
|
| "Long time" is subjective.
|
| > I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from
| your home-country because of that
|
| New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short
| list of crime categories that one can be extradited for.
| I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the
| US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the
| exact crimes one is accused of are subject to
| modification to squirm around protections, maybe the
| people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
| herculity275 wrote:
| Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of
| luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| Megaupload had lots of grey/dark patterns, namely people
| could upload whatever but downloading anything big, each
| Downloader had to buy credits.
|
| Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating
| piracy of movies/tv/software
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Nah, he built a file sharing service and people paid for
| that.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| MegaUpload was primarily funded by ads displayed on
| download pages, not the small number of people paying for
| storage.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Can you provide some source for the claim about the
| volume of sales MU had?
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| The original indictment put it at $25mm from ads and
| $150mm from subs, so my original statement is wrong.
|
| But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU
| was making far more from download users than upload
| users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that,
| but they were. It's a question of what they were actually
| paying for.
|
| Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage,
| but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing
| only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever
| uploaded anything.
|
| I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast
| majority of your _paying_ customers don 't share any
| files?
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Sounds exactly like a file sharing service. My Google
| documents are also downloaded much more than uploaded,
| very often by people who don't upload anything at all.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Why does it matter?
| chollida1 wrote:
| > Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of
| luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?
|
| Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from
| MegaUpload and Mega.
| catapart wrote:
| He didn't "share songs on the internet".
|
| He created a site where you can upload anything with
| complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for
| racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government
| interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh,
| too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ
| to build a case around so that they could get discovery
| and find out what they were really trying to get access
| to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
|
| As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND
| absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes,
| the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and
| "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy
| agreement/etc)" types.
|
| Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't
| take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it
| is in the public interest for him to be held accountable
| against his will.
|
| I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a
| media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human
| trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow
| themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
| queuebert wrote:
| This is the clear-headed take. As a point of
| clarification, I don't believe Dotcom has anything to do
| with Mega anymore, and the service Mega has gone legit
| and provides quite a nice a service similar to Tresorit
| -- end-to-end encrypted cloud storage.
| vaylian wrote:
| > But I'll never defend a human trafficker either
|
| Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate
| human trafficking?
| retinaros wrote:
| he did not and at least there is no written evidence that
| he did. something that OP could look up tho is the stats
| of the giant reduction of child trafficking/child abuse
| content posted on X since Musk took it under his wing.
| Why wasnt it adressed before? this could be a much bigger
| story but one OP will never address
| catapart wrote:
| I'm not in a position to disclose anything, but there is
| plenty of information out there about who was storing
| data in what repositories and what those people were
| using other, less-protected, repositories for.
|
| Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word
| for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human
| trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's
| enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that
| anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not
| in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to
| believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was
| going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested,
| completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of
| data.
| throwadobe wrote:
| > And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is
| where the government interest starts.
|
| MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic
| levels of irony
| catapart wrote:
| "needing to be saved from" is a far cry from the 'used as
| an excuse for disclosure' that I accused them of. But I
| do appreciate the irony in conspiracists accusing others
| of racketeering (or otherwise unduly influencing
| markets).
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| He kept breaking laws with large penalties (or provided
| others a platform to do so, depending on your point of
| view) knowingly and repeatedly on a massive scale for
| many years.
|
| Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not,
| if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| I am not saying that's wrong. What's wrong is the way
| it's done. Especially the part where another country
| raids his residence, and has him shipped to said another
| country he's not even a citizen of, to be judged based on
| their law.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| While I don't disagree with the idea behind the post, Kim is
| not exactly small fry. He is not as big as he once was, but
| he seems to be doing well money-wise.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I wish people wouldn't cheer when criminals evade
| accountability.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| First we have to agree on whats a criminal.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Sure. I propose...a trial.
| immibis wrote:
| Kangaroo court it is. We say you're a movie pirate, so
| you are one. Life in prison for you.
|
| ...that is a summary of Kim's trial. Movie companies own
| the government.
| philippejara wrote:
| Is that going to be a trial by the laws of the land he
| resides in and not to a foreign country that the
| defendant is not a citizen nor a resident nor operates
| out of and that refuses to guarantee the same protections
| under the law to a non-citizen compared to a citizen[1]?
|
| This same foreign country who passed laws for invading
| the hague if they came under trial for crimes in the ICC.
|
| [1]: See assange's bid for first amendment's guarantees
| when the same foreign country was trying to extradite and
| "trial" him
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| He moved to New Zealand _after_ much of the alleged
| criminal conduct, in a deal where he was pretty
| explicitly buying residency to the point that immigration
| authorities tried to keep it a secret.
| (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/6547471/Secrecy-
| over-...)
| philippejara wrote:
| He didn't move to new zealand from the US so I struggle
| to see how that is relevant, it's not HK or Germany
| looking to extradite him.
| account42 wrote:
| Genereally such a trial would take place in the
| jurisdiction of the accused unless the crime was
| physically committed somewhere else.
| orra wrote:
| The fair thing to do would be to bring proceedings against
| him the New Zealand. Extraditing him to the U.S. isn't
| accountability: it's a flex.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Dotcom declined that option. His co-defendants plead
| guilty to NZ charges instead of being extraditioned.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| File sharing is not a crime.
|
| IP holder damages should take in consideration what the
| actual buying power of pirates is, not just multiply
| downloads by dvd costs, and copyright laws need a huge
| reform.
|
| He's a modern day robin hood, people would prefer him to
| win over eg. disney... and disney is not doing itself a
| favour these days :)
| popcalc wrote:
| Sharing CSAM definitely is a crime. Nuances exist.
|
| >He's a modern day robin hood
|
| He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for the
| better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on his
| fanbase.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Sure, so is commiting murder.
|
| We're talking about software and (well, mostly) media
| piracy, movies and music here.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| One of the arguments the government used against Kim and
| Mega was that they implemented tech to identify and
| remove CSAM therefore they could have (but chose not to)
| do the same for material that violated copyright.
|
| I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been
| involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does
| seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a
| guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music
| and movies over a decade ago.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been
| involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does
| seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a
| guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music
| and movies over a decade ago.
|
| Yep, especially compared to other people, who did worse
| (pedophillia-wise), like Polansky, etc.
| SXX wrote:
| > He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for
| the better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on
| his fanbase.
|
| Yeah and there is Logan Paul living in US running pump
| and dumps, scams and other things. But he look nice and
| popular so he'll continue to do it without any
| prosecution. As well as many other YouTube personalities.
| After all they pay taxes to US so they can do it freely.
|
| Again, not protecting Dotcom or like him as person, but
| he is not some war criminal to justify this kind of
| effort US put into trying to get him.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Ah, the classic tale of modern Robin Hood, living in a
| mansion with 18 cars and 175M in cash.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > File sharing is not a crime.
|
| Depending on the content, it is.
|
| > He's a modern day robin hood
|
| Robin Hood didn't enrich himself with the stolen goods.
| nadermx wrote:
| What was stolen if the copyright owner still has their
| copy?
| slightwinder wrote:
| Profit.
| nadermx wrote:
| There is no evidence anyone who used their services would
| of paid. The "theft" is propaganda. In fact from the
| article itself it even says Mega had a notice and
| takedown system available to the rights holders. So once
| again what is it that was stolen?
| slightwinder wrote:
| > There is no evidence anyone who used their services
| would of paid
|
| Do you mean "would be paid"? But why would anyone pay the
| users? The uploaders were paid.
|
| > The "theft" is propaganda.
|
| No, it's juridical fact.
|
| > In fact from the article itself it even says Mega had a
| notice and takedown system available to the rights
| holders.
|
| Where does it say this? Anyway, this system was bullocks.
| It was just a poor lip service which they stalled and
| ignored the whole time.
| nadermx wrote:
| Please site source where it says theft, since apparently
| it's a judicial fact. Since last I checked, it says a
| right was infringed, not theft.[0]. Specifically
|
| "copyright holders, industry representatives, and
| legislators have long characterized copyright
| infringement as piracy or theft - language which some
| U.S. courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise
| contentious."
|
| And also I'm unsure there is evedence it was ignored, it
| just seems like you are spewing more copyright
| propaganda. Might I dare to say they might be in fact
| lying?
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
| slightwinder wrote:
| Nitpicking on words? I guess you must be fun at parties.
| nadermx wrote:
| Well last I checked words have meanings. And you needing
| to resort to ad hominen when facts state otherwise is
| telling, especially since I am the Great Gatsby of
| parties.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| >Anyway, this system was bullocks. It was just a poor lip
| service which they stalled and ignored the whole time. I
| can't unsubscribe easily in one click ? They don't get to
| complain easily in one click. I can't get easily an email
| address or phone number to contact them ? They won't get
| contact info too. They had a taste of their own medicine.
| It's unfair if it's easier for them to take down my
| content than for me to appeal the decision.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Some criminals deserved to be cheered on, such as Alexandra
| Elbakyan.
| vaylian wrote:
| Because the real criminals are the publishers who keep
| publicly funded science behind a paywall. None of the
| people who actually conduct the science see any of the
| money. In fact, they typically have to pay a lot of money
| to get their findings published.
| SXX wrote:
| BTW she is as bad as Kim Dotcom in terms of being Putin
| shill and other crazy stuff. So people who dislike Dotcom
| for this would be surprised to learn that Elbakyan is as
| bad.
|
| I mean she doing gods work on making science more open to
| everyone, but if she were living in New Zealand she would
| land in US prison for 10+ years long ago.
| mrfinn wrote:
| Well then I guess you won't have a thing for political
| parties
| preisschild wrote:
| "the state" is made up by normal people. And in this case the
| state is just protecting normal people from criminals like
| Dotcom.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How exactly are they protecting me?
| nxicvyvy wrote:
| Just like trump eh?
|
| Is everyone you don't like a Russian spy?
| dubcanada wrote:
| Let's not read past the words written on the screen now. No
| reason to bring Trump into the conversation at all.
| enriquec wrote:
| It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The degree to which
| the propaganda works is alarming. They'll turn a blind eye to
| Ross Ulbricht, Snowden, the Patriot Act, etc. while wasting
| their time foaming at the mouth at made up stories about
| Russia. Unreal to see in this day and age, honestly - I mean
| you'd think the internet + a little critical thinking would
| have given these people a clue.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Two bad (and sad) things can be true at the same time.
| zo1 wrote:
| I have a hard time just convincing people in my company to
| buy a license for some software we arguably need. I
| literally can not convince them using any logic or facts,
| it's downright infuriating and I feel like I'm in a crazy
| world. You can't bring people to the watering hole, they
| have to get there on their own. And by that point, I've
| given up and have moved on. And even then, no amount of "I
| told you so" will have them listening to you next time
| around, they always just double-up on their own ideas and
| cope with the existence of any facts that contradict them.
| Oh and sometimes they forgot you even told them in the
| first place, and they make it seem like they thought of it
| first.
|
| I weep for this world.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I know what you mean and I work with some smart people
| that also cannot be convinced with arguments unless they
| come from someone with a high social status. They have to
| fail to learn anything if they don't have someone around
| with a high social status to guide them.
| efdee wrote:
| Nitpicking, but I think the saying goes "You can bring a
| horse to the watering hole, but you can't force it to
| drink". :-)
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Which stories about Russia do you find made up, exactly?
| When my relative had to watch his neighbour being taken to
| a Russian torture chamber in Kherson, not to be seen for
| months, and then hearing his stories about daily beatings,
| electrocution, pulled fingernails and the like - was that
| made up? Are you one of those people who consider the
| massacre of hundreds of unarmed Ukrainians in Bucha "made
| up"?
|
| Kim Dotcom, the Critical Thinker, does. But he curiously
| suspends critical thinking when pandering idiotic
| conspiracy theories about biolabs weaponizing birds. Gotta
| love these selective critical thinkers.
| finikytou wrote:
| sad to see that kind of comments in HN. I feel that 10 years
| ago there was more room for accepting that a political opponent
| should be free to speak up. now our educated masses are pushing
| for prison and extradition because they don't belong to the
| axis of good.... you def cannot be for opensource and its
| values and say things like that
| herculity275 wrote:
| The comment you're responding to just speculates that he will
| escape to Russia based on his (very consistent) views and
| activism, there's no suggestion that he should go to prison
| because of them.
| philippejara wrote:
| The comment he's responding to speculates that he is being
| paid by russia to post on twitter, as if people couldn't
| come to their own conclusions based on their own views and
| their own biases, which are very very strong against the US
| if you're Kim Dotcom with good reason.
| thor-rodrigues wrote:
| I don't understand your line of thought. The question with
| Kim was not about open-source, was about copyright and
| intellectual property all along.
|
| As other comments noted, the man literally made millions
| distributing copyrighted material, while completely aware of
| what he was doing.
| enriquec wrote:
| no. he gave people a way to send stuff and they sent what
| they wanted.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Have you read the indictment? It makes a pretty strong
| case that he knew copyright infringement was the cash cow
| of his business model, structuring the business and lying
| to copyright holders in order to make the infringement
| more effective. Deleting links without removing the
| infringing content from the server is the big smoking gun
| to me - there's really no legitimate reason to do that.
| enriquec wrote:
| disagree
| snapcaster wrote:
| So what? are you a record executive? why do you feel so
| strongly about this? what is motivating you to simp for
| the empire so hard?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think this is an honest question and I'm not
| going to engage with it.
| throwadobe wrote:
| That's the mother of cop outs. It's an absolutely honest
| question.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Perhaps we're using terminology differently. When I say
| "honest question", I mean a question that someone wants a
| straightforward answer to, perhaps as a starting point
| for further discussion.
|
| "What is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?"
| is not such a question. Having been in such conversations
| before, if I responded with an honest answer like "I
| generally think the US is a pretty good country" or "I
| feel that it's important for criminals to be caught and
| punished", I'm quite confident that the original
| commenter would respond with personal insults and
| invective.
| throwadobe wrote:
| You're arguing legality trumps morality. We're in the
| opposite camp.
|
| Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they
| play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's
| so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all
| things!
| snapcaster wrote:
| people used to be embarrassed in forums like this about
| being so pro-government. Tech has been completely captured
| by normies
| enriquec wrote:
| yup, what a bummer
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| On the other hand, the straming/video 'services', are
| literally stealing stuff you bought from them. How is that
| better? If there's a "buy"/"purchase" button, the movie is
| yours... it's not a "rent" button, where they can take it
| away whenever they want.
|
| Kim is a modern day robin hood. Illegal, criminal, yada
| yada? Sure. Is he "bad" for the people? Well... that's very
| debatable.
| retinaros wrote:
| chatgpt is doing just that and they re being praised for
| it. hell they even break deal with gov agencies
| SXX wrote:
| But it's run by Altman and Microsoft. They bring money to
| US so allowed to do it.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| No he didn't. He made money through ads. The fact that
| copyright stuff was on the platform doesn't mean he should
| be arrested.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Kim is not a political opponent, he is a convicted criminal
| who now very deep in fake news, conspiracy myths and other
| lies. This is not someone who has just a different opinion on
| some things, but one with a long history of seriously harmful
| behavior.
| retinaros wrote:
| how is it different than what youtube, chatgpt, fb or even
| google drive did? the only difference is his political
| stance
| slightwinder wrote:
| Those are services, not people. And what illegal stuff
| are they actually doing? Yes, people abuse them for
| illegal content, but it's not their normal modus
| operandi. The companies are removing content on proper
| request and do not actively aid in spreading it.
|
| And BTW since when has Kim any legit political stance? It
| has always been about money and fame for Kim. Political
| topics were never a serious part of him.
| retinaros wrote:
| they did the same original thing he was blamed for.
| having a platform where people can upload stuff. but like
| you said he should be jailed for his beliefs because he
| shouldnt be free to spread his conspiracy theories. how
| about religious people shoudl we jail them too?
| retinaros wrote:
| also to your point about services removing illegal stuff
| here the NYT : " During the first full month of the new
| ownership, the company suspended nearly 300,000 accounts
| for violating "child sexual exploitation" policies, 57
| percent more than usual, the company said. The effort
| accelerated in January, Twitter said, when it suspended
| 404,000 accounts"
|
| how come musk did it with 80% people fired why wasnt it
| adressed before? would you send the previous twitter ceo
| to jail?
| slightwinder wrote:
| > they did the same original thing he was blamed for.
|
| No, they did not. User abused the platform, and the
| companies removed it when notified. Kim didn't do that,
| instead he even made a business of it. Youtube especially
| had a historical case about this, when they were sued by
| Viacom(?) for not removing content well enough, which
| then resulted in the creation of the contentId-system.
| This was BTW around 5 years before MegaUpload and Kim
| were raided.
|
| And as you mentioned ChatGPT, AI and content-usage is a
| completely different story, and a recent problem around
| loopholes in the existing laws. Maybe the companies will
| also be sued for this, maybe not, we will see..
| squidbeak wrote:
| It isn't 'a difference of opinion'. Dotcom has relayed
| Russian disinformation to an impressionable mass audience and
| heartily cheerled an invasion. It's not surprising that
| people who disagree with him politically find themselves
| amused or glad at the prospect of due process being served in
| this individual's case - where they might otherwise have been
| indifferent or grudgingly sympathetic.
| snapcaster wrote:
| what makes you so sure you're not the impressionable
| audience being fed misinformation?
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I'm not a fan but do you have real proof of this conspiracy
| theory? It's very popular to accuse people of being on Russia's
| payroll now. Rather unfortunately it dumbs down the movement to
| hold Russia responsible for invading Ukraine.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Ah yes, the classic. Everybody who opposes american foreign
| policy is labeled. Tweet about opposing the genocide in gaza?
| Oh dont listen to him -- he is pro khamas. Tweet about opposing
| war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the
| interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on
| the communist payroll.
|
| I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these
| character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own
| interests (political or economical) but why do you do it? Why
| would normal people throw baseless accusations like this? What
| is your motivation? What skin do you have in this game? Is your
| argument really "Kim Dotcom is an agent because he is opposing
| the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and he is against a
| forever war in Ukraine"?
|
| He is presumably some guy that youve never met that happens to
| be fighting against the US government and its copyright laws so
| why are you making these comments? Are you so passionate about
| copyrights because you are an artist that has lost money
| because of mega? What motivates you?
| snapcaster wrote:
| >I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these
| character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own
| interests (political or economical) but why do you do it?
|
| Thanks for articulating this, similar idea behind my sibling
| comment. Sadly i think the conclusion is that the vast
| majority of people are small minded, spiteful, and more or
| less accept whatever narrative the empire feeds them. Wish it
| wasn't like this
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I agree that Kim Dotcom is not likely to be on Russia's
| payroll, but, as you said, he's simply small minded,
| spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative that
| empire feeds them.
| SXX wrote:
| Most likely he just hate US for a good reason and gonna
| support anything anti-US. In his particular case he
| probably just needs a country that not gonna extradite
| him to US no matter how bad the country is.
|
| I just seriously doubt that likes of Dotcom, Musk or
| Trump need to be on Putin payroll. They just all have
| their own agenda to sell "strong russia, good putin"
| narrative.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is
| outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no
| attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll.
|
| Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't
| brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll -
| just ignorant beyond measure.
|
| Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now
| and I for one am happy that in my country it was the post-
| communists out of everyone who spearheaded the effort to have
| a deterrent in the form of NATO membership.
|
| Finland and Sweden appear to agree, considering how they
| joined the alliance.
|
| If anything, NATO is now more relevant than ever.
| macintux wrote:
| Why do people who oppose the war in Ukraine feel it's
| Ukraine's responsibility to roll over and die, instead of
| Russia's responsibility to turn around and go home?
| DSingularity wrote:
| Is that truly what people who oppose the war believe? Or
| is that an easy strawman for you to dismiss the anti-war
| crowd in the eyes of those who dont know the history of
| this conflict?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| What do people like you mean by "anti-war", exactly? Do
| you expect Ukraine to stop trying to liberate its people
| from a genocidal fascist invader who is holding them
| hostage? Do you want Ukraine to give up? Because, like, I
| suppose surrendering and being marched to the basement
| for your 9 grams of lead (that is, unless you accept
| being ethnically cleansed off your land and becoming a
| refugee) - well that also ends the war.
| attentive wrote:
| That's exactly what russia lovers want. "Just stop
| fighting invading forces" is as amoral as it gets.
| SXX wrote:
| This is usual tactics of Putins' shills. They all very
| much against war, but it's certainly must be stopped as
| is on the current frontline. So Ukraine not controlling
| part of it's territories and can't get into NATO, so
| Putin can prepare better for next invasion.
|
| Unfortunately EU and US governments are not much better
| since they all put dumb limits on weapons usage and never
| supplied Ukraine enough weapons to actually get any
| superiority.
| DSingularity wrote:
| How is it in the interest of the Ukrainians to trigger this
| invasion? Russia has always made it clear that Ukraine was
| a red line for what it sees as NATO encroachment on its
| borders.
|
| Also wrt to Finland -- if anything the story of Finland
| ascension into NATO supports the arguments that NATO is
| intentionally -- and aggressively -- pushing Russia to war.
| Finland has had close relations with NATO for years and
| during the same period Ukraine was more or less under the
| influence of Russia. So why havent the Russians cooked up
| some story about the Finns abusing ethnic Russians and
| invaded Finland a while back? Could it be that the Russians
| are sincere in their concerns that Ukraine hosting NATO
| troops is a matter of national security for them?
|
| The world is being pushed towards nuclear war. And for what
| exactly? A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage
| with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are
| matters critical to its national security while
| enthusiastically engaging with war mongering nations abroad
| on weapon deals that bring little value to the people of
| Ukraine. What would have been better for Ukraine? To find a
| way to make peace with Russia or to fight it for a decade?
| And please dont say this is for "democracy", "freedom", and
| "liberty". Who believes that the US and Europe is pumping
| tens of billions of dollars of military hardware to Ukraine
| monthly out of altruism?
|
| I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super
| power. At some point they will lose self control and it
| will be a loss for mankind.
| hcfman wrote:
| A decade ? That's optimistic.
| hcfman wrote:
| Those 10's of billions are billions that will never be
| used for fighting global warming, so the whole planet
| looses on wars.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| What good could come out of saying _" Oh, you are playing
| the nuke card. Well, take whatever you want then, I'm so
| sorry."_ ?
|
| What's to say Russia won't wave the nuke card again, and
| again, if it worked the first time?
|
| Also, do you ascribe any agency to the people of Ukraine?
| If they want to resist Russia, let them, I say.
|
| And of course it's not out of altruism. (Well, _some_ of
| the icing on the cake may be.)
|
| It's because Russia is changing the status quo. That's a
| threat to the US. (And many other countries!)
| ric2b wrote:
| Russia is not a superpower if it can't even have air
| superiority on its own land and struggles to push beyond
| 150km from its own border, it's just a very nuclear armed
| nation thanks to the Soviet days.
|
| As for the NATO enlargement narrative I don't know why
| people still try to push this when it's clear as water
| that Russia wants to annex more and more territory, even
| their conditions for ceasefire are mostly about Ukraine
| ceding territory to Russia.
| SXX wrote:
| > I think people dont realize that the Russians are a
| super power.
|
| Super power that cannot defend it's own borders during
| the hot war. I guess their superpower army too busy
| conquering Moon and Mars or far away galaxy.
|
| And you know what's not happened when Ukraine started to
| capture Russia territory? Putin and his gang said nothing
| at all about nuclear weapons during last 10 days. Not
| even single hint even though he like to talk about them
| every time when his ass not in danger.
|
| This is because they are criminals and bullies and these
| kind of people only understand force.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Good that Vietnamese did not realize US is a super power
| and will just nuclear bomb them when they get frustrated
| they are losing conventional war.
|
| > A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with
| its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are
| matters critical to its national security
|
| If the "matters critical to its national security"
| involve unprovoked invading of other country, then it's
| good they don't care, even assuming your biased rhetoric
| has anything close to reality.
| anthonybsd wrote:
| > How is it in the interest of the Ukrainians to trigger
| this invasion? Russia has always made it clear that
| Ukraine was a red line for what it sees as NATO
| encroachment on its borders.
|
| This is completely false. "NATO encroachment" is a VERY
| recent talking point which is part of the neo-fascist
| narrative that Russia developed attempting to excuse its
| own inadequacies. You should google Foundations of
| Geopolitics which is basically a Russian version of Mein
| Kampf. This book is required reading for majority of
| Russian politicians, diplomats and high ranking military
| officials. Before Russia decided that it wanted to pursue
| a fascist state, NATO was not on its agenda at all.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Russia the fascist state? Russian citizens have greater
| free speech and expression rights than any E.U country,
| U.K, Australia, Canada or New Zealand.
|
| In the U.K people are currently being jailed for years
| for mild social media posts. Hopefully the Axis of
| resistance will liberate the West. This American
| certainly hopes so.
| anthonybsd wrote:
| >How dare you call Russia the fascist state when Russian
| citizens have greater free speech and expression rights
| than any E.U country, U.K, Australia and New Zealand.
|
| Greater free speech huh? Let's see shall we:
|
| 72-year-old Russian woman sentenced to 5 years in prison
| for anti-war posts on social media [1]
| https://therecord.media/russian-woman-sentenced-to-
| prison-ov...
|
| A Russian American Is Sentenced in Russia Over Social
| Media Posts [2]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/world/europe/russian-
| amer...
|
| US-Russian dual national jailed for 12 years on treason
| charges for $52 donation to Ukraine [3]
| https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/international/ap-us-
| russ...
|
| Russian man whose daughter made anti-war painting
| sentenced to two years in prison [4]
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/europe/russian-man-
| sentenced-...
|
| >This American certainly hopes so.
|
| Press X for doubt on this one :)
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| So in Russia you can't support the country you're
| currently at war with. In the West you can't criticize a
| man who stabbed three children at a Taylor Swift concert.
|
| Would you like to reconsider who has greater free speech
| rights?
|
| American as apple pie. You're a hacker, see where the IP
| I'm commenting from is located. What hubris to think
| millions of Americans aren't completely fed up with this
| fascist empire. If you're still unsure, for 20 years now
| Congressional approval hasn't cracked 30%.
| anthonybsd wrote:
| >In the West you can't criticize a man who stabbed three
| children at a Taylor Swift concert.
|
| Are you talking about this stochastic terrorist who
| incited riots and called for the murder of hundreds of
| innocent people? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
| news/article/2024/aug/14/woma...
|
| If yes, I think you are utterly delusional at this point.
| lawn wrote:
| > if anything the story of Finland ascension into NATO
| supports the arguments that NATO is intentionally -- and
| aggressively -- pushing Russia to war
|
| It's incredible the convoluted things people tell
| themselves to explain away the simple and obvious
| reality:
|
| The only reason Finland and Sweden joined NATO was
| because Russia invaded Ukraine and started a genocide,
| while threatening Finland and Sweden with the same (and
| nukes).
| lawn wrote:
| > What would have been better for Ukraine? To find a way
| to make peace with Russia or to fight it for a decade?
| And please dont say this is for "democracy", "freedom",
| and "liberty".
|
| The option is to let Russia freely commit genocide with
| rape, murder, and terrorism.
|
| Only to then steer their target to the next country and
| do exactly the same.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > NATO encroachment on its borders.
|
| I see you've never seen Estonia or Latvia on a map. Nor
| realize NATO is already there. Why have they not been
| invaded while _since 2008_ , Georgia and Ukraine have?
| Total mystery.
| older wrote:
| > Russia has always made it clear that Ukraine was a red
| line for what it sees as NATO encroachment on its
| borders.
|
| You are just parroting lies manufactured by russian
| propaganda. Here you go, read it from the source:
| http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598
| Tade0 wrote:
| The way you speak about Russia is akin to the way an
| abuse victim would speak about their abuser - it's
| everyone's fault but Russia's that they invaded.
|
| Also don't you dare make them lose their temper.
|
| Russia isn't under threat from NATO, as it's a defensive
| alliance. They seem to understand that as well, as they
| pulled their air defense systems from the region
| bordering Finland.
|
| > I think people dont realize that the Russians are a
| super power.
|
| The soviet union was a super power. If anything people
| realised that Russia's supposed power is mainly
| posturing.
|
| And it was high time for that. In the past some western
| governments attempted a policy of appeasement - all it
| achieved was emboldening Russia.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| It's useful to compare Russia with other countries.
|
| Russia pop 145 million. GDP 2.24 Trillion.
|
| Brazil, pop 205 million, GDP 1.92 Trillion.
|
| Brazil isn't anyone's idea of a super power. Difference
| is Russia has or had a lot of Soviet cold war era weapons
| and weapons manufacturing. With the emphasis on the
| increasingly had.
|
| So yes you are right. And I agree about the wife beater
| logic.
| enriquec wrote:
| tribalism. Probably on the democrat side and probably because
| Kim has been active on X. propaganda and its effects are
| literally that dumb and predictable (thus the NPC label).
| underlipton wrote:
| Eh. I'm far-left and also think that the way he's been
| treated has been out-of-proportion to his actual crimes,
| and mostly predicated on his having pissed off powerful
| donors and not being Chinese. And I'd argue that there are
| plenty of people on the right who support him primarily
| because of his edgelord-iness, and not so much out of
| concern for an ever-expanding carceral state that deals out
| "justice" capriciously and disproportionately to whoever
| the oligarchs point at.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Huh. Really. It's leftists who are demonizing him? Not the
| right, which has traditionally been the far far more
| corporate-friendly political wing?
|
| And "because he tweeted on X"?
|
| I think you're going to need something a bit more
| substantive than that.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
|
| https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-
| am...
| lbrito wrote:
| The concept itself ("being on the payroll") is archetypical
| head-in-the-sand American. All countries have intelligence
| assets on the payroll, and that absolutely includes the US,
| probably on the #1 spot.
|
| Its like Americans complaining about how Chinese or Indian
| hit movies are covertly pro-Chinese or pro-Indian propaganda
| pieces. Ever heard of Hollywood?
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| - "What motivates you?"
|
| Intelligence operative or peasant. Pick one.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| This Kim dude. Neverending story.
|
| Amiga (never heard of him during my scene time), then his alleged
| mobile ISDN service, MEGA.
|
| He seemed like the shady poster child for every trend who got
| stopped before jumping once more publicly on Crypto.
| localfirst wrote:
| He has done some shady stuff in Germany with stocks
|
| then used those proceeds to launch his other businesses
|
| I really enjoyed Megaupload & rapidshare those were almost as
| good as the WaReZ days if not better: direct links to any
| digital content without waiting for seeders
|
| It's a shame. Arresting Dotcom won't do anything to curb piracy
| in fact it would raise the stakes even higher and more
| untraceable leading to more uncensored content that would be
| deemed "harmful"
|
| Dotcom should've chosen Russia or China instead of NZ but
| obviously the quality of life isn't quite up to par with NZ.
| Russia dacha outside moscow would've been great for him without
| worries of US extradition.
| ionwake wrote:
| Anyone know why this is prioritised? Wasn't this copyright stuff
| from like 2 decades ago? Just genuinely curious.
| Taniwha wrote:
| He fought it all the way and ran out of options, we have a more
| right leaning government now who want to suck up to the US
| _djo_ wrote:
| What did the government have to do with this? Sounds like he
| ran out of appeals through the court system, which is
| independent of the government of the day.
| Taniwha wrote:
| There's a minister who still has to approve/deny it
| halyconWays wrote:
| >ran out of options
|
| He'd have one more option to fight tyranny, if your
| government didn't disarm the populace.
|
| Imagine being yanked out of your home country by a foreign
| power and their corporate overlords with the prospect of
| living the rest of your life in third-world prison
| conditions, for the crime of allegedly reducing their balance
| sheets from $550B per year to $545B per year.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Our populace is pretty heavily armed, hunting is pretty
| ingrained in the national psyche. No one's arguing for
| getting rid of hunting rifles. Pistols and semiautomatics,
| things designed to kill people are illegal and most of us
| are quite happy with that, especially after we had a
| foreign terrorist kill 100 innocent people in a mosque.
| diggan wrote:
| If the media industry is successful in using DMCA against
| foreign residents to put them in US jail, it'll be a huge
| deterrent against any other similar people hosting similar
| platforms in countries with US extradition treaties.
| tzs wrote:
| They aren't using the DMCA against him. Where DMCA comes into
| the picture is that for hosting sites DMCA compliance can be
| used as a _defense_ against a charge of copyright
| infringement in the US.
|
| The underlying problem for Megaupload is that what they were
| doing is illegal in over 180 countries (basically any country
| that is a party to a major international copyright treaty or
| convention).
|
| A good general rule of thumb is that if you want to host
| something that is illegal in country X hosting it in country
| Y without an extradition treaty is not sufficient. You should
| pick a Y where it is not illegal there. Otherwise even if Y
| does not care enough to go after you, if Y has good trade or
| other relations with X the may respond positively to
| encouragement from X to go after you.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The indictment was a bit under 12 years ago. As the article
| covers, Dotcom initiated extensive legal proceedings, with one
| argument going to the (NZ) Supreme Court in 2020, about whether
| he could legally be extradited. Presumably we've reached the
| end of those proceedings.
| elfbargpt wrote:
| He's a popular voice of dissent on Twitter and someone must be
| cracking down right now. Scott Ritter is another--he had his
| passport seized recently and his house raided by the FBI a week
| ago.
| halfjoking wrote:
| And Tulsi Gabbard recently was placed on a terror watch list.
|
| All the Federal agencies have been weaponized. SEC only went
| after companies like LBRY, Inc because their founders and
| platform share information they don't like. The real
| fraudsters on Wallstreet get away with anything.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our
| region.
|
| With some 'diplomacy', Julian Assange was brought home after near
| 15 years fighting for BS extradition charges.
|
| The news and politicians in Australia follow almost lock step
| with whatever our US overlords allow us to say.
|
| It's been more of a thing lately with them trying to secure the
| pacific away from China's sphere of influence and the biggest
| 'dumb' thing from our government is that silly submarine deal
| (under something called AUKUS) which is about as good as our F-35
| jets purchased (totally useless IMO).
|
| There's probably some bootlickers in NZ trying to gain political
| favour / power by brown-nosing with the US of A.
| josefresco wrote:
| In your opinion why is the submarine deal/F-35 program "totally
| useless" for Australia? Are you saying it's the wrong
| equipment? Too expensive? Not needed?
| tedk-42 wrote:
| Not needed. It's tax payer money down the toilet.
|
| But hey I'm a pacifist and will be told that I'm a weak man
| who will lead to the downfall of civilisation so oh well.
| scrapcode wrote:
| Well, ya know - it could be. Not needed until they are...
| risk management. Most should hope that their weapons are
| never "needed."
| defrost wrote:
| We already had an order in for convential working subs
| from the French .. now we're on the hook for more money
| and less of a guarantee they'll ever arrive.
| lmpdev wrote:
| They're still redundant though
|
| If we're heading to regional war, US nuclear subs will be
| here regardless
|
| Even Darwin is a massive permanent US base
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I'm a pacifist at heart, but I'm not blind to the fact that
| a single digit percentage of humans (in every country) are
| just plain evil (in lots of ways). These people can do harm
| without any feelings of remorse. And a double digit
| percentage of humanity can easily be manipulated into being
| / doing evil.
|
| Our current, imperfect, civilisation exists because we
| largely succeed in keeping the whims of these minorities
| under control. It's a depressing thought, but if I don't
| accept it, I'll be disappointed in humanity on a daily
| basis.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| They are so evil in so many nonspecific ways! These evil
| minorities cannot be named (so just substitute your Nazi
| du jour depending on what side of the political circus
| you are on). And you know they are bad because hey - they
| are a minority.
| YounoYouno wrote:
| All of the above!
| zik wrote:
| The submarines are almost certainly useless. We won't get
| them for decades. We're not even allowed to service the
| nuclear reactors when we do get them. And the technology is
| already an old one and will likely already be superceded by
| the new much quieter air-independent fuel cell and lithium
| battery technologies which other countries are adopting.
| inopinatus wrote:
| The whole point of the AUKUS submarine deal is to never get
| them. It's a political manoeuvre, an emollient for national
| security hardliners.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Air-independent fuel cell and battery powered submarines
| are not at all a replacement for nuclear submarines, nor
| even really competing with them. No matter how good the
| tech becomes, diesel-electric subs running fuel cell AIPs
| will always have shorter range, less submerged time, and
| lower speeds than nuclear-powered submarines. Each time
| they surface, even to periscope level, the chances of
| detection go up massively.
|
| That's why diesel-electric submarines are best suited for
| coastal defence, especially of small countries, whereas
| larger countries with huge areas of territory to protect
| benefit from having nuclear submarines.
|
| Whether it's the right decision for Australia to get these
| subs under AUKUS is a fair debate, but it's not at all
| accurate to claim that they're using 'old' technology that
| is being superseded by AIP.
| dools wrote:
| The F35s we have are pretty sweet but we are paying a shit
| tonne for like 5 submarines that we are going to receive in
| the 2040s. China already had 10x that many attack submarines.
| The subs deal stinks.
| defrost wrote:
| All those reasons and more. Strategically bad move, we did
| okay in the middle.
|
| _You don't have to be a Sinophile to know Keating's right
| about AUKUS_
|
| alt-headline: _Paul Keating is right, AUKUS will turn
| Australia into US protectorate_ The ex-PM
| is the only person offering a convincing explanation of
| AUKUS. And it's a damning one.
|
| webcache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cac
| he:https%...
|
| subscription: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-
| keating-aukus-aust...
|
| On the economics | robustness of the deal:
| This deal is getting worse all the time.
| Courtesy of the latest details of the AUKUS agreement tabled
| yesterday in Parliament, we now know that the moment it
| becomes inconvenient for the Americans or the Brits, there'll
| be no submarines for Australia: Cooperation
| under the agreement is to be carried out in such a manner as
| to not adversely affect the ability of the United States and
| the United Kingdom to meet their respective military
| requirements and to not degrade their respective naval
| nuclear propulsion programs. Those programs, as
| even ardent defenders of the program admit, are already
| pretty degraded. The Americans have shifted from building two
| Virginia-class boats a year to one this year, and delayed the
| construction of the next generation of nuclear submarines by
| five years to 2040. The new generation Dreadnought-class
| boats under construction in the UK have suffered serious
| delays and astonishing cost blowouts. Somehow,
| with around $10 billion of Australian cash, both programs
| will come good, to the point they can build boats for the US
| and UK, and for Australia, and help Australia build its own.
| It's normal for defence policy to double as heavy
| manufacturing policy, and Australia has a rich history of
| wasting billions making things here that we could have bought
| far cheaper from other countries. Where AUKUS is unusual is
| that Australia will be using its defence policy as heavy
| manufacturing policy for the US and UK as well
| throwawaythekey wrote:
| One of our former prime ministers, Paul Keating, came out
| strongly against the submarine deal. IIRC two important
| dimensions are that Australia has shallow waters which are
| not a good fit for the chosen submarine technology and that
| tactically it makes limited sense for Australia to focus on
| weapons to be used on our largest trading partner.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/2023/mar/15/paul-...
|
| I am not an expert on any of the above.
| roenxi wrote:
| They might make sense if in the long term we build out a
| nuclear deterrent? We'd need a handful of deep water
| submarines with big missiles on them. Although I expect
| that it'll turn out they're designed wrong for that or
| something.
|
| Other than that I can't see what situation they'd be useful
| in practice though. If we get into a war with Indonesia,
| China or the like that is the end. There will be no winners
| and we'll either lose or be ruined. One of the lessons in
| the modern era is if a country can't defend itself with
| diplomacy then it is in a lot of trouble.
|
| I assume we're buying this gear as some sort of realpolitik
| tribute-style thing for the US military industrial complex.
| If the point isn't to give them money I doubt we're
| achieving our goals.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> if a country can 't defend itself with diplomacy then
| it is in a lot of trouble._
|
| You are absolutely correct.
|
| I wish more folks understood this.
| oroup wrote:
| Diplomacy works _because_ you have the means to defend
| yourself. If they can fight and you can't, why will they
| bother talking to you?
| roenxi wrote:
| Run me through Australia's strategic outlook if the US
| decides to invade us. Or if they decide Australia needs
| to go and starts supporting one of our neighbors in
| fighting us.
| echoangle wrote:
| Why are you talking about Australia fighting the US?
| Aren't the subs against China?
| roenxi wrote:
| 1) The subs are certainly not for fighting China. By the
| time they're delivered, assuming all else equal, China
| will be in a position to ignore them. People are talking
| about deliveries in the 2050s vs a country that can
| basically build an entire economy in a few decades; it'll
| never work out in our favour. And we can't afford to be
| in a war with an Asian power under any circumstances
| anyway, we'd probably be better off surrendering
| immediately rather than fighting back against China if
| the US's deterrence fails. Ironically we'd probably end
| up with better infrastructure.
|
| Fighting China with those submarines is a similar idea to
| fighting the US with those same subs. The plan is not to
| do that. It won't work out well for us.
|
| 2) Keep going with your thought, you haven't gone far
| enough. If diplomacy works because you have the means to
| defend yourself, why aren't we fighting the US? We can't
| possibly defend ourselves from them, and realistically
| we'd probably struggle to annoy them if they attacked us
| via a proxy war. And yet there is no realistic scenario
| where they fight us. Why is that, hm?
| echoangle wrote:
| Here's my view of why countries don't attack each other:
| The downside for the attacker has to be larger than the
| upside, that's when diplomacy becomes interesting. The
| downside doesn't just have to be the defense of the
| attacked country but also the relation with other
| countries. The US won't invade Australia because they
| wouldn't gain much, compared to the loss of trust by
| other countries. Defense from china is more important
| than from the US for Australia, because the "public
| stage" deterrent is smaller for china than the US. That's
| why you need to increase the deterrent by increasing your
| defense capabilities. You can correct me if you disagree
| though.
| benopal64 wrote:
| I think diplomacy itself can help gear a country to
| defend itself by creating powerful allies who will come
| in a time of need.
|
| At the same time, I do not think there is any
| justification for war or harming others non-defensively.
|
| The amount of money and human power we piss away with
| wars and conflict is so sad. Humans are the most advanced
| and capable complex adaptive systems in the world. Why
| waste such a precious resource?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Stupidly flippant but likely somewhat accurate answer:
| x-thousand years of tribal evolution.
|
| With all our intelligence we're still programmed to
| behave in particular ways, and it takes a lot of effort
| to even try to break out of it, and that's only possible
| if you're aware of it - which most people aren't.
| benopal64 wrote:
| Hmm, I think you are correct, and from my perspective,
| speaking to the idea of human heuristics and biases.
|
| Ironically, I think societies and cultures need long
| periods of peace (not in an extreme sense, but rather
| enough peace to allow for safer conflict) to have the
| time and ability to introspect on their heuristics and
| biases, as well as integrate other people's perspectives.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Having something to lose, makes it a lot more likely to
| bring you to reason.
|
| It takes seconds to destroy what it took decades to
| build.
|
| If someone is pointing a mortar at your house, you want
| to get rid of the mortar, but you also want to keep your
| house, so it's likely that you will look for ways to
| remove the mortar, that don't include it being fired.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > if a country can't defend itself with diplomacy then it
| is in a lot of trouble
|
| If you have a strong neighbor that wants to take
| something you have by force, how do you get them to
| instead practice diplomacy with you?
|
| The only way I'm aware of is by projecting enough of your
| own strength that they think it might not be worth it to
| try and take by force.
|
| Military might is an arm of diplomacy.
| josefresco wrote:
| I'm no "submarine warfare expert" but I believe the
| purpose/value of nuclear submarines is not defense of close
| coastal waters, but rather as a deterrence that can come
| "from anywhere". I don't believe shallow waters would
| hamper the operation of a submarine launching ICBMs or
| similar. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| I also know nothing of Australian politics but Paul Keating
| seems to have some curious views regarding China:
|
| > Keating brushed aside human rights concerns about China
| by arguing there are "disputes about what the nature of the
| Chinese affront to the Uyghurs"
|
| > Keating is a noted dove towards China. He has previously
| labelled Taiwan "not a vital Australian interest" but
| rather a "civil matter" for China.
|
| > On Wednesday Keating said China "is not the Soviet Union"
| because it is involved in international institutions and
| would "fall over themselves to have a proper relationship"
| with Australia, except that Australia has "manufactured a
| problem" through its increasing alignment with US.
|
| > Keating said the "great sin" China had committed in the
| eyes of the west was developing its economy to equal the
| size of the US
|
| Yikes.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Not OP but another Aussie
|
| I'd sat it's _too good_
|
| Effectively trading the last of our sovereignty for overkill
| submarines
|
| The threat of China exists yes but I think the French subs we
| had lined up would have been adequate
|
| Especially as the US will likely send their nuclear subs our
| way when/if Sino-American tensions escalate again
|
| I mean we're effectively already an American outpost with
| many permanent US bases/facilities
| stephen_g wrote:
| The submarines are useless to our (Australia's) national
| interest. If we ever get them (and even then there's serious
| questions about whether Australia would actually have command
| authority over them), they aren't really geared to be super
| useful for defending our shores (taking advantage of our
| distance from potential enemies) - we'd need more, smaller
| subs for that. But they do have the extreme range and
| endurance that would be useful for, say, projecting force
| into the South China Sea, following the US into a conflict -
| and that is something the vast majority of Australians are
| dead against, but what our politicians (at least on the
| opposition side) have basically already pledged to do...
| timmg wrote:
| > As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our
| region.
|
| Not an expert, but my guess is that there is (probably valid)
| concern about China. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and
| all that.
| zerkten wrote:
| China is a concern for Australia whether the US is in the
| picture or not. Australia's interests are highly aligned with
| those of the US. The increased engagement from the US is
| being welcomed by most Australians, but the issue is really
| around the implementation.
|
| AUKUS is one of these huge deals with the results coming many
| years after huge investments creating great uncertainty. That
| makes it easy to attack politically.
|
| EDIT: What's missed by the original commenter is that
| Australia was already investing in submarines from France. If
| delivered, there would be similar outcomes. The project had
| just as much uncertainty around it and was off-track when
| AUKUS was announced.
| stephen_g wrote:
| The political class, yes, welcome the engagement. But not
| most Australians!
| evgen wrote:
| A claim that is categorically untrue and easily
| disproven. It takes less than ten seconds to google up
| multiple surveys that show the opinions of the Australian
| public. The most recent broad survey was conducted less
| than a month ago, but before Biden dropped out when it
| appeared Trump was likely to win the upcoming
| presidential election (relevant fact because the question
| was asked and answered regarding whether another Trump
| presidency would diminish support for the US.) Several
| key take-aways from this survey show: -
| 80%+ said close ties with the US was important to AU
| security - 70%+ named China as a security threat to
| AU - 55%+ stated confidence in the US acting
| responsibly in the world
|
| There are other similar points if interest in the survey
| but the facts are quite clear that Australians do welcome
| more engagement with the US and see it is a counter to
| Chinese threats in the region.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You're correct, of course.
|
| But that's the majority of dumb Australians, much like
| the majority of dumb Americans. Our two sets of dumbs
| have a lot of similarity.
|
| Australia's identity has been lost in the last thirty
| years up it's own anus of mineral riches and the feeling
| of lifestyle entitlement that came with it. The USs 51st
| state. Yeehaaw...
| arandomusername wrote:
| China is Australia's biggest trading partner. Only US tries
| to paint China as a threat to Australia so they can get more
| influence in there.
| xdennis wrote:
| The US and Australia are part of the five eyes. They have a
| very strong connection and a similar culture. It is China
| who is trying to assert more influence around the world,
| including the US (e.g. Midjourney doesn't allow criticism
| of Xi Jinping).
| olalonde wrote:
| > As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our
| region.
|
| Australia and New Zealand have extradition treaties with dozens
| of countries, it's not just a US thing.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| There would be less external influence in the latter case if
| the US wasn't your main form of military and arms supplier.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _As an Aussie observer, I 'm seeing more US influence in our
| region._
|
| You got our attention by filling all our streaming channels
| with your shows.
|
| _As is common in the international film and television sector,
| a key driver of Australia's ongoing production upswing came
| from an enhancement to its incentive schemes._
|
| _In July, the country's national government increased the
| location offset program in its annual budget from 16.5 percent
| to 30 percent. Thanks to those changes, films spending at least
| A$20 million dollars (about $13 million U.S. dollars) in the
| country can claim back 30 percent of all expenditures on goods
| and services upon completion of the project._
|
| _Previously, it often was [already] possible for especially
| savvy producers to add to the guaranteed 16.5 percent offset
| and bring total support to 30 percent by cobbling together
| prior grant schemes -- but the increases introduced last year
| provided global producers with a much-needed sense of ease and
| surety._
|
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/planet-o...
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Don't forget the Aussie influence on the US. Murdoch is
| Australian.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our
| region.
|
| Fox News is an Australian product built to flood the US with
| far-right, pro-business outrage. We'll get out of your lane
| once you get out of ours.
|
| All kidding aside, describing these sorts of things in terms of
| national influence is extremely unproductive. New Zealand
| wouldn't be turning itself into a pro-commercial-pirate haven
| or anticopyright haven but for the influence of the US[1]. The
| question regarding extradition is not "should we consider what
| Kim Dotcom did to be a crime[0]" but "do we abduct him to
| another jurisdiction to face trial." It's bikeshedding over the
| color of the wood on the electric chair.
|
| [0] In general, extradition treaties only apply for acts that
| are crimes in both jurisdictions.
|
| [1] Even China's pro-copyright, they just don't want to pay
| America for any of it. If they were anti-copyright they'd be
| freely sharing all the "IP" they keep stealing.
| preaching5271 wrote:
| I appreciate Kim Dotcom for running MegaUpload and later Mega, in
| a time when the internet was younger and wilder. Also for his
| pirate spirit and "stick it to the man" attitude. But everything
| has a limit, specifically his resistance against the law, even if
| he hid it behind virtues. I think it's clear for everybody that
| one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get
| involved. Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other
| stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise? But people
| are superficial and tend to develop an "i'm the main character"
| personality, pushing them into recklessness, like persisting
| doing certain things or publicly talking shit. Hope he and his
| family will be ok.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away
| with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved.
|
| I'm _far_ more concerned with the stuff that _governments_ get
| away with, including infringement of the freedom to share
| information.
| preaching5271 wrote:
| Totally fair point, but what can you do? This is how the
| world works. Fighting such beasts is pointless. You might
| tame them with lobby money, but no billionaire is interested.
| And we're now talking about the human spirit that cannot be
| chained, as also seen in Pirate Bay or Snowden. Sure, people
| do need heroes and hope from time to time. But I have become
| less romantic over the years, and more careful.
| FpUser wrote:
| [flagged]
| Joker_vD wrote:
| [flagged]
| hiatus wrote:
| It wasn't a crime against the crown last time?
| waldothedog wrote:
| I think they were being sarcastic.
| suslik wrote:
| Only if you loose.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Right, of course Treason doth never
| prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper,
| none dare call it treason.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| You can adapt and fit in to the establishment, and I
| wouldn't suggest any moral problem with it. We definitely
| need stability - the raising of children requires it,
| trappings like clubs and societies and clean streets are
| great, but I think the spirit of mavericks like Kim is much
| more 'right' about something that institutions will always
| miss.
|
| I can't celebrate this at all, and I am never sympathising
| with legal thuggery. It is just naked power exerting itself
| and it will always be ugly.
| chii wrote:
| While it's true the copyright lobby tried to make an
| example out of kim, it is completely useless in stopping
| piracy nor any form of copyright infringement that will
| inevitably continue to happen.
|
| > It is just naked power exerting itself
|
| and it's a relatively minor showing of it. Compare it to
| direct assasination of foreign nationals (of which both
| the US as well as russia has done). The chinese
| stationing covert forces to try to police their migrant
| nationals overseas (spy stuff basically), or if what
| snowden leaked is as widespread is it is alleged, the
| amount of hoovering of information and surveillance that
| exists!
| FredPret wrote:
| The maverick spirit is definitely more right that wrong,
| especially in the long run.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Educate the next generations.
|
| Maybe we'll have a generation of people with a backbone
| again who will be able to free us from government
| oppression.
|
| The trend is going the other way, so I think we're heading
| to socialism-ville for a repetition of last century's
| lessons.
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| A lot of the best things we have in the modern world are
| "socialism". Libraries and parks are socialist. Socialism
| isn't a dirty word, nor is it an argument or a criticism.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Socialism isn't a dirty word,
|
| It is, for people like me, who have actually experienced
| living under a socialist regime.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Was it the socialism or the autocracy, behind thr veil,
| which made it so unpleasant?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The socialism, of course. Unlike socialism, autocracy can
| be prosperous.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| This is why definition of terms is so important in
| discussions of this type. The word socialism/socialist
| has been bastardized and propagandized beyond
| comprehension now. Socialism covers a broad range of
| potential policies and structures, but in modern
| discourse the average person seems to slot it in almost
| exclusively to mean government tyranny and communism.
| Meanwhile communism now seems to mean evil beyond any
| consideration.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Do you mean back to FDR-era policies, or are you using
| socialism as a stand in for the tyrannical communist
| governments of USSR et al?
| jtriangle wrote:
| Fight in the shade
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| > Fighting such beasts is pointless.
|
| You realize that if everyone thought that, the world would
| be a worse place?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| not really, his website was based on hong kong, this is a fight
| against america playing world police, which i'm on board with
|
| they have no business going after just a single man so
| fervently, he's a foreign national and the websites weren't
| based in the US
| tim333 wrote:
| He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property,
| films, TV shows and music and the like. And unlike say normal
| use of bittorrent, making a lot of money off it. And being
| the largest player doing that. I'm not sure about the morals
| but you can certainly understand financially why they've gone
| after him.
| localfirst wrote:
| is US intellectual property a national security issue? I
| don't understand why they went to such extent pursuing a
| man for simply running a piracy site
|
| meanwhile US is losing influence and trust on geopolitical
| stage, shouldn't that be the bigger issue
|
| edit: im being rate limited so heres my response to comment
| below:
|
| I didn't say anybody was replacing US, merely they are
| losing credibility and prestige on world stage and this
| isn't recent and not slowing down.
|
| I don't think any country will be able to replace US and
| its freedom of maritime navigation anytime soon.
|
| China is in no position to project as its undergoing
| internal turmoil. Neither is Russia. BRICS also won't offer
| much.
|
| One potential non-zero chance scenario is the northern
| artic sea routes opening up due to rising temperatures
| melting ice bypassing the need to route through singapore
| and suez canal which would put Russia back on the power
| map.
|
| US is a hyperpower and there is no equal.
|
| Maybe a unified Korea with extended northern manchuria
| territories can fill the vacuum left by China and Russia in
| the region. I don't really see any other candidates.
| gameman144 wrote:
| One of the reasons the US is viewed as such a good place
| to start a business is that the country will go to bat
| for their (favored) businesses internationally.
|
| National security is _very_ far from the only scenario
| where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for
| better or worse.
| FredPret wrote:
| Genuinely curious about this opinion from outside my
| bubble - not trying to start a flame war.
|
| If you say the US is losing influence, then who is taking
| their place in your view? Is China / the EU actually
| _gaining_ influence?
| csallen wrote:
| Minor nitpick, but he was not stealing, he was infringing
| copyrights.
|
| To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without
| permission, such that you now possess it, but they no
| longer have it.
|
| To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy
| of another person's work without their permission.
|
| Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of
| copyright infringement are losing is not their property,
| but the potential extra profit they could have made if
| they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and
| distribute their work.
|
| Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their
| property. Copyright infringement is illegal because
| (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less
| incentivized to create things because they won't be able to
| profit as much.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| This. The phrase "intellectual property" is an attempt to
| confuse a censorship strategy that's a few hundred years
| old with an entirely separate tradition that's been with
| us for millennia. They're very different, whatever words
| you use for them.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Reminds of a recent discussion seen here about 'identity
| theft'. Another blame-shifting concept ...
| adamomada wrote:
| And then you have the people who say that language
| changes based on usage. Get enough people calling it
| property, theft, stealing, irregardless, etc. and then
| you can change the dictionary.
| singlow wrote:
| The word for stealing has been applied more broadly than
| your definition for millenia.
| xdennis wrote:
| > He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property,
| films, TV shows and music and the like.
|
| But they have no jurisdiction as he was not doing that IN
| the US. When the Pirate Bay guys were persecuted, the US
| got Sweden to convict them. They weren't extradited to the
| US.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well they've been arguing over that in various court for
| over ten years. They didn't just charge him with
| copyright infringement which itself would probably not be
| extraditable:
|
| >..charged in 2012 with engaging in a racketeering
| conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement,
| conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of
| criminal copyright infringement.
|
| Often with US law enforcement where there's a will
| there's a way even if it doesn't strictly stick to normal
| legal practices. See also Assange, and if you read Howard
| Marks book Mr Nice there's another example of where they
| got him in an unconventional way. Plus of course a
| variety of drone assassinations.
| TylerE wrote:
| But he was, as many many others have pointed out, hosting
| files on US based servers
| WheatMillington wrote:
| He has US victims though. Fraudsters aren't absolved of
| responsibility in the USA just because they operate
| outside the border, and the same can be true of other
| crimes.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> this is a fight against america playing world police
|
| That is how Dotcom wants it characterized. Everyone else sees
| a fly-by-night website run by an eccentric millionaire making
| money by playing fast and loose with the law. It is one thing
| to be an outlaw subverting oppression by distributing free
| bread to poor people. It is another to be a bootlegger
| selling vodka under the table and then throwing huge invite-
| only parties with the profits.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't think your point stands.
|
| How would US citizens would feel if another country, say
| China, wanted to extradite a US citizen because he
| allegedly violated Chinese copyright law?
|
| Dotcom is absolutely right in saying that US is playing
| world police.
| tommi wrote:
| It can be that while US is playing world police,
| characterising Dotcom's MegaUpload and Mega as a fight
| against it not a fitting description of them.
|
| International crime can be a tough problem to solve. Who
| gets to decide what is a crime, how it should be judged
| and punished?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > How would US citizens would feel if another country,
| say China, wanted to extradite a US citizen
|
| Probably how Swedish citizens felt when China
| 'extradited' Gui Minhai. At least in US you have due
| process?
|
| See also
| https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-
| expan....
|
| > US is playing world police
|
| NZ and US have a bunch of shared laws, trade and
| extradition agreements and stuff. It's not like US
| dropped in and snatched Dotcom without any NZ
| cooperation. Not world police, just boring international
| justice.
| epolanski wrote:
| US copyright laws *are not* international law.
| jajko wrote:
| Countries extradite criminals all the time for crimes
| done here or there or anywhere, its just that US stands
| above literally everybody else, or at least wants to, so
| its not an equal situation and never was.
|
| This is underlined by other US excesses, ie [1] or the
| fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other
| states, but there are very few US citizens detained
| elsewhere (in democratic systems, not used for some
| political deals).
|
| [1] "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the
| president to order U.S. military action, such as an
| invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located,
| to protect American officials and military personnel from
| prosecution or rescue them from custody. The antithesis
| of fairness and basic human equality rights.
| pb7 wrote:
| >the fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other
| states, but there are very few US citizens detained
| elsewhere
|
| Americans commit exceedingly little crime
| internationally. Even in ultra-low crime countries, US
| citizens rank below native citizens per capita. That is
| probably why.
| quacksilver wrote:
| The US usually seem to decline stuff, while the UK will
| extradite people rapidly to the US.
|
| Relatively recent, though involved diplomatic immunity
| too: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/us-declines-
| uk-extra...
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Depends. Are there actual reasonable grounds to suspect
| that the US citizen violated copyright law in China? Can
| China be held to granting them a fair trial with a
| reasonable punishment (read: not executing them in the
| courtyard and billing their family for the bullet) being
| prescribed if the US citizen is found guilty?
|
| If those two things are present... well, then it is what
| it is. Now, I doubt China would be able to provide the
| fair trial part, but if we're trying to compare your
| situation to what Kim Dotcom is going through, it's a
| question we have to answer. I'd much rather take my
| chances in a US courtroom than a PRC courtroom.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Can China be held to granting them a fair trial with a
| reasonable punishment_
|
| Hmm, excellent question. And for context, America is
| going to give Kim Dotcom a functional life sentence in
| what Americans like to call "pound-you-in-the-ass
| prison". For sharing files. He'll be given more years
| than harsher than most murderers.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I find this to be a pretty good counterpoint.
|
| Dragging a foreigner (especially) into the country to be
| put into a metal cage for violating copyright is
| disgusting.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Agreed. I don't at all see Mega in the same light as SciHub
| for example.
| z_ wrote:
| Mega stored files in the US, Carpathia and Cogent were the
| providers specifically.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload_legal_case
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| The Kim Dotcom case is the primary reason why I decided a
| long time ago to never host any content or website on US
| servers, no matter how legal I believe it is and how much
| we comply with copyright law.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| If not the US, then who do you suggest could plausibly lead
| (I would even say prop up) the free world and the global
| economy?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Catering to trillion dollar media companies is not exactly
| my idea of freedom.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Freedom is in the eye of the beholder, apparently.
| FredPret wrote:
| Does their size make the moral situation any different?
|
| Many of these are public companies that anyone can buy
| shares in. Tons of people have part of their life savings
| in US stocks - these people all own a slice of the rights
| to various works of art.
|
| Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it,
| it's OK to ignore their rights?
|
| As an aside, here's a list of public companies [0]. 7-8
| of them are "trillion dollar companies", and only one
| (Apple) has a stake in media (that I know of) and that's
| a very minor part of their business. The media business
| is not a very good one to be in.
|
| [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/
| sensanaty wrote:
| > Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it,
| it's OK to ignore their rights?
|
| Let's not pretend these companies give the slightest hint
| of a shit about morality. They'd destroy the world next
| year if it meant they could earn a penny more of profit
| this quarter.
|
| As long as companies like Disney are pulling moves like
| this [1], I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if
| these companies are in the right.
|
| The only reason Dotcom (a non-US individual with 0 ties
| to the US in any way that should matter) is being
| extradited is because US politicians are pathetically
| cheap and easy to buy off, and Disney and all the other
| big media companies have infinite coffers with which to
| do so, not because of some vague bullshit about morality
| or property rights.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go
| FredPret wrote:
| Are you morally perfect? No? Do you still have legal
| rights and ownership of things despite that?
|
| It's like that for companies. It doesn't matter if Disney
| sucks in many ways, if they own something, they own it.
|
| If you think this is vague bullshit, then I'd invite you
| to read up on how societies tend to work without it. Even
| communist China instituted reforms and amendments in
| recent decades cementing the concept of private property
| ownership.
|
| And Dotcom _does_ have a tie to the US that he willingly
| and knowingly created: he committed a crime against their
| citizens and companies.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Most people, not just trillion-dollar media companies,
| have at least _some_ interest in seeing intellectual
| property protections enforced.
|
| You can argue that there's too much protection, or that
| it doesn't afford equal protection under the law for
| smaller parties.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Do they? I know for sure nobody in my circle of friends
| cares in the slightest if people pirate media from huge
| companies.
|
| I don't think anyone other than Disney shareholders gives
| an iota of a damn if others pirate movies/shows/music
| from the big guys. And I especially don't think most
| people would seek extradition for a guy who hosted a
| piracy website, especially, that's the type of thing
| psychopathic execs and their ilk seem to be into.
| Especially someone who's not even a US citizen or has any
| affiliation with the US.
|
| Also, keep in mind we're talking companies like Disney
| here, who are currently fighting a legal battle [1]
| because someone died due to their negligence and using
| the argument that agreeing to the T&C of their streaming
| service absolves them of wrongdoing in a person's death.
|
| So yeah, don't expect anyone to feel sorry for the plight
| of the poor soulless megacorporation here, they'd destroy
| the earth if it made them half a nickel more in yearly
| profits.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go
| kube-system wrote:
| Copyright is protected by international treaty.
| EionRobb wrote:
| I didn't think NZ was part of that treaty in 2012 when this
| all went down?
|
| https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/parties/remarks/NZ
| /... says it wasn't until 6 years later that it joined. But
| maybe a different treaty?
| kube-system wrote:
| There's more than one. New Zealand is, for example, a
| member of these two:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Phonograms_Conventio
| n
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| New Zealand is for all practical purposes a USA protectorate.
| If you want to break USA law don't do it in a country that is
| dependent on the USA.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| It's really not though.
|
| Although NZ has agreements with Aus and the US, you'll find
| on the ground that kiwis are actually not super fond of the
| US.
|
| We won't let US nuclear ships into our waters, and we
| actually have quite a good relationship with China.
|
| NZ is also quite self sufficient in many ways and so far
| from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from
| potential conflict.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered
| from potential conflict
|
| I suspect the small size of the economy, the small number
| of people in it, and lack of strategic importance in
| military matters are what keep it protected from
| potential conflict more than it's self sufficiency and
| distance. In fact, if anything was to create conflict
| would be someone trying to capture that self-sufficiency
| to support their own population.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Yes, it's a number of things.
|
| Small country, fairly neutral stance, little involvement
| in international conflict, and huge distance.
|
| Follow that up with alliances and there's not much reason
| to come to NZ, other than for a holiday!
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Also, no nuclear ships but part of five eyes. I think
| it's more complicated.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| It really IS though. I am both a NZ and US citizen, and I
| am well aware that the Bretton Woods Accord is alive and
| well (although I agree with Peter Zeihan that its days
| are numbered).
| raggles wrote:
| This is just not at all true, and we are hardly dependant
| on the USA, which makes up only 10% of our trade. The way
| that Americans think the world revolves around them is
| embarrassing.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| That is just not true, where do you get your ideas?
| Cody-99 wrote:
| Being based in a foreign country doesn't mean you aren't
| committing a crime. Cyber criminals, drug traffickers, money
| launders, etc are all still on the hook even though they
| operate in a different country.
|
| Also what he was doing is also a crime in NZ otherwise he
| wouldn't be extradited.
| halyconWays wrote:
| There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to
| these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment
| conglomerates. Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen
| from another country using the power of the state, and drag him
| before their feet is tyrannical.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Here's your evidence: I would have bought House on DVD 15
| years ago if there hadn't been the option to stream it
| illegally.
|
| You might object this evidence by telling me that you bought
| all seasons of House only because you had been streaming it
| illegally before, and that you wouldn't have done so without
| previously streaming it - but in most jurisdictions, this
| kind of "business procurement" does not cancel out the harm
| done in the first case.
|
| Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me not
| buying it is on you.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| I think what they are saying is there is no way to compare
| a good when it's free to when there is even a nominal cost.
|
| My "counter evidence" to your example could be something
| like: I bought House on DVD 10 years ago because my friend
| who had pirated it told me it was a good show to checkout.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me
| not buying it is on you.
|
| Is that legally how it works?
|
| This sounds a lot like being guilty until proven
| innocent...
| hylaride wrote:
| > There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to
| these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment
| conglomerates.
|
| I think there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly)
| vastly overstated. If I illegally download a song/movie I
| wouldn't have otherwise bought, did anybody lose out? There
| was a reason Napster was popular in colleges, because many of
| those people were cash poor. Music industry revenue peaked in
| 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily
| growing again. Also, the entertainment industry are not
| multi-trillion dollar conglomerates. Not even close. Disney
| is worth $160B and Netflix is $260B.
|
| That being said, if it were up to the music industry we'd
| still be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 for
| an album we only like one song on and we wouldn't be able to
| create out own playlists. You can only fight the consumer for
| so long (and they fought long and hard). That's to say
| nothing about the morality of repeatedly increasing copyright
| from 14 years to life plus 70 (which is BS). The Beatles'
| great great grandchildren (or whoever owns the rights later
| on) shouldn't still be benefiting from intellectual property.
|
| > Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen from another
| country using the power of the state, and drag him before
| their feet is tyrannical.
|
| This is what rule of law is. KDC knew he was breaking the law
| and not only didn't do anything about it, but invested in an
| encouraged it to benefit himself financially. Even after
| being charged and having megaupload shut down, he then tried
| again. Do you really feel sorry for him?
| xp84 wrote:
| > > no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm
|
| > there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly)
| vastly overstated
|
| I'm not sure how relevant the harm is. It seems like
| copyright law doesn't have exceptions for "harmlessness"*
| -- and even if that were a carve-out, it would be a stupid
| one for the kind of offenses we're discussing, since it
| hinges on hundreds of millions of individual 'butterfly
| effect' decisions and how they hypothetically would have
| unfolded in a fictional world without piracy vs. the real
| world. No one can prove or even know what the impact of
| piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term
| revenue. Maybe "Firefly" was boosted massively in its long-
| term commercial success by piracy, but some $400 physics
| textbook had materially less sales. I think there's a
| reason courts never debate this question, though.
|
| *I'm aware there are specific exceptions for things like
| fair use and timeshifting -- I just don't believe all
| 'harmless' acts are protected or that that was ever even
| intended.
| realusername wrote:
| > No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy
| is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue
|
| Just that is an indication on how little piracy affects
| revenue, the effect is at best so small that it's
| effectively invisible.
|
| > I think there's a reason courts never debate this
| question, though.
|
| Because discussing about the real financial impact of
| piracy is a sure way to throw a lot of pretty extreme
| copyright laws out of the window.
|
| They really don't want to start this debate. Piracy is
| just a boogeyman at this point to pass ever stronger IP
| laws and the large IP conglomerates are pretty aware of
| that.
| realusername wrote:
| > Music industry revenue peaked in 2000 at $21B and went
| down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again.
|
| That's because the music industry was incredibly slow to
| adapt to the internet. They basically took a full decade to
| react and lost revenue in the process.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to
| these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment
| conglomerates.
|
| Not sure if you know this, but there are tens of thousands of
| people involved in making a movie or TV series. Many making
| minimum wage and many who own businesses that are employed by
| the studios like catering companies. Or transportation
| companies, or even all the companies who tech they use like
| the camera's they use to film said movies.
|
| ALL of those people? Their employment DEPENDS on movie
| studio's and the work they do to keep them gainfully
| employed. When you pirate movies you're not taking money out
| of the faceless multi-trillion entertainment companies,
| you're taking money out of the people's pocket who are
| integral part of creating the movies and shows you watch and
| who's livelihood depends on their continued employment by
| those companies.
|
| Take a studio like New Line who put out the Lord of the Rings
| movies and was wildly successful until a series of flops
| effectively closed the studio:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
| entertainment/films/featu...
|
| _From 'Nightmare on Elm Street' to 'Lord of the Rings', New
| Line Cinema created some of Hollywood's most influential
| blockbusters. But now its 40-year history is in tatters
| following a string of big-budget box-office flops._
| ofrzeta wrote:
| So you think if we put more billions into the entertainment
| industry then at some point the minimum wage people will
| get decent pay?
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Actually, if you're not buying movies and TV, the money
| comes out of producers pockets, not the tradespeople. They
| never get residuals. The case you point to is about box
| office flops, which, again, come far after tradespeople
| have cashed their last check from a production. People made
| stinkers every year even before pirating and past
| performance does not guarantee future success.
|
| Also, I would consider pirating a perfectly valid protest
| of what producers have done over the last two years,
| dragging their feet to break the backs of unions in advance
| of negotiations. Hollywood, Atlanta, New Orleans, NY, all
| filming far less over the last two years due to producer's
| greed and hope that they can enjoy these pesky trades
| entirely by automation and AI. This has done more damage to
| tradespeople than pirating ever did.
|
| Fortunately, it's pretty clear that it will not be feasible
| to make a coherent movie or TV show via AI in the near
| term. Hopefully consumers vote with their wallets too and
| don't buy or stream any content that is made without
| trades.
| dangus wrote:
| There is a ton of evidence. Ask Snoop Dogg how much money he
| gets from streaming compared to CD sales. Look at how badly
| industry revenue has collapsed. It literally never recovered
| fully since Napster.
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-
| for...
|
| It is an industry that employs real people from artists to
| studio engineers to musical instrument and equipment
| companies to the bartenders at the venues. Those people are
| sharing a smaller pie than they used to before Internet
| piracy devalued their music.
|
| In your opinion it's tyrannical. Sure, most certainly a non-
| violent crime against a wealthy corporation isn't on the same
| level as murder or assault. At the same time, copyright
| infringement is conceptually not that different from property
| crime.
|
| You would want the police to arrest someone who broke into
| your home and stole your movie collection.
|
| You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your
| micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your
| infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own
| website.
|
| It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers
| that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their
| table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail
| or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it
| but you are going to need to quit your job writing software
| and start driving a city bus or something.
|
| Don't forget that Megaupload was specifically designed to
| enable piracy and discourage other uses of the technology. It
| wasn't a file storage service that could be used for
| legitimate personal use because unpopular downloads would be
| deleted. The company actually paid people via an incentive
| program to upload popular files that were copyright
| infringing. This wasn't just "YouTube is bad at playing
| whack-a-mole with DMCA claims," this was a company that was
| responsible for something like 4% of all Internet piracy all
| by itself and actively encouraged it.
|
| It's not like they were a company that didn't have access to
| lawyers who could warn them not to do what they did. Kim
| deserves his fate because his own hubris invited it.
| zamubafoo wrote:
| Streaming is not piracy though?
| dangus wrote:
| No, but piracy didn't stop being the #1 way to obtain
| digital music until streaming offered a convenient
| alternative. Streaming was essentially forced into
| existence by the wild rampancy and ease of music piracy.
|
| You really think if Spotify came along in 1998 that all
| the major record labels would agree to give them their
| entire catalog for $10 a month? Back then they were
| selling a single CD for around $20.
| threeio wrote:
| I mean... they did (basically) give access to their
| entire catalog to radio stations for even less than
| that.. but I almost sound like a troll mentioning it.
| ineptech wrote:
| Streaming was forced into existence by the invention of
| digital media. The ~20 years between the point where
| could stream and the point where we did stream seems in
| retrospect to be an artifact of having an entrenched
| industry clinging desperately to the concept of music as
| a physical product.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Ask Snoop Dogg how much money he gets from streaming
| compared to CD sales.
|
| If you do that you'll get a very misleading answer. That
| low payment he got was for writing credit on a song with 17
| writers.
|
| But the main reason streaming gives less revenue than CD
| sales isn't a "devaluation of music" thing, it's because
| streaming is closer to radio.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I usually imagine extradition being used for people who are
| dangerous, for someone who at worse encouraged a lot of
| copyright violations by making software feels like an abuse
| of power to me.
| colordrops wrote:
| If everyone just sat back and allowed the powers to do what
| they please, we'd have absolutely nothing in this world.
| Countless have spilled blood or have been killed over the fight
| for freedom in the past giving us the humanist open society we
| have now. The fight is never over.
| FredPret wrote:
| This isn't a clear-cut case of humanism vs something else.
|
| Humanist values include right to property ownership, and the
| right to get the benefits of your work. Artists deserve that,
| and can sell their rights to big studios if they want.
|
| Just because it's easy to copy something, or just because
| studio execs were idiots who wouldn't get on board with
| streaming, or whatever else, doesn't mean it's morally right
| to copy someone's work for free.
| scarmig wrote:
| Humanism arose during the Renaissance, when scholars and
| artists gleefully cribbed from each other's work without
| attribution and copyright didn't even exist.
|
| It's perfectly fine to copy someone else's work. The
| immorality comes in when you start using physical force to
| punish people thinking thoughts you feel entitled to.
| FredPret wrote:
| I'm 1000% in favor of free ideas and free speech.
|
| Copying scientific ideas (with attribution!) is
| completely OK and good.
|
| Having heterodox ideas is vital for society.
|
| Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to)
| is the worst evil.
|
| But making a movie is a commercial enterprise that
| involves risking a bunch of capital. It rarely pans out
| to make a profit. Copying it without payment is a very
| minor form of theft, but it's still theft.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Depriving someone of their liberty over interference with
| a revenue model based on copyright protections is not
| 1000% in favor of free ideas and free speech.
| FredPret wrote:
| Yes it is.
|
| If the content is a movie created in the last 100 years,
| it was almost certainly created to slot into that revenue
| model.
|
| The artists have a right to sell their property on their
| terms. And if they decide to do so by selling their
| rights to a studio, then that's how it is. And if you
| don't like corporations, contracts, or the revenue model,
| then that's completely irrelevant to the parties
| involved.
| colordrops wrote:
| You could add restrictions to anything to create business
| models. Doesn't mean it's natural and helpful to society.
| The vast majority of movies are tripe and provide no real
| value to humanity. And the vast majority of revenue go to
| a few executives and middlemen rather than the artists.
| The fact that this regime exists now is not proof that it
| is a good thing - that's circular logic.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Not all stipulations sellers place on items are legal.
| For example, I cannot sell you a scooter with the
| stipulation that if I need a kidney, you'll have to
| donate one to me.
|
| Furthermore, what is and isn't legal is a product of the
| legislature and the judiciary. Let's not forget that
| _people_ write laws and interpret laws. They aren 't some
| function of the cosmic order, though it's convenient to
| posture them as if they were.
|
| When someone "has the right," it's because a group of
| people _gave_ it to them, and anything that can be given,
| can be taken away. The fact that we forget this reality
| is a massive collective hallucination. Once you know how
| the hallucination works, it 's hard to buy into it ever
| again.
|
| TLDR; The arrow of implication doesn't go from reality ->
| laws. It goes from laws -> reality.
| FredPret wrote:
| This is an interesting argument but at the moment the
| laws say piracy is illegal. And they do so in a way that
| is super reasonable, no kidneys involved.
|
| The pirated works were created under this understanding
| of the rules.
|
| In other words, movies and games were financed and made
| at great expense and effort with a view to selling copies
| and tickets and making money off of VHS rentals / Netflix
| streaming. Piracy is a clear subversion of this, and by
| the way, if it became mainstream, would break the
| industry that creates some of the things we like.
|
| While the law isn't part of some cosmic order, there's
| nothing written in the stars that entitles you to every
| creation of every other person, at your convenience, for
| free.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Definitely. It's good to point out that these discussions
| often co-mingle two topics: "What should happen given
| these laws?" and "What should these laws be?"
|
| I'm glad there's room for both and the gray areas in
| between.
|
| Do we, for example, have an obligation to those who play
| by laws we believe to be unjust?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to)
| is the worst evil.
|
| Like forcing people think that copying is theft? Or that
| by clicking a button you agree to few hundred page
| agreement you couldn't possibly read or understand?
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| >The immorality comes in when you start using physical
| force to punish people
|
| for sharing or facilitating the thinking of thoughts you
| feel entitled to.*
| __loam wrote:
| Creative work costs money to make. People who make it
| should have the right to make a living off it. It's not
| hard. Most of the people on this site make their money
| creating intellectual property. How many piracy activists
| here would be willing to leak the source code their
| company relies on?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And how many expect that there would be no repercussions
| if they did, even if they believed it would be a moral
| thing to do?
| cdchn wrote:
| >when scholars and artists gleefully cribbed from each
| other's work without attribution and copyright didn't
| even exist
|
| This was also a time before mass copying and distribution
| on a massive scale.
| Fomite wrote:
| This was also a time of wealthy patrons
| kylebenzle wrote:
| That is 100% the antithesis of the hacker spirit and I
| shudder at your callousness.
|
| 1. All information wants to be free.
|
| 2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free".
|
| 3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free
| for personal profit is immoral.
| FredPret wrote:
| I have to be a communist to have "hacker spirit"? Hardly.
|
| 1. All information wants to be free.
|
| Information on the order of complexity of a movie cannot
| want anything.
|
| 2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free".
|
| Nearly free to copy, doesn't mean you're free to take it.
|
| 3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is
| free for personal profit is immoral.
|
| I get the sentiment here but I don't think it follows in
| the context of an artist creating something specifically
| to make money from it when it gets distributed.
| colordrops wrote:
| it's very simple. trying to apply the concept of property
| to information is unnatural and has hindered human
| progress more than it has helped. Information is not like
| physical property, which is limited in supply. In fact it
| doesn't even really exist. To tell me that having the
| atoms on MY hard drive or MY ink molecules on MY paper
| arranged in a certain pattern is absurd. I'm not
| depriving anyone of anything by doing this. I am the one
| being deprived by not being allowed to arrange them how I
| wish.
|
| To try to own information is like trying to own a flame.
| I lit your candle with my candle, so I own the flame on
| your candle. Making a copy is the same. To claim you own
| the copy is just plain stupid.
| FredPret wrote:
| This is a weird argument.
|
| Information can be any collection of bits. You can copy
| these easily and almost for free.
|
| But almost nobody cares about information in the
| abstract. I'm talking about specific, artful arrangements
| of bits. Lots of effort goes into making sequences of
| bits. (we can give our sequence of bits names like "The
| Lion King" or "Windows 98"). You only want a copy of
| these bits because of the effort that went into it.
|
| Of course nobody can control how you flip the bits on
| your hard drive in practice, but that's missing the
| point. It's a particular arrangement of bits that you
| find entertaining or informative or useful, somebody put
| a lot of work into making it that way, and it's this
| creative effort that you end up enjoying and paying for,
| not the actual bits.
|
| And of course you _are_ depriving the artists of
| something - a royalty payment. The art was likely created
| with a view to that royalty payment. Which is why you
| want to pirate it in the first place. You want to enjoy
| the creative work without having to shell out for it.
|
| You can come up with elaborate arguments about
| information theory, but in the end this is what it comes
| down to - pirates want other people to create value for
| them, for free, and will howl about "corporations" and
| "information wants to be free" to try and justify it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 1. Information doesn't _want_ anything. Yes, digital
| information is easy to copy and hard to copy protect.
|
| 2. No. It becomes easily copyable.
|
| 3. Irrelevant, given the problems with 1 and 2.
| gliiics wrote:
| It's not always black and white; let's be honest, yes, Kim
| Dotcom was probably more about piracy than freedom of whatever
| simply because that's where his money was. But:
|
| > Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to
| do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
|
| Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and
| whistleblowers in general?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Whistleblowing is not the same as hosting pirated material.
| NamTaf wrote:
| Yes, that's the point the poster is making. They are not
| the same despite being united by the fact that in both
| cases the government got involved and said "stop that, it's
| wrong". They explicitly stated their point that there's a
| moral spectrum of positions which means it's not always
| right to just roll over and find something else to do when
| the authorities get involved.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I don't know if it's just coincidence, but I've been
| seeing this so much lately. People reflexively responding
| that thing A is totally different than thing B,
| completely missing that the point is not to suggest
| similarity between A and B, but to challenge the
| reasoning being applied to A by noting that it would also
| apply to B (in most cases where applying it to B leads to
| a clearly wrong outcome).
| pishpash wrote:
| It's standard trolling technique, or maybe rhetorical art
| to win an argument, your call.
|
| Now you have a pointless thread five deep.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Back in the day, piracy was seen as a symbol of free speech
| and censorship much like how abortion is still a symbol for
| women's rights today.
|
| The premise was that these services didn't actually perform
| the piracy, its users did. Kim Dotcom played both sides of
| the field, much like how social media platforms are right
| now with the whole "we're not a media company" but wanting
| all the profits of providing services that those companies
| do.
|
| I'm not saying I agree, but it provides context as to why
| people felt Kim Dotcom was a hero.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange,
| and whistleblowers in general?_
|
| Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross.
| He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or
| whistleblower.
| gliiics wrote:
| I agree, and in fact I did not compare them. I asked an
| entirely different question.
|
| You can re-read the first line of my comment if you think
| I'm putting those two things on the same level, and you
| will see that I agree with:
|
| > He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or
| whistleblower.
| jrflowers wrote:
| What is the point of asking that question if you strictly
| intended no comparison between the subject of the post
| you're replying to and the people you mentioned?
|
| It is like posting "You have interesting thoughts about
| Kim Dotcom. What is better, paragliding or parasailing?"
| singlow wrote:
| He was contrasting them. He was pointing out that the
| logic of the previous post falls apart when applying it
| to more noble subjects.
| jrflowers wrote:
| That is a comparison.
| stouset wrote:
| You can believe that the two should be held to different
| account while still critiquing a specific attempt at
| doing so.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The comparison is between the proposed heuristic of
| "stopping at some point", not between the people.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's not. They were attacking an argument made in the
| original comment. That argument had no reason to only
| apply to Kim dotcom. It applies to everyone. The poster
| attacked the logic behind that argument using a few
| different people as examples.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| On the internet, questions like your first comment are
| statistically likely to be smug gotchas. It'd be nice if
| it was different, but it's not. So if that's not your
| intention, it's worthwhile to say so in the first place
| rather than assume people will understand.
| jfyi wrote:
| Just to say up front, I think you are the only one that
| gets it here and am not criticizing you, but the answer
| in question could also be read that way (of course with
| the excuse that "the other guy did it first!").
|
| Am I the only one that didn't read either that way? I
| think a lot of biases are hanging out in this
| conversation.
| pokstad wrote:
| That's a subjective opinion. You shouldn't have a legal
| system built on opinions.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The legal system shouldn't care about _motive_?
| mulmen wrote:
| Sure but the legal system is only one branch of
| government. Many of the rights we enjoy today were earned
| by what the legal system would classify as criminals.
| mjhay wrote:
| The written justification that judges give for their
| rulings is literally called a "judicial _opinion_. "
|
| Human understanding of humans and human social structures
| (which one needs to make just rulings) isn't objective.
| To claim otherwise is not just _subjective_ , but
| incoherent. It's an infinite regress. Many people
| throughout history possessing ideas that we now consider
| to be stupid were convinced of their objectivity.
|
| FWIW, I think this vendetta against Kim Dotcom is way out
| of line, and wouldn't have happened if he were more
| important.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Truth. I'll go further. He was a scam artist. Back in the
| day, I remember using MegaCar.com as an example of all the
| evils of Flash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9RIkwvFjfw
|
| Also Data Protect was a fraud masquerading as an
| information security company. I was living in Germany then
| and it was a joke in the infosec space.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| "Comparing X to Y feels gross [therefore don't do it]" is a
| gross argument. This type of argument never yields insight,
| and only serves to draw attention away from the interesting
| and relevant question being asked, which in this case is:
|
| The top-level poster appears to be proposing a general rule
| for how people should behave. But how suitable is it
| really?
|
| The way to explore that is to test it out by trying other
| inputs, as the GP did here.
| jfyi wrote:
| To be fair, the person you are replying to didn't use the
| argument you are describing. They stated it felt gross
| and then went into detail of the actual argument:
|
| > He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or
| whistleblower.
|
| That is noticeably different than stating, "it feels
| gross so don't do it".
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Literally the whole point of comparing things are that they
| are different. If you could only compare things that were
| exactly identically equal, the concept of comparing
| wouldn't make sense.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > > Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other
| stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
|
| > Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange,
| and whistleblowers in general?
|
| Or maybe even more generally to people like Jobs, Bezos,
| Zuckerberg, Buffet? Because maybe at some point enough should
| be enough?
| toolz wrote:
| I find this mentality is always directed at rich people,
| but never applied consistently in anyone's life, so I have
| a hard time taking this opinion seriously. Hopefully, you
| can convince me otherwise, but I've never heard anyone
| suggest the best sports teams should stop competing when
| they've won enough, or that the best inventors should stop,
| or the best artists, and so on. Money isn't zero sum. We're
| constantly creating insanely large quantities of money. If
| the people at the top are accumulating that money from
| individual consumers making their own free choices, then
| would you suggest that the people at the end of the line be
| given things for free? Or maybe they should be disallowed
| from making the purchases? Or maybe you're suggesting the
| rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits
| away? and who would they give it away too? The federal
| government controls more money than any entire private
| business, so obviously it controls orders of magnitude more
| than any individual. Should these wealthy individuals be
| forced to give their money to the largest money holders in
| the world? What value system would that make sense in?
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I think there's a significant difference between someone who
| does the right thing despite personal risk (because it's that
| important), and someone who does the _profitable_ thing
| despite personal risk (because they can 't imagine the rules
| actually applying to them).
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _But people are superficial and tend to develop an "i'm the
| main character" personality_
|
| How on earth are you labeling the people persistent to a fault
| "superficial"???
| bdcravens wrote:
| Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich
| himself off of content that people were already sharing?
| There's a lot of retcon-ing those like him, Ross Ulbricht, etc
| as freedom fighters, when the truth is they were simply
| capitalists.
| gscott wrote:
| Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by
| hosting pirated tv episodes. But one was started by ex-Paypal
| founders and the other bootstrapped (MegaUpload).
|
| Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by
| doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they
| fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child
| pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they
| could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but,
| in their case, now the law is something entirely different
| and unexpected.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| >>> Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo)
| by hosting pirated tv episodes.
|
| +10x Twitch. I still remember JustinTV ..
|
| >>>> Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law
| by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated
|
| Could you please elaborate ? The implication is that other
| similar sites were not removing child pornography or
| similar ?
| sanswork wrote:
| Not 100% sure what your first line means so apologies if
| I'm telling you something you already know but just want
| to point out that Twitch is JustinTV. They just rebranded
| the gaming section of the original site.
| big-green-man wrote:
| You can fight for freedom while being a capitalist. In fact,
| you can fight for freedom with capitalism.
| panta wrote:
| Only when you are not stepping on the toes of bigger
| capitalists.
| joshcryer wrote:
| If there were no copyright capitalists would find a way to
| invent it, so nah. Infringing copyright is just robber
| baron stuff from a capitalist perspective. A profiteer,
| maybe, but not a capitalist.
| microtherion wrote:
| Kim Dotcom is simply a career criminal, settling on piracy
| after having previously been convicted of trafficking in
| stolen phone calling cards and embezzlement. He simply
| figured out a crime that is socially more accepted than what
| he engaged in previously, but it was always about the money
| for him.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to
| enrich himself
|
| Why not both?
| joshcryer wrote:
| So I remember sharing a file to my brother and "uploading" it
| over very slow DSL at the time (I think I was getting 100kbps
| a second or something). The file was copyrighted, a TV show,
| Supernatural, or something like that. Anyway, the upload was
| instant. Apparently Megaupload would do a quick hash of the
| file (not sure if it was in browser or probably more likely
| the first 100k bits or something of the file), and if it was
| a file that was _already_ on their servers, they would just
| make a new download link for it, and the "upload" would
| finish. Links would be taken down by DMCA notices from forums
| and other file sharing sites (back then you could get good
| money making affiliate links and such, so people did a lot of
| their own uploading). But your private links and links you
| didn't share would remain. _The files remained._
|
| The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files
| locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't
| deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. _And_
| that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice.
| This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and
| convivence for the end user of course; though outside of
| Linux ISOs there 's little question what kind of files people
| are sharing), screwed him.
|
| Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit
| out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be
| sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were
| consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK.
| Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him
| 10... bet he regrets that now.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Getting a DMCA for one user's copy of a file doesn't mean
| every other user's copy is violating copyright. And that's
| not a theoretical concern, I remember a recent tweet about
| google drive having false positives in that exact way.
| joshcryer wrote:
| That's an interesting argument but the hash for an
| "infringing file" would be universal across all copies of
| said file, since presumably the DMCA striker would be
| claiming the _file_ as infringing. I doubt a jury would
| buy it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They can claim that a file is infringing everywhere it
| exists but they'd often be wrong and I don't think
| inherently infringing files are a valid way to interpret
| copyright.
|
| "Better safe than sorry" is certainly, uh, safer. But I
| don't know if you can really say the DMCA requires it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Yeah, large scale copyright theft for profit is something
| that you're only allowed to do if your name is "Sam Altman".
| akira2501 wrote:
| I'd go with "Anarcho-capitalist."
|
| Which of course explains their allure and the desire to
| retroactively improve their origin stories. They stand
| precisely in the face of what the OP himself retroactively
| considers.
|
| > "I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away
| with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved."
|
| Which is the mantra of the bullied. As if we aren't the
| government. When precisely did we all decide that copyright
| should exist for a term of life PLUS 70 years? The government
| does not seek our permission when applying these laws to us
| yet we have to implicitly sacrifice our freedoms in order to
| blithely comply with it?
| sizzle wrote:
| Who is running mega.co.nz? It looks like a superior offering
| compared to mega upload with sophisticated encryption and
| decoding.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Kim runs it. Isn't it the defacto successor to the now
| defunct mega upload?
| malux85 wrote:
| No he no longer runs it, and no longer is involved with it,
| and does not own any shares in it anymore.
|
| He started it as an improved successor to megaupload, but
| something shady happened about 2015ish with a Chinese
| investment firm doing some kind of hostile takeover.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >I appreciate Kim Dotcom for running MegaUpload and later Mega,
| in a time when the internet was younger and wilder.
|
| I like this. Us internet boomers got to learn and get
| everything for free. The new kids coming in are paywalled to
| hell :)
| Suppafly wrote:
| unrelated, but why is your username a different color than the
| others in this thread?
| mesmertech wrote:
| its that color for people who recently signed up
| kaliqt wrote:
| This is the wrong position to take. The government is wrong,
| and a bully, the answer is not to give them what they want.
| mike_d wrote:
| How is the government wrong? He is being charged with money
| laundering and wire fraud, both things that require pretty
| substantial paper trails to prove in court.
|
| I think enough time has passed that I can say this openly: I
| worked for an ad network that was used by MegaUpload. Most of
| the traffic from his site was fraudulent bot traffic.
| Mysterious advertisers would repeatedly rebuy ad placements
| that were clearly not generating any returns. There was
| definitely things that didn't add up to the point I would
| error on the side of believing the government on this one.
| somastoma wrote:
| Elon Musk comes to mind...
| swayvil wrote:
| I can think of a worse habit.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to
| do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
|
| The problem is that government doesn't have a line, that line
| is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people
| sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a
| parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they'll be busting
| down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the
| case in the UK).
|
| Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to
| its senses is a fool's errand. Copyright holders, the
| government, and powerful interests are entities that have no
| problem playing dirty.
| brownvshemmin wrote:
| Hemmingway insisted he was being harassed by spooks and
| nobody beleived him. One suicide and one declassification
| later.. James Brown created a radio network for Blacks... one
| meeting and one pcp and one declassification later...
| Something about Kim Dotcom makes him not something enough...
| Krasnol wrote:
| > Also for his pirate spirit and "stick it to the man"
| attitude.
|
| When the internet was even younger, and he called himself
| Kimble, he sold out other pirates to save his own ass.
|
| His attitude is of a selfish and greedy person. Nothing to be
| admired.
| DaleNeumann wrote:
| I know little about this case but remember the wild show Kim put
| on before his arrest. The way I saw it then was his colleagues
| pleaded guilty and where never extradited so my assumption was
| new Zealand would bend to his favour but I guess interpretation
| of rule of law is above precedence... I wish I could say I know
| what Im talking about.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sad news. I don't really know if there's more than the file
| sharing thing behind this, but the US is cracking down too hard
| on this guy. Seems unfair, tbh.
|
| The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO.
|
| I do not think he's a criminal. A big (massive, maybe) fine
| should have been more than enough.
| phyalow wrote:
| I disagree, he has engaged in a deliberate media/public
| personality building campaign over the last 12 years to make
| the public sympathetic to him and his plight.
|
| >>I do not think he's a criminal "He was arrested in 1994 for
| trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was
| convicted on eleven charges of computer fraud, ten charges of
| data espionage and various other charges in 1998 that he served
| a two-year suspended sentence for.[7] In 2003, he was deported
| to Germany where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November
| 2003 and after five months in jail awaiting trial he received
| another 20 months suspended sentence" (From Wiki)
|
| >>The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO.
| Yeah it was over the top, but he had firearms on the property
| and bodygaurds....
|
| I'm with you that he should have just been fined, but he made a
| tremendous amount of money very deliberately (despite his
| protestations) trafficking illeagaly in Warez, I geniunely
| think the US is right to go after and nail him.
|
| As a New Zealander, our government should be far more judicous
| about who it grants visa's to - he should have prima facae been
| refused his original visa on the basis of his prior convictions
| (I am sure there is a good story about why this was
| (incorrectly) overlooked by NZ officials). This ultimately is
| not a problem of New Zealands government/judicial system
| making, they have very fairly given Kim every chance to appeal
| and hear his side of the story - whilst he engages in games of
| attempted political manipulation for his own aim. The chickens
| must come home to roost at some point.
|
| IMO I dont think Kim deserves the publics sympathy, the shield
| of New Zealand residency or that he is a good faith operator.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I do not think he's a criminal.
|
| I should have added "in the context of this lawsuit". An edit
| now would be disingenuous.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| New Zealand source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41253465
| pizza234 wrote:
| The context is more nuanced that how presented by K.D.:
| the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to
| extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload"
|
| See Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload_legal_case#Basis_of...
| vessenes wrote:
| A fair amount of "this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and
| that's a public good" vibes in here, which is all a very
| reasonable perspective.
|
| I'd argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of
| the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA
| had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for
| distribution.
|
| The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new
| business models / protecting current models in law, and then a
| fair amount shaking down and sorting out happening as new
| technology hits the scene, going back to radio. Each of these
| waves has led to push / pull between distributors, retailers,
| artists and song writers, and whether or not you like it, that's
| the system we have today.
|
| MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively
| weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. But, it wasn't the
| wrong model using tech of the time. It was too early, and too
| successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders
| properly.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> without cutting in the existing rights holders properly._
|
| That's the killer, right there.
|
| "existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been
| ignored by tech bros for a long time.
|
| As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the
| tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden
| Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success
| is a _huge_ driver for modern popular art culture (for better
| and for worse).
|
| If we take that away, guess what happens?
|
| No one wants to do it, anymore.
|
| This may be an issue, with AI-generated creative content.
| Unless the AI is _truly_ better than human talent (and
| "better" is in the eye of the beholder), it has the very real
| prospect of turning the commercial creative industry into gray
| goo.
|
| _[EDITED TO ADD] Watching the karma count on this post, yo-
| yoing up and down, has been fascinating. This seems to be an
| issue that people have very strong feelings about._
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad
| thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers
| and musicians don't make money from their art, and would
| continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went
| bankrupt.
| earthnail wrote:
| I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a
| lot of time to learn to make music. If you can't make it as
| a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as
| becoming a football star), you previously still had the
| option to use your music skills to make money with boring
| work: music for ads for example.
|
| That's going away. Now it's becoming a lot more like
| professional sports: either you make it, or your hard
| earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases
| the risk significantly and will lead to less people
| pursuing a musician career.
|
| I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in
| any way, but purely as an explanation.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| "either you make it, or your hard earned skills are
| useless on the job market"
|
| I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental
| dexterity along with the ability to perform under
| pressure are being undervalued here.
| throwway_278314 wrote:
| I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively
| searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what
| the job market seems to value is that you have done the
| exact same thing as what they are hiring for.
|
| I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered
| solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with
| life and death outcomes.
|
| Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants
| someone who has done personalization for consumer
| products.
|
| I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks,
| where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a
| different context. And somehow that never seems to count.
|
| So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market
| values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been
| different?
|
| I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that
| the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me
| point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from
| text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to
| refute a claim) is very different from an interview
| context.
| underlipton wrote:
| It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find
| a way to keep artists secure economically while letting
| as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to
| think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the
| working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and
| Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it
| prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People
| would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are
| anything to go by).
| butlike wrote:
| For. The. Love. Of. The. Game.
|
| Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because
| you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and
| musicians don't make money from their art_
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about that.
|
| The overwhelming majority don't make _big_ money, but many,
| _many_ creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of
| them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a
| few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep
| doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know
| what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they
| _pay_ me for it, when I 'm done!". He is not a huge rock
| star, but does well enough to tour around the country.
|
| People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as
| "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why
| should they be paid?"
|
| I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained
| professional designer, help me with my software design.
| They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes,
| that can become one of the most significant assets a
| company has. That's a really valuable skill.
|
| We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It
| probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than
| some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are
| creative, but aren't.
| account42 wrote:
| > "You know what's great? I get to play music for people,
| and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!"
|
| This transaction does not need IP protection at all.
| whycome wrote:
| How would his career change if AI music become prevalent?
| He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever
| play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He
| might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| There are _way_ more people that draw, paint, sing, or
| play an instrument for their own and their friends
| enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how
| you could think that's not true.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| And software engineers that do it?
|
| Actually, that's what I do, these days. Take a gander at
| my work. It's not exactly "Hobby grade" stuff, but I
| don't make a dime from it.
|
| I'm grateful for the many years of being a professional,
| that helped make it possible for me to do it creatively,
| these days.
| bobajeff wrote:
| >The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is
| a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and
| for worse). If we take that away, guess what happens? No one
| wants to do it, anymore.
|
| I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego
| building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe
| it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported.
|
| Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no
| matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe
| that feeding that beast is not having an effect.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The ego stuff can be sickening, but it is definitely a
| draw. Some of the best musicians and artists, ever, have
| been rather appalling personalities. I won't go into naming
| names.
| butlike wrote:
| If you get used to stepping on the shoulders of others,
| that cascades to other aspects of your life and sooner-
| or-later a paparazzi video comes out of you being a dick
| to wait staff or worse.
| butlike wrote:
| Being "the guy" is the moat in entertainment. The problem
| is if you remove that, then the throngs of folks can make
| content to where it becomes "if everyone's special, no one
| is." I get it, I just wish it wasn't the case.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The music industry isn't a "goose that lays golden eggs" for
| the greater economy. It's not as democratic or accessible as
| the tech industry either.
|
| You'd have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the
| artists that it purportedly represents. It's not.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The music industry has been the one making the pots and
| pans.
|
| But it is also the one that has been making it possible for
| creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only
| fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become
| independently successful, without having patrons. I don't
| know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could
| be wrong, though, as it has never really been something
| that I've paid attention to).
|
| Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.
|
| It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed
| with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect
| of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
| fluoridation wrote:
| A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in
| itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies
| the music industry existing as it does today. That would
| be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that
| smoking is banned because I specifically don't like
| smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music
| to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make
| music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly
| the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is
| access to technology, not the possibility of getting
| rich.
| chaostheory wrote:
| This isn't a good argument since extremely few creatives
| get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to
| generate a decent income to do things like being able to
| buy a home.
|
| At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and
| for more types of people. It even contributes to the
| broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as
| opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, as a [former] creative, myself, I don't think that
| I'd consider what I did, "collecting rent on IP."
|
| In fact, if you look at the behavior of many tech company
| legal teams, that seems more like what tech corporations
| do, than individual creatives.
|
| This is the stuff I did in the 1980s, when I was
| considering making a living at it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
| chaostheory wrote:
| Because you're not the one doing it. It's the music
| labels that are doing it. You'd also be lucky to get fair
| compensation for your work. Even superstars get cheated.
|
| The behavior of music labels is far worse and less
| valuable to society than the tech industry
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> far worse and less valuable to society than the tech
| industry_
|
| The jury's still out on that.
|
| The music industry can't hold a candle to some of the raw
| destruction that has been wrought by tech.
|
| It's just balanced by a lot of good (and making tech
| billionaires isn't really what I consider "good").
| chaostheory wrote:
| At least the tech industry contributes something, which
| is more than I can say about music labels.
| EasyMark wrote:
| No we just realized people who pirate likely aren't going to
| buy it anyway, you can't claim lost profits for ~$0.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wouldn't say that, myself.
|
| In the case of software (a creative product that many,
| here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually
| lead to future sales.
|
| I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to
| be Adobe Photoshop.
|
| This resulted in a _huge_ number of folks that became
| expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in
| their careers.
|
| The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a
| pirated game, is a lost sale.
| butlike wrote:
| Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I
| was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some
| developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1.
|
| A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and
| bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the
| income isn't as scarce.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| For myself, I also pay for my creative consumer stuff
| (streaming and art).
|
| It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Who are these developers making reliably good games over
| 20 years?
|
| _Lemmings_ was a great game, but that isn 't informative
| as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Anecdotally, when I was in a grad-level design class as
| an undergrad, 100% of my classmates first learned to use
| their tools via a jailbroken copy of professional
| software. At that level of competition for opportunity,
| it just wasn't good enough to have waited until you got
| to college to learn these tools; you needed to have been
| playing with them in high school to be fluent enough to
| look good on a college application form (or a grad
| application form four years later).
|
| AutoCAD, in particular, used to be[1] super smart about
| this and went out of their way to get their toolchain in
| front of high-schoolers (even back when that involved
| pricy copy-protection solutions like physical dongles).
|
| [1] Not to imply they are no longer super-smart about it;
| I just no longer have clear signal.
| butlike wrote:
| I...I want to make ego-less music... ._.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| You're mixing several valid criticisms of the tech industry
| with a really invalid critique of Free Culture[0]. If it were
| true that "taking away the opportunity for individual
| financial and ego success" meant nobody makes creative works
| anymore, then we wouldn't have Wikipedia, the SCP Foundation
| wiki, GNU, or Linux. I also want to point out that it was
| specifically the Free Software people who fired the first
| shot against generative AI, because a lot of our licenses are
| designed to resist enclosure of the commons.
|
| Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that
| has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both
| liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry
| - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond
| making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech
| industry started out not understanding the creative
| industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into
| facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're
| not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster
| anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a
| blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone
| comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.
|
| To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI
| are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and
| raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are
| up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and
| workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly
| consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording
| session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of
| musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed"
| model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their
| royalties.
|
| Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose"
| interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information
| wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and
| take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out".
| _Licensed_ GenAI is not going to be any better than the
| current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not
| the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an
| individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not
| workers. And even if you decide you 'll never license your
| specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will
| still work the same.
|
| As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from
| collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and
| privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living
| due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism,
| and thus considers none of those consequences to be
| violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would,
| say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live
| musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law
| could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that
| soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a
| far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the
| artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.
|
| [0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed
| cultural works and do so legitimately through consent
|
| [1] Fascism with extra steps
|
| [2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a
| movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my
| point.
| i80and wrote:
| Pedantically: MEGA runs today as a Dropbox-alike, and has very
| little to do with Kim Dotcom beyond his being involved at the
| very beginning and then departing quickly.
|
| You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different
| despite the name similarity.
| vessenes wrote:
| Thanks, you're right -- MEGA was the relaunch.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I might be misremembering things here but AFAICR, it went
| something like this:
|
| MegaUpload existed as a file hosting service. It was widely
| used by pirates, and MegaUpload earned a lot of money off of
| hosting pirated files because users would buy subscriptions
| to MegaUpload specifically because of the pirated content
| that they could download, without the limitations that are
| placed on the users of the free tier.
|
| With a paid subscription you got:
|
| - Multiple parallel downloads
|
| - Much faster speed
|
| - No waiting time between downloads
|
| A similar service was RapidShare, also popular with pirates.
|
| Pirate sites would typically split downloads into multiple
| parts due to restrictions on upload size on MegaUpload,
| RapidShare and other file hosts like that. They would then
| upload these parts to MegaUpload and RapidShare and one or
| two other file hosts so that:
|
| - If files were taken down from one host they might remain
| available for a bit more time from one of the other hosts
|
| - Free users could speed up download times by simultaneously
| downloading the different part files from different hosts. So
| you'd start a download for part 1 from MegaUpload, part 2
| from RapidShare and part 3 from some other host. Then you'd
| occasionally check on the slow progress and the countdowns
| from each sites before they allowed you to download another
| part, and continuing downloading parts from each as soon as
| they allowed you to again after you finished downloading a
| previous part from them.
|
| The connection to Mega is that after MegaUpload was shut
| down, they started Mega and they made it so that all uploaded
| files were encrypted client side during upload and the URL
| contains a fragment with the encryption key so that it's
| decrypted client side and the key is not shared with the
| server (unless of course the JS served by the server is
| modified to explicitly send the key to them either during
| upload or download).
|
| This solved a problem for the pirates and it solved a problem
| for Mega.
|
| Previously when a file was taken down, the host would usually
| make note of the hash of the file that was taken down and not
| allow that file to be uploaded and shared again.
|
| Now, with encryption users could reupload the exact same
| parts without having to do anything on their end. And the
| users downloading did not have to do any extra steps either
| on their end either.
|
| This benefits the pirates greatly. When you've spent 3 days
| downloading a bunch of part files and suddenly the remaining
| parts are all taken down and their hashes banned it sucked to
| be a pirate. But with this automatic encryption the same
| parts could be reuploaded and new links could be posted to
| pirate forums and the users could pick right up again where
| they were in the progress of downloading all the parts.
|
| Less work for users uploading. Less work for users
| downloading. Happier users. More paying customers.
|
| And in addition to more money, Mega also have less work to do
| as now when someone argues that they should police the
| uploads better they can point to the files all being
| encrypted and then not having the keys to decrypt the files
| there is no way that they actually can inspect the files they
| are storing for their users. (Again unless they modify the JS
| they serve to their users so that they intentionally send the
| key to the server.)
|
| Of course, encryption benefits everyone. Not just pirates.
|
| But at least to me it appeared strongly that the main
| motivation for building Mega and having it use this client
| side automatic encryption and decryption was very
| specifically because of the experience they had with takedown
| requests for intellectual property hosted on MegaUpload. It's
| a neat way to cater to the pirates and encourages them to
| become paying customers of Mega.
| plorg wrote:
| Adding to this there were stories that came out that even
| beyond knowingly profiting from pirated content people
| working on the MegaUpload backend would search it directly
| for warez to share amongst each other.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Thanks, I had no idea that's how it worked. Embedding the
| key in a part of the URL that's not sent to the server is a
| stroke of genius.
|
| I still find it surprising that so many people use Mega (at
| least enough that it can stay in business) when BitTorrent
| can easily saturate a downlink and is free.
| Daedren wrote:
| Hosting pirated content is a liability, and putting it on
| MEGA helps clear it. Many countries have issues with
| torrenting such data too, as it's an easy way to get a
| notice at home from your ISP if you're not on a VPN. I
| assume many kids in dorms and whatnot may have bittorrent
| traffic blocked as well.
| cevn wrote:
| I dunno if this is unreasonable, but I fear dling
| Torrents with high number of seeders in case one of them
| is malicious. With Mega you only had to trust one server.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Torrent files have hash check sums of the fragments. If
| someone sends you a bad fragment it will be discarded.
|
| Magnet links are also hashes, so when you retrieve
| torrent metadata from your peers from a magnet link that
| data will also be verified for integrity.
|
| However, if the original torrent itself was made from
| malicious data then it's still gonna result in malicious
| code on your system.
|
| Interestingly though, it is probably far more likely that
| a torrent with a very low number of seeders is malicious,
| than that a popular torrent contains malicious data in
| the files you download.
|
| I suppose it could still be possible that the malicious
| code sent by a peer was targeting a weakness in your
| torrent client itself though. And that they could get
| remote code execution on your computer that way.
|
| The main thing I would worry about with torrents is that
| your IP could be seen in the swarm by one of the
| companies that monitor torrent peers on behalf of rights
| holders and send you a nasty demand for money and threats
| of legal action.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Malice in this context could mean that they are concerned
| about someone tracking the activity.
|
| If you are connected to a server, the server is the only
| connection(and only one with a log) but with a torrent,
| there are multiple connections so multiple parties could
| be keeping logs.
|
| Depending on how a file is split in the torrent, it could
| be possible to add malice data with a collision:
| https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/
| fluoridation wrote:
| BitTorrent uses SHA-1, not MD5. It's not ideal, but
| hardly vulnerable.
| kbolino wrote:
| SHA-1 has been broken since 2017. It is considerably more
| expensive to produce a SHA-1 collision than an MD5
| collision, but certainly not impossible. However,
| BitTorrent v2 also came out in 2017 and uses SHA-256, for
| which no known collisions exist even today.
| rvnx wrote:
| Legally they can decrypt the content though, they have
| access to the key, they just need to change a piece of
| JavaScript so it sends back to the key to their server
| the next time a page visitor comes.
|
| It's up to the courts and to them to decide. Perhaps they
| are doing it already, but just keeping it low-profile, so
| the "real" dangerous people get attracted to the service
| and caught.
|
| Like VPNs.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Meanwhile Mega is actually a really good Dropbox
| alternative. Stable, fast transfers, desktop sync works
| very well, lots of sharing options, decent pricing. I've
| been a happy customer for years instead of Dropbox and
| iCloud.
| butlike wrote:
| I FORGOT that movies used to be split into 2+ ~700mb
| downloads way back when.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _when a file was taken down, the host would usually make
| note of the hash of the file that was taken down and not
| allow that file to be uploaded and shared again_
|
| One of the complaints the US case had was that MegaUpload
| specifically did not do this. They de-duplicated uploads by
| hash internally, but when one download URL was DMCA'd, they
| only disabled that one URL and left other URLs with the
| same hash accessible.
| dpedu wrote:
| How exactly are rights holders required to inform
| MegaUpload of content to remove? Every DMCA takedown
| request I've seen generally has a collection of links. I
| don't know the letter of the law of the actual process,
| but the ability of a rights holder to tell MegaUpload to
| take down all copies of X piece of media seems... Unfair.
| Not everybody has a hash based system, and even if they
| did, variance - such as raring, modification times, etc,
| would make everything mismatch. And, if that is actually
| the process, why do they bother to include the links at
| all?
| mnmalst wrote:
| Megaupload Song anybody? https://youtu.be/o0Wvn-9BXVc
| agpl3141592 wrote:
| You do know that they pushed it left and right as 'dropbox'
| share everything platform targeting pirate groups with referral
| money right?
|
| He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated
| movies and TV shows
| meesles wrote:
| Wait until you hear how Crunchyroll got to where they did!
| Plex is on much the same trajectory. Heck, even Google Play
| Music used the strategy by letting people upload their
| pirated music libraries to get users. It's a tried and true
| strategy.
| ric2b wrote:
| Plex and GPM never distributed pirated content, they just
| allowed users to host or upload their own content.
|
| Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks
| about that but images online are constantly breaking
| copyright law.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Kim just didn't grease the right palm plus he was a
| singular face and name. Feds are relentless at getting
| those who the oligopolists have marked for retribution,
| just like Assange and Snowden
| dangus wrote:
| Except when you read the basis for indictment section of
| megaupload's Wikipedia page, I think it's quite clear
| that the service wasn't just another YouTube or
| Crunchyroll that was hosting copyrighted content and not
| doing a great job at taking it down. They were doing a
| lot more than that, they were running a file storage
| service that actively encouraged privacy and wasn't
| actually useful for storing personal files.
|
| They even paid people to upload high demand popular
| copyrighted files. They crossed a number of lines that
| other companies of the era didn't dare cross.
|
| As far as equating Kim Dotcom to Assange and Snowden, if
| it isn't clear by now that Assange and especially Snowden
| are Russian assets by now idk how to convince you. Like,
| Snowden tried to travel to Ecuador via Moscow and Hong
| Kong? Coincidentally just stopping by at the number one
| and number two intelligence agency adversaries of the
| United States? He could have just flown from Miami to
| Ecuador directly. Why didn't his original plan involve
| flying to South America? It's so obviously suspect in
| retrospect.
|
| But Kim Dotcom isn't a political retribution target on
| that same level anyway, he's just an egotistical idiot
| who thought he could play with law enforcement and get
| away with running a for-profit piracy website.
|
| The one thing Kim has in common with Assange and Snowden
| is that he could have avoided a decade of self-imposed
| house arrest and/or exile by facing justice in court and
| taking the L. But Kim is attached to his ideals so much
| that it he's wasted a good chunk of his life with this
| issue hanging over him, all because he doesn't want to
| give in to the pragmatic reality that he brought upon
| himself.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm not sure that one can distinguish between a russian
| asset and a russian prisoner so easily.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| didn't itunes let people convert their pirated music
| collections into legit paid ones?
|
| except they did a bad job by replacing tracks that sounded
| similar and then deleting the original.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Or even YouTube.
| echelon wrote:
| Google Play Music let you upload your own music library to
| your own account. They didn't check or assert where you got
| your mp3s. Nobody else had access to your collection.
|
| From the beginning, Kim's company put itself front and
| center in the piracy world. It was advertised as an
| alternative to BitTorrent and you were meant to share links
| with others.
|
| When licensors and eventually authorities asked him to
| stop, he laughed at them and doubled down.
|
| He's played the pirate the whole time, and he's hated
| authority and venture capital and IP every step of the way.
|
| There's a reason he would up where he is versus the other
| IP grey area companies and products that became wildly
| successful. He deliberately chose this path.
| dangus wrote:
| There are big differences in the details there. I suggest
| you go to the Megaupload Wikipedia article and go to the
| "basis of indictment" section.
|
| Megaupload wasn't even hiding behind a legitimate use case.
| It couldn't be used as a personal file storage service
| because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The
| company paid people to upload popular files. The service
| had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such
| process for copyright infringement.
|
| Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload's
| intent was extremely obvious.
|
| Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being
| a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield.
| They complied with requests to take down content and
| weren't building the entire business around infringement.
|
| Plex doesn't enable you to distribute content beyond your
| household, and it's also facilitating legal personal
| backups of commercial content.
|
| Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the
| same thing: making backups of your music is completely
| legal. Google Play wasn't telling you to jump on LimeWire
| to illegally download your music.
| butlike wrote:
| YouTube got big because back in the day you could watch
| full movies uploaded to it. (pre-Google era)
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| But was Google actively paying pirates to upload those
| full movies? That's the allegation against Kim.
| Xen9 wrote:
| As for the reason, Mr. Dotcom has claimed to have been a
| supporter lf WikiLeaks and this was probably not of
| signifigance, but I would overall bet 10% that his less public
| involvement with WikiLeaks & WikiLeaks-type activity was part
| of the analysis that led to him getting targeted.
|
| May be worth to compare the usual tactics of IP owning
| companies to what happened to Kim. I have a feeling that it
| could be shown that the kind of treatment he got was not very
| probable for a normal piracy case, even after accounting for
| his eccentric behabiour.
|
| ALSO politically he was a failure but not so much that it was
| not worth paying attention to him as challenger of
| establishment. Even those normally ignorant of related topics
| but active in politics may have seen him as an agent eating
| their votes.
| veidelis wrote:
| Why was he a failure politically?
| EionRobb wrote:
| Maybe in reference to his political party which failed to
| gain any seats in parliament?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand)
| Xen9 wrote:
| I'd consider not getting seats a failure overall, though
| he managed to get attention and the first elections
| werent that bad (if I recall correctly).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The government enforcing IP laws is certainly not a public
| good, in my book.
|
| I also don't think you can be held responsible for what your
| users do with your service, especially if you are complying
| with DMCA requests.
|
| They're shooting the postal service just because it bothered
| some powerful people.
|
| This is happening because Media is a powerful lobby in the USA
| and Mega is a nobody.
|
| Just another example of government corruption, move along.
| dansitu wrote:
| > MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an
| aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify.
|
| Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006,
| so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Spotify didn't launch in the US market until 2011.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-
| launche...
| zeofig wrote:
| Yeah it's totally fine. No uncomfortable thoughts bubbling
| below the surface here.
| philippejara wrote:
| > A fair amount of "this is fine, governments enforce IP laws
| and that's a public good" vibes in here, which is all a very
| reasonable perspective.
|
| I'd say it would be a a reasonable perspective if his case was
| being tried where the offences actually took place and/or where
| he was a citizen of and not a country who refuses to give the
| same rights to non-citizens being tried there compared to
| citizens[1] and wasn't even where the offense took place. This
| is absolutely chilling for anyone who isn't an US citizen
| honestly.
|
| [1]:https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's a mockery of jurisdiction. It's a joke that NZ would
| sell out its own citizens like that.
| zaSmilingIdiot wrote:
| NZ is a member of 5 eyes IIRC, and so likely have various
| relations/cooperative agreements in place that make it
| easy(-ier) for justifying the handing of citizens over to
| another state.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I wonder if the same would have happened if the roles had
| been reversed. Somehow I doubt it.
| vizzier wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn Pretty
| much.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's not analogous. The person was being charged of a
| crime that happened in the UK and fled to the US, then
| was extradited back to the UK to be tried. In other words
| how extraditions usually work.
|
| An applicable case would be someone being extradited from
| the US to the UK to be tried for a crime that happened
| while they were in a different country.
| rtsil wrote:
| > It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like
| that.
|
| DotCom is not a NZ citizen, he's a resident.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I mean, fine, but replace one word for the other in my
| sentence and it makes no difference, really.
| rtsil wrote:
| It does, inasmuch as your sentenced described the NZ
| jurisdiction as a mockery on the basis that it "sells
| out" its citizens.
|
| Considering the number of countries that extradite their
| own citizens, the bar for "selling out" and "mockery"
| must be quite low.
|
| And most extradited people don't have the luxury of being
| able to delay their trial by 12 years.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >It does, inasmuch as your sentenced described the NZ
| jurisdiction as a mockery on the basis that it "sells
| out" its citizens.
|
| No. What I said was that this is a mockery of
| jurisdiction. I seem to recall that DotCom lived in South
| Korea when what he's being accused of happened. Whether
| he's a citizen of NZ or not, this is a joke. The US has
| no legal right to demand his extradition just because the
| servers were in the US. It's just using political power
| to get its way. Like I said in a different sub-thread,
| what, it now has jurisdiction over the entire planet and
| can require anyone anywhere to follow its laws?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> tried where the offences actually took place
|
| The general rule is that a crime takes place where the victim
| stands. Where the perpetrator stand is a potential secondary
| location. The alleged victims here were "standing" in the US
| and so the US is proceeding with the case.
|
| Trials in a third location are extraordinarily rare. Only
| things like the ICC or some admiralty proceedings involve
| trials in a third location.
| fluoridation wrote:
| So if someone robs your house while you're out of the
| country, the crime would have taken place in whatever
| country you happened to be in at that time, right? That's
| how that would play out. Because if that's not the case it
| would imply that the house itself would be the victim.
|
| I also think it's odd to talk about this being the "general
| rule" when there's plenty of crimes/infractions with no
| victim.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Pagers created a new business model for drug dealers. It didn't
| change the criminality of drug dealing.
| kome wrote:
| this likable/unlikable narrative gives me chills. it's just
| like with assange--(il)legal imperialism at play - basically a
| rogue country playing the world police for the capitalist
| class, yet we're fixated on personalities. it's like mistaking
| the finger for the moon.
| vasco wrote:
| One thing you learn over the years is that people make up
| everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character
| Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law
| is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning
| he could control the situation regardless.
|
| The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or
| Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top
| of minor crimes will not get them in hot water because other
| people do worse but keep on the low down, but time and again
| you see these guys being made an example of, probably because a
| bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking
| them personally.
|
| So I guess like, don't behave like an asshole generally, but
| specially if you're also committing crimes. Kinda like not
| breaking traffic laws if you have a dead body in the trunk.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> probably because a bunch of people dealing with their
| cases also start disliking them personally.
|
| More likely because those people remain naive about the real
| world. In a past career I had some interaction with IP
| enforcement lawyers. They were stuck in the past then and
| have not really evolved. Their understanding of "the
| internet" extends only to those things discoverable via
| google search. Megaupload was knocked down because it was so
| visible. Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no
| longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA
| cannot see it.
| t-3 wrote:
| > Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no
| longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA
| cannot see it.
|
| How so? Google is a major distributor of most pirated
| material through YouTube and their search engine still
| makes finding stuff easy. I'd argue that p2p is nearly
| irrelevant nowadays and server-oriented distribution is the
| main model.
| 7jjjjjjj wrote:
| P2P is still where you go if you don't want potato
| quality video.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Probably the largest source of piracy is the widespread
| normalization of VPNs. Once upon a time VPNs did not
| advertise so as to not attract IP enforcement attention.
| They constantly shifted host locations to stay ahead of
| blocklists. Now VPNs openly advertise on youtube, touting
| the ability to "access contend not available in your
| country". That's piracy 101 stuff, at least it used to
| be. I just watched a youtube by LLT on how to bypass
| encryption to rip your own Blu-ray disks and upload the
| resulting files to your plex server. Even talking about
| such tech was considered criminal only a few years ago.
| The laws haven't changed. We just now have a generation
| of adult decision makers who have grown up with piracy as
| a norm.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
| vasco wrote:
| There's way more. I'd risk saying google drive has more
| pirated content today than MegaUpload and Rapidshare
| combined ever did, just based on the size of the user
| base and basic knowledge of long tail distribution. Other
| than that today you have so much piracy on discord,
| telegram, p2p communities stay strong, and of course the
| first rule of usenet is you don't mention it.
| billy99k wrote:
| A decade ago, I had a successful book business online,
| which included used college textbooks. I had IP lawyers
| (the same that represented the music and movie industries)
| send me threatening cease and desist letters on at least 2
| occasions accusing me of selling counterfeit books.
|
| At that point, I had gotten really good at spotting
| counterfeits, so I really doubt we were selling any
| counterfeits, especially when they couldn't come up with a
| single instance. The publishing companies continue to do
| this because used books cut into their profits.
|
| I just sent my lawyer after them and they never came back.
|
| Amazon and the publishers eventually came to an agreement
| that there were certain textbooks they just won't allow to
| be sold as used on their platform.
| xp84 wrote:
| Wow. And I'm assuming the publishers are now sprinting
| into the arms of rented, time-limited e-textbooks with
| DRM, and either eliminating or discouraging the sales of
| physical books that they can't fully kill resale of.
|
| My wife asked me last week to help her get a textbook in
| a format that could be viewed on a reMarkable tablet,
| which can read PDFs but won't work with arbitrary DRM
| schemes. I checked my options and found the publisher
| selling some DRM crap, and some clearly illegal sites
| selling DRM-free PDFs. Since I found plenty of people
| vouching that they'd received what they bought, I chose
| to (using a Privacy card number) willingly buy from the
| criminals, since they were the only ones willing to
| provide me what I needed: an unencrypted PDF that we can
| actually use on the device we want.
|
| I know publishers are afraid someone will email the PDF
| to the whole class, so that's why college textbooks
| probably ought to be folded into tuition, that way (1)
| publishers can get paid for the correct number of copies
| and (2) someone who actually has to pay the money (the
| school) is somewhat in the loop on textbook selection.
| It's broken now since those actually paying (students)
| have no say in book selection.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Aah yes, the KRS-ONE principle:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvJ7uMyIGJU
| delusional wrote:
| I've heard it articulated as "There are no rules, only
| consequences." which I take to refer to the Legal Realism
| idea that the rules are just what we bind each other to. The
| written rules only matter if some "powerful" entity (like the
| government, or a mob, or civil court) is committed to holding
| you to them.
| jkirsteins wrote:
| > There are no rules, only consequences
|
| I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the
| consequences, then there is no rule."
|
| E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket,
| so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in
| Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Even then it still hurts the millionaire less than the
| ordinary person.
| rurp wrote:
| Matt Levine is great at writing about the difference between
| laws as written and how they work in practice. He's pretty
| fascinated by some of the cases where the two diverge
| sharply.
| vander_elst wrote:
| Do you happen to have a link?
| aeturnum wrote:
| He's at Bloomberg right now[1]. His main output is his
| 4-times-a-week column Money Stuff, but he also has a
| podcast and writes in other venues. I love his writing!
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-
| levi...
| quotemstr wrote:
| "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"
| gengwyn wrote:
| Sometimes this translates even down to the individual level.
| I've watched a lot of police bodycam videos and it's
| surprising how many people make their situation worse by
| being loud obnoxious tightwads when calmly answering
| questions and handing over your license would have you on
| your way in 5 minutes.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > people make their situation worse
|
| I'd still be more likely to say the officer is making their
| situation worse. Take away the false dichotomy of loud and
| obnoxious vs calm and compliant and consider someone who
| doesn't answer irrelevant questions and is waiting for the
| officer to do their job (calm and not compliant). That
| person might have their situation worsened by the officer
| who thinks the person they're talking to is obligated to
| answer to the officer's whims.
|
| (Based on what I've seen of police body camera footage.)
|
| Anyway, I'm not really familiar with Kim Dotcom's case. It
| sounds like he's been more on the "loud and obnoxious" side
| and the authorities involved are not city response
| officers; it's hard to draw a parallel. Just pointing out
| that "you're just making it worse for yourself" is
| something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too
| small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
| sushisource wrote:
| This kind of exactly misses the point the comment you're
| replying to is making. The point isn't that just
| complying and handing over your info is the ideal goal.
| The point is that, pragmatically speaking, it's a lot
| easier to just do that and move on with your life than
| making a big scene about standing up for your ideals -
| because A) You're not going to change shit in that
| situation anyway and B) It's just going to make it harder
| for you.
|
| > Something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's
| too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
|
| Yeah, probably right. But, also, yeah, easier sometimes
| to just appease the bully and move on with life.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but being an obnoxious tightwad
| isn't actually against the rules, and it's not OK that
| there are some societies in the world where being an
| obnoxious tightwad towards a force ostensibly tasked with
| PROTECTING their fellow citizens (including the obnoxious
| one) will take this as a cue to 1) violate your civil
| liberties/rights, and/or 2) commit bodily harm to your
| person, and then 3) get away with it primarily without
| consequence.
|
| I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to
| interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious
| because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my
| day, and maybe my life.
|
| But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our
| society that needs to be eradicated.
|
| Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under
| the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only
| very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you
| have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or
| looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically
| tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At
| some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this
| composure the entire time.
| lesuorac wrote:
| At least for Shkreli he wasn't wrong. Massively increasing
| the price for a drug is legal.
|
| > [1] On August 4, 2017, the trial jury found Shkreli guilty
| on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy
| to commit securities fraud, and not guilty on five other
| counts which included wire fraud.
|
| Granted, the case started in 2015 probably in response to him
| hiking the prices in 2014 but the thing he was being an edge
| lord about isn't what directly did him in. However, Capone
| didn't go to prison for murder either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Criminal_convic.
| ..
| greenthrow wrote:
| He was not early at all.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My favorite part of this was SOPA was being discussed on the
| same exact day they arrested Kim Dotcom, and they argued they
| needed SOPA to do what they did to Kim Dotcom. Kind of a
| useless bill.
| EGreg wrote:
| Do you think UK will sign an extradition order for JK Rowling
| to go to France over a olympic harrassment lawsuit? Or USA will
| sign an extradition order for Elon Musk if France asks in that
| same lawsuit, or if UK demands he be extradited for
| participating in incitement from abroad?
|
| Something tells me the extradition orders only work one way --
| if the US Government wants it.
|
| Who knows. To be fair it took years and seems to have been
| given due process. But how much of it is "leaning on" the
| countries? Recently on his X interview with Musk, Trump bragged
| about "how quickly" he was able to use US leverage to extradite
| people they wanted, from LATAM countries! And everyone was like
| "right on!"
| aimazon wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the comparison. Megaupload was a file
| sharing platform that we used to download mostly pirated
| material and although they had a music platform at some point,
| that wasn't the primary method that most people interacted with
| Megaupload. The illegal equivalent to Spotify was Grooveshark,
| not Megaupload. The majority of Kim Dotcoms products outside of
| file sharing came long after Megaupload was attracting
| scrutiny. He was not a trailblazer, even Megaupload itself was
| a clone of Rapidshare. I'm sure we all remember the terrible
| album he used to launch his music platform which came after he
| was arrested.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the
| existing rights holders properly.
|
| In a way that makes it _much_ easier to argue against the idea
| that IP protects creators and not their pimps.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Politicians steal, make horrible decisions, and worst things
| and nothing happens. But you share movies and go to prison!
| lossolo wrote:
| Megaupload was not deleting content. They only deleted links to
| the content. So, if you had 10 links to the same video, and a
| copyright holder contacted them to delete their content under
| link #1, they would only remove that link but leave the rest
| (links and content) intact.
| nadermx wrote:
| Is this proven? Is it possible someone else uploaded the
| content after it was deleted?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If anything, it's a cautionary tale that tech is only one
| dimension of the question of creating a process, service, or
| system that will be a net benefit to people (or even allowed).
|
| A road paver is a great thing to have, but if I rip a three-
| lane highway through my neighbor's back yard, you can be damn
| sure someone's going to try and stop me.
| curiousObject wrote:
| Kim DC is not a likeable or admirable person, but this vindictive
| pursuit seems even worse.
|
| It appears very similar to the treatment of Ross Ulbricht,
| Assange, maybe even Snowden?
|
| These are the equivalent of white collar crimes (typical massive
| frauds from the finance sector, etc) but they are getting a blue
| collar punishment of decades in jail that a successful and
| persistent street drug dealer could receive, NOT the few years in
| comfort camp prison that white collar frauds usually get.
| tedivm wrote:
| One of these things is not like the other. Ross Ulbricht was
| part of a murder for hire scheme, and was not a whistle blower
| or anything close to a reporter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-hire_...
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I understand what you are saying, but I wonder if that is the
| right type of defense here. Each of those individuals could
| be separated from otherwise sympathetic audience by diving
| the audience( 'he is x$ and therefore bad' approach ).
|
| Same here. Murder for hire is bad, but his prosecution was
| about just as bad[1] and one could argue that (edit) by using
| warrantless spying without any probable cause undermined US
| constitutional rights. In a grand scheme of things, it is
| better to have one criminal get away than trample on
| everyone's rights.
|
| What they do have in common, however, is an inordinate amount
| of resources expended to punish them by the state..
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-
| hire_...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| You realize that the moderators in question were Secret
| Service and DEA agents creating fictional scenarios to line
| their own pockets
|
| Their involvement and indictment was withheld during the Ross
| trial and they went to prison for that
|
| Ross was not charged for these scenes, the other district
| court is saving face by calling it redundant and dropping it
| but it's really a shaky case
|
| It shouldn't have been brought up in sentencing, but there is
| no accountability in a judge doing so
|
| https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/cyber-
| vault/2019-12-13/silk-r...
| pc86 wrote:
| You're right that he wasn't charged, but: "For example,
| because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five
| commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by
| a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact
| commission the murders, believing that they would be
| carried out."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#cite_note-46
|
| Just because something doesn't rise to the level of
| provability of getting charged and sentenced for it doesn't
| mean that you can't say with a high level of confidence it
| happened.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I didnt say it didnt happen
|
| Corrupt, convicted ex government agents staged the
| murders, there is video evidence of some of them that
| they made for Ross to pay them. Which got them convicted.
|
| Ross was not charged with that, wasnt charged with
| conspiracy to do that, wasnt put in front of a jury for
| that. Because the government would lose that case because
| of their corrupt agents and agencies (Baltimore FBI which
| hosted the skit) messing up the case.
|
| This doesnt warrant a double life sentence for the crimes
| he was convicted of.
|
| 1 presidential candidate will commute (basically saying
| ~9 years is enough, ending this debate), 1 presidential
| candidate will pardon completely, 1 will likely do
| neither until the FreeRoss campaign learns how to do
| campaign contributions. Its only a matter of time as
| crypto savants gain position
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| So we're led to believe. But Ulbricht was identified via
| domestic NSA wiretaps; they used parallel construction to
| prosecute (oh yeh, the FBI just happened to stumble onto a
| Stackoverflow question of his years ago and used proper
| warrants against that!).
|
| Why would I swallow any childish stories that the US attorney
| made up?
| moomin wrote:
| I remain unconvinced that the relative punishments of the two
| categories is either pragmatic or fair, mind you.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| One of the things worse than a bad law is an inconsistently
| applied bad law, as that allows for it to be tolerated for
| longer and effectively enshrines the basis for the
| inconsistency as the true law of the land.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I'd go along with unfair, but it does seem pragmatic to keep
| criminals who would harm anyone in striking distance away
| from the public, while only keeping criminals who would harm
| corporate and investor interests away from executive
| positions and boardrooms.
| e40 wrote:
| Bernie Madoff got real prison time for his white collar crimes.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Likely due to the high profile nature of his crime. He still
| only served time in a tame white collar prison too.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I assume they're talking about hiding being the corporate
| veil and just getting a slap on the wrist. Embezzlers are
| caught and sentenced all the time but people on the board of
| directors get away with a fine and finger waggle for similar
| activities
| underlipton wrote:
| Bernie Madoff is notable because someone of his stature being
| pursued so vigorously is rare. If officials went after every
| financial industry criminal with the same energy, the
| financial industry would cease to exist. Likewise, executives
| who sign off on decisions that actually kill people (Boeing)
| rarely see jail time.
| AmVess wrote:
| They only went after Madoff because he stole from the rich.
| walleeee wrote:
| Are the actions of these individuals really the equivalent of
| financial fraud?
|
| Assange and Snowden especially, who revealed to the public
| crimes perpetrated by agents of the US federal govt.
| cies wrote:
| He's not one of "them" (bankers, politicians, lobbyists).
|
| Street dealers as well: not belong to "them".
|
| See how Epstein was punished in 2008:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Legal_proceedi...
|
| "On June 30, 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty to a state
| charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18, he
| was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. While most
| convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison,
| Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach
| County Stockade and [...] allowed to leave the jail on "work
| release" for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week."
|
| That's for a horrible crime. Not for allowing people to copy
| some audio and video files for entertainment purpose.
|
| He was one of "them".
| electriclove wrote:
| Why is the parent comment being downvoted? Is it stating
| something incorrect or is the conclusion incorrect?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > but this vindictive pursuit seems even worse.
|
| It's been profitable for the US agencies that stole millions
| for KDC
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/27/how-us-government-legall...
| bee_rider wrote:
| White collar crimes should be punished with the same vigor as
| blue collar ones. White collar crimes mostly steal money, at
| scale. Insufficient money is a huge cause of suffering--people
| don't get to retire at early, they and their kids don't get the
| opportunities they would have had otherwise.
|
| You can be a drug dealer that doesn't hurt anybody.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| No. Drug dealers always hurt people - we have the word
| Pharmacist for good drug dispensers.
| EasyMark wrote:
| There is a huge difference between a regulated and
| controlled system and your neighborhood methhead mixing up
| something in his kitchen to sell to the kids a couple of
| blocks over
| bee_rider wrote:
| Regulated and controlled systems sold a ton of opioids.
| bpmooch wrote:
| your name is extremely ironic next to your post
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do you actually believe that or is this some sort of
| rhetorical point? This stretches my suspension of disbelief
| to be honest.
|
| People can buy very addictive drugs from pharmacists (legal
| drugs are a huge contributor to the opioid epidemic), and
| there were doctors in some areas that were known for being
| extremely lax about that sort of thing.
|
| Lots of the illegal drug dealers do sell really harmful
| stuff. But before it was legalized they sold weed...
|
| We should not pretend our laws are perfect, they are always
| undergoing refinement.
| butlike wrote:
| Disagree. Someone who is well and truly addicted to drugs
| does, in fact, need it like the air they breathe. Drug
| dealers provide a necessary service to those folks where a
| lot (most?) of the "above the belt" services aimed at
| rehabilitation either fail completely or make matters
| actively worse.
| ric2b wrote:
| Many of them should be treated to non-violent home theft,
| adjusted for the value of the fraud.
|
| Defrauded people out of 10M? That's about as much or more
| than 1000 home thefts, which would probably land you in
| prison for life.
| fluoridation wrote:
| OK, but if you want to judge white collar crime and blue
| collar crime with the same yardstick, you have to put a price
| on human suffering. How much money do I have to embezzle so
| it's equivalent to a punch in the face? How much so it's
| equivalent to a murder? By a scale of suffering caused, I
| would argue that embezzling a very large sum can be much
| worse than an assault. On the other hand, not every murder
| causes the same amount of suffering.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| US Gov's revenge-deployment machine was first put in motion at
| the request copyright industry (which funds elections).
|
| Through the 2000s and 2010s, legislators (and by extension LEO
| agencies) were _extremely_ responsive to whims of copyright
| lobbyists. ex: ICE agents patrolling events for locals selling
| knock-off goods.
|
| It was so pervasive, news orgs noticed it - and even covered
| some non-sensational incidents. Though I don't recall
| journalists ever following the money.
| fastball wrote:
| Don't forget Aaron Swartz.
| edm0nd wrote:
| >but this vindictive pursuit seems even worse.
|
| Seems to be pretty much how the US government operates on these
| high profile tech cases. They are going to turn you into a
| martyr.
|
| Ross is a great example of this. He received a double life
| sentence + 40 years + no chance of parole. By comparison, El
| Chapo, a dude who most certainly ordered the deaths of many and
| imported billions of dollars of drugs, only got a SINGLE life
| sentence + no chance of parole.
|
| That is not justice, its a message.
| juujian wrote:
| You know how it is. You search someone's home, you set aside the
| evidence, and you promptly forget about it for 12 years. I
| dislike Kim Dotcom as much as the next gal or guy, maybe even
| more, but this is weird.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Thats just how much time money buys you in appeals, challenges
| and what not.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Don't forget they helicopter-dropped a heavily-armed swat team
| onto his property to execute the search of his home.
|
| Illegally, extra-judicially. Although it was mainly NZ
| authorities who overstepped their bounds by allowing it.
| donatj wrote:
| What exactly has Mega done that Dropbox hasn't? In my eyes
| they're basically the same product, the only difference being
| Mega's edgier tone.
| cma wrote:
| Wasn't the allegation that Mega uploaded copywritten content to
| themselves to kick things off with something people wanted?
| SXX wrote:
| You confusing it with MegaUpload that was shutdown 12 years
| ago.
|
| When MEGA launched Kim was well known enough where his new
| service got tracktion on it's own.
| dewey wrote:
| So (allegedly) like early Spotify
| popcalc wrote:
| This is about Megaupload, completely different business.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Not completely different, actually, they're pretty much the
| same.
|
| The only difference is the "we encrypt everything so we don't
| know what users upload" trick, which seems to have worked so
| far (and branding and stuff).
| tzs wrote:
| No, it was not "pretty much the same" as Dropbox.
|
| Megaupload took steps to specifically support piracy. When
| a movie studio would report a pirated copy of one of their
| movies, Megaupload would tell the studio they removed it
| but in reality they would only make it so the specific link
| the studio new about would stop working. They would not
| delete the underlying file and any other links would
| continue to work.
|
| This failure to remove the underlying file was not a
| technical limitation. When child porn was reported they
| were able to kill the reported link and the underlying
| file, thus breaking all links to it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I was talking about Megaupload vs. MEGA.
|
| >This failure to remove the underlying file was not a
| technical limitation.
|
| This, and the rest of your comment makes sense in 2024,
| but not around 2010.
|
| Back then:
|
| * _All_ file sharing platforms had this exact problem.
| This was _the_ problem at the time. You were even able to
| find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They
| were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and
| tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely
| solved.
|
| * Most of these companies (including the "good ones"(tm)
| like YouTube) thrived under this (unlawful) sharing of
| copyrighted content. Measures against it were being
| actively developed and tested and there was a big
| backslash from the platform's users as they were being
| introduced, i.e. it wasn't an armchair software
| engineer's "easy problem". When these platforms
| incorrectly labeled and removed content due to copyright
| infringement, it was a bit of a scandal, with many of
| these events reaching the news and people boycotting
| platforms and threatening lawsuits.
|
| * Piracy was huge compared to today, torrents were almost
| the norm. Not trying to justify it, just trying to put in
| context what internet users used the internet for. If we
| are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted
| content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it. The
| "market" was there, with or without Megaupload. I would
| even go as far as to suggest a wild point of view where
| Megaupload was actually a victim of piracy as well.
|
| * A lot of legislation around this was not in place
| and/or mature enough. Some landmark cases around Section
| 230 were just starting to take shape. It was not black or
| white clear whether a platform should be responsible for
| its content or not and what are the _legal_ requirements
| for them to address this liability.
|
| * The overall sentiment of tech people (even in
| communities like this one) was that internet services
| should behave like utilities, in spirit; I still believe
| this to be the right approach. It follows from that that
| whatever misuse of them made by end users should hold
| _them_ liable and not the utility provider.
| tzs wrote:
| > _All_ file sharing platforms had this exact problem.
| This was the problem back then. You could even find full
| length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were
| eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious
| process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
|
| At Megaupload they were not eventually removed. At
| Megaupload the same physical file could be accessed by
| different URLs. When a rights holder reported the content
| Megaupload only made it so the specific URL no longer
| worked.
|
| > If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the
| restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it.
|
| He was encouraging it. Top management of Megaupload had
| discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy
| and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing
| material removed.
|
| They published list of the top downloads, but first
| checked them for pirated content and removed those items
| from the list. What purposed does that have other than
| trying to hide the infringement?
| moralestapia wrote:
| >At Megaupload they were not eventually removed.
|
| This is not true. All DMCIA requests were properly
| addressed and the content removed.
|
| They even had a dedicated page to submit these requests,
| years before YouTube and others did so.
|
| >Top management of Megaupload had discussions
| specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it
| harder for rights holders to get infringing material
| removed.
|
| I would like to see a source for this.
| tzs wrote:
| The source is internal emails and chat logs from
| Megaupload that were released as part of the case against
| them.
| nadermx wrote:
| Is that alleged or proven? Because the law does no
| require you to take down a file and the make sure that
| file is not uploaded by someone else. In fact all it
| requires is you to take it down if you're hosting it, so
| if someone else uploads a file they would have to notify
| you of that file as well for the simple fact that it may
| actually now be the rightsholder uploading it.
| slightwinder wrote:
| It's about MegaUpload, not Mega. True, they both offer(ed)
| cloud-storage and public sharing, but MegaUpload was much more
| on the shady side. They were stalling and ignoring requests for
| removing illegal content. Furthermore, they were even actively
| supporting uploads of popular content. I vaguely remember they
| were even paying some people. Over all, it was a platform
| strongly focused on distribution of illegal content. And this
| is just about commercial content. I wouldn't be surprised if it
| also was popular for porn and abuse-content.
| denysvitali wrote:
| IIRC you had to pay for "premium" on MegaUpload, but if you
| uploaded a file that got downloaded many times, you'd be
| granted X months of premium (or lifetime premium, can't
| remember)
| jtriangle wrote:
| I've found mega to be consistently faster and it's a little
| cheaper.
| adrr wrote:
| You can just read the charging docs.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-edva/legacy...
|
| > On or about February 13, 2007, ORTMANN sent an e-mail to VAN
| DER KOLK entitled "my concerns about the thumbnails table." In
| the e-mail, ORTMANN asked VAN DER KOLK to create "a dummy
| lifetime premium user," stating that "[t]his is very important
| to prevent the loss of source files due to expiration or abuse
| reports."
|
| The company was literally reposting copyrighted material under
| puppet accounts.
| geor9e wrote:
| It feels like a decade ago, but I remember the issue being with
| how they dealt with abuse reports. To save storage space, they
| matched similar files. So if two people ripped a DVD and
| compressed it, they would just keep one source file, and
| generate 2 different metadata files, to avoid wasting space. So
| they'd have different filenames and creation dates, but only
| take up half the space. Then, when one got an abuse report,
| they would delete that metadata, but as long as one still
| existed, the source data never got deleted. Law enforcement
| called it a conspiracy to commit crime, megaupload called it
| smart database deduping. It was usually much more than 2
| copies, so content owners were playing endless whack--a-mole
| while megaupload was barely shuffling a few kilobytes around.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Dropbox scans shared files and checks hashes against known-
| pirated material. It's not just and "edgier tone", one actually
| makes an effort to take down infringing material and the other
| tacitly (and at time explicitly) condones it.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm mostly curious about the timing. Wasn't the raid on his house
| in 2012? 12 years ago?
| sgt wrote:
| Ever watched that show Monk with that villain Dale the Whale who
| had to go to prison? That's pretty much how I see Kim Schmitz
| rotting in jail: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DMb6zUTVwAAQwPn.jpg
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Haha wow, this brings back memories.
| Jedd wrote:
| > ... cost film studios and record companies more than $500
| million ...
|
| This bit is standard, trope-style make-believe.
|
| However:
|
| > ... paying users [...], which generated more than $175 million
| in revenue for the [Kim Dotcom's Megaupload] website.
|
| .. if they can prove that bit, it's a much more damning case.
|
| Not the usual hand-wavey _' We were banking on several thousand
| dollars of revenue from each of the 12yo's we're going after'_
| claims, but actual, demonstrable, revenue that was misdirected.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It is unconscionable that governments in both countries are
| spending time on this or chasing Assange or Snowden instead of
| the criminality of things like government warrantless
| surveillance, megacorp anti competitive actions, civil
| forfeiture, etc. Or the cartel of organizations behind this
| extradition that abuse copyright laws to keep things out of
| public domain. Or companies all exchanging our private
| information with each other, which inevitably gets released in a
| hack, which is far worse than a storage platform being used by
| some people to share songs or whatever.
|
| Are any candidates actually against this farce? Or are they all
| simply working for the companies behind this?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It's complicated. Most career politicians like all those things
| you hate because it lets them outsource the state's dirty work.
| The state made constitutional commitments it can't quite keep
| and has worked around them. On the other hand, those
| workarounds are themselves becoming threats to the state in
| ways that have made some politicians willing to rebalance
| power. On the other hand, I do not want to name specific names
| of people to vote for, because few Congresspeople are actually
| hacking at the root of power. Remember when Obama was a Marxist
| and then turned out to just be another neoliberal?
|
| To explain why, we must keep in mind that all states are in a
| perpetual crisis of legibility. They have more force than
| anyone knows what to do with, while having no idea of what
| happens in their territory or whom to use that force on. To
| make matters worse, most democratic states - and nearly all
| states in the Anglosphere - have been constitutionally
| handcuffed to restrict their investigatory powers. This is an
| existential threat to the state, and so the state will take any
| chance it can get to impose legibility upon the people by
| force, lest the state be replaced with something worse.
|
| I've worded the above like some kind of conspiracy theory, so
| let's remember exactly who we're talking about: the "I'm-just-
| doing-my-job" types. If your job is to investigate crime, then
| the 4th Amendment is an annoying hurdle you have to think about
| constantly. But it's not a high hurdle to jump over because
| most criminals are profoundly stupid. Drug kingpins are more of
| a problem, however. Organized crime is the criminal equivalent
| of an MLM, so you can pick off a bunch of idiots at the
| exterior, but not people running the organization. This is
| where law enforcement gets creative, weaponizing things like
| tax law and - yes, civil forfeiture - to cut at the root.
|
| The pattern of how democratic states deal with limitations on
| their power that prove inconvenient is simple: they cheat. Or
| at least, they cheat the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
| For example, if your job is to investigate foreign threats to
| the country, you're not fighting criminals. You're fighting the
| Borg[0] - an existential threat that learns from and adapts to
| everything you do, even the successes. For the CIA/NSA, having
| to get a warrant is like running a marathon while having both
| hands tied around your back and wearing a pair of cement shoes.
|
| Data brokers are the perfect workaround. They built the perfect
| panopticon and used social engineering to get people to consent
| to it. The CIA and NSA buys shittons of their data and mines it
| to find threats to the state because it's significantly easier
| and less complicated than getting specific warrants to collect
| specific data.
|
| Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public
| domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for
| positive propaganda. Here, we're working around the 1st
| Amendment, not the 4th. The US government can't legally compel
| Hollywood to make propaganda, nor can they prohibit Hollywood
| from making movies that denigrate US actions. But they can
| still pay Hollywood to make propaganda[1], they'll downplay the
| critical movies to save face, and even if they don't, it'll
| make America look like they're aware of and fixing problems
| they have no interest in fixing. So when the US government
| treats a storage platform for stolen songs as an existential
| threat, it is specifically because they are fulfilling their
| end of a deal with Hollywood.
|
| But there's a catch. Those constitutional restrictions were put
| in there for a reason. If the CIA can buy data from data
| brokers, than so can China's MSS. American lawmakers are so
| irrationally afraid of TikTok because China figured out how to
| use the CIA's own weapons against it. The government's defense
| of the TikTok ban is page after page of redactions. They can't
| publicly say they know TikTok is a Chinese intelligence asset
| without telling the judge enough information to blow the cover
| of every CIA agent in China, but the black highlighter[2]
| itself is an admission.
|
| Same with the anticompetitive actions. The late 90s saw the US
| government bring the hammer down hard on the tech industry[3],
| and then suddenly stop. Why? Simple - the tech oligopoly became
| useful to American interests and so was given a pass, to the
| chagrin of America's other sweetheart, Hollywood. Politicians
| only realized how much power had been actually ceded to big
| tech by accident. Social media made the mistake of ceding power
| to Donald Trump, who used it to run for president legitimately,
| lost a re-election campaign, and then attempted a feeble self-
| coup. Twitter and every other tech company rightfully shut him
| down, but this exposed how much power they really had been
| given in the political process. And then Elon Musk bought
| Twitter in a vain attempt to restore Donald Trump's
| influence[4], ensuring that the concern over Big Tech would be
| bipartisan.
|
| I still can't point you to a politician to vote for, but I can
| at least point you to an ideology and a person who talks about
| it: the New Brandeis movement[5] and Cory Doctorow
| specifically. Louis Rossmann is also a good option if Cory is
| too left-wing for your taste. Lina Khan is a huge figure in
| neo-Brandeis and she runs the FTC now, which is why the FTC has
| been trying to do its job again[6]. I single out antitrust here
| as it is the enabler of all the other abuses I've detailed
| above. You need economic centralization in order to get
| perfectly funded propaganda machines or privatized spying and
| censorship.
|
| [0] I _hope_ Star Trek is still culturally relevant enough for
| this reference to land correctly.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y
|
| [2] https://www.theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-
| black-h...
|
| [3] Examples include the antitrust actions against Microsoft,
| the copyright actions against Napster and Grokster, and various
| legislative attempts to either force computer manufacturers to
| include copy protection hardware or force online services to
| have upload filters for copyright.
|
| [4] This is an after-the-fact justification; at the time Musk
| was high off Tesla's stock price and bought Twitter basically
| in the same way one buys a bunch of shit they don't need off
| Amazon at 3 in the morning.
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brandeis_movement
|
| [6] And let us hope to $DEITY that she succeeds, lest we find
| ourselves living in South Korea.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the
| public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in
| exchange for positive propaganda.
|
| Seems unfair to not mention that the US here was aligning
| with the Bernie convention[0] (life + 50 years, Copyright Act
| of 1976[1]) and then latter aligning with European
| countries[2] (+70 years "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"[3]).
| Seems like something that might happen without any payments
| for propaganda. Also, I don't want to watch a 2 hour YouTube
| video, so maybe you can leave a link for the specific point
| about the US exchanging copyright extension for propaganda.
| Not even sure what propaganda would even be needed in 1998 -
| there were no wars, no China or USSR, no 9/11. Somehow I
| doubt the YouTube video will mention these points either.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
| treprinum wrote:
| Didn't YouTube get popular on pirated content first? What was the
| main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload?
| They both went legal later.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think youtube cooperated with taking pirated content down
| while Kim was a bit like screw you, I'm offshore, you can't get
| me.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| More than taking it down, YouTube pretty much gave the media
| companies a new revenue source, already built-out.
| glzone1 wrote:
| More than that. They gave the media basically a tool to
| identify music that they owned, then either remove it or take
| all the money from it.
|
| I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is
| pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus
| serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored
| content or product placement stuff in music videos).
| colechristensen wrote:
| For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips
| of things were popular and there were things split between many
| videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me
| using youtube for.
| jahnu wrote:
| It was filled with music uploads.
| emursebrian wrote:
| It still is.
| colechristensen wrote:
| They have license and royalty agreements with labels now
| and takedown methods for rights holders who object to
| things as well as quite capable detection machinery.
| janderland wrote:
| I work in this space and there is still a ton of illegal
| content on YT. As stated earlier, the main difference is
| that YT complies when infringements are eventually found.
| xnyan wrote:
| In my social groups at the time(late highschool, early
| college) it was exclusively used for watching TV shows. The
| 10min limit was only a minor annoyance, and more than made up
| for the fact that it was free fast video hosting at time when
| that was extremely rare.
|
| It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was
| dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked
| down on TV content.
| znpy wrote:
| As a former megavideo user... i watched many American tv
| shows I wouldn't have watched otherwise. And i wouldn't
| have paid anyway because at the time as a teenager i had no
| money of my own to spend.
|
| Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like
| extortion, it's unfair anyway (prices constantly
| increasing, and you still get ads even if you're paying...
| might as well go back to pirating stuff)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| you're moving the goalposts from "I didn't have money" to
| "I have money but it's not worth it".
| znpy wrote:
| Yes, because i did not have money when i was a teenager
| and have money now that i'm in my 30ies.
| Izkata wrote:
| Also 10 minutes is right about where the commercial breaks
| would be anyway.
| Eumenes wrote:
| > What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube
| and MegaUpload?
|
| Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts
| within the DoJ
| more_corn wrote:
| One of the cool things that lawyers do is that they advise
| you on how you can comply with the law and avoid such pesky
| things as "imprisonment" and "extradition".
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Salty hot-take but not grounded in reality if you remember or
| look back on the facts. He actively encouraged piracy, of
| whioch there is ample proof, then doubled-down on this, then
| tried to frame his own take on "following the rules" - all
| while continuing to poke the bear. We can debate what the
| laws and punishements should be, but he's about to feel
| justice in many different forms.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| YouTube was acquired by Google within two years of it
| launching. It's life as an independent operation was just too
| short to get into that sort of trouble.
| adrr wrote:
| I am sure if youtube execs had emails showing that they were
| actively encouraging and participating in the posting of
| copyrighted material on the site they would have been
| prosecuted as well. Thats the evidence against Kim Dotcom,
| emails.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Funny you should say that, because there are literally such
| emails all the way up to Google's C-suite. They leaked a few
| years ago when Viacom sued them for mass copyright
| infringement on Youtube. In that case Google even tried to
| argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and
| not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted?
|
| >Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed
| Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom
| show that many top Googlers -- all the way up to co-founder
| Sergey Brin -- were concerned about YouTube's copyright
| piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google's
| ethics.
|
| >[...]
|
| >Google executives -- who previously had referred to YouTube
| as a "rogue enabler of content theft" whose "business model
| is completely sustained by pirated content" -- nevertheless
| agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006.
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-
| cal...
| mjhay wrote:
| Thank goodness that Google execs are too high-profile to be
| prosecuted!
| ffhhj wrote:
| And that's why they'll keep feeding the surveillance
| machine.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok
| because it's the content creator's and not the service's
| fault. When are they getting prosecuted?
|
| I mean it's actually a pretty good argument.
|
| If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own
| employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be
| expected to police it?
|
| > [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms
| had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube
| voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its
| lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips
| alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to
| YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was
| unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which
| videos were uploaded without permission."
|
| ---
|
| Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that
| YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where
| it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10
| times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So
| Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other
| links would still let you download that file.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc
| ._v._Y....
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It's actually a hideous argument. You could make tons of
| money with any service platform by bypassing all
| copyright that way. The only interesting thing here is
| that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - _knew_ they
| were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose
| to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it.
| If held to the same standard, they would have to face the
| same repercussions.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > You could make tons of money with any service platform
| by bypassing all copyright that way.
|
| Only if copyright holders voluntarily upload their
| content in a complete crazy manor. Otherwise the argument
| doesn't work since uh the copyright holder can easily
| identify which uploads were infringing.
|
| > The only interesting thing here is that Google - all
| the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong.
| They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it,
| because money. And the emails prove it.
|
| Lawsuit is public record, feel free to link to those
| emails.
|
| ---
|
| Also from reading the lawsuit, Google removed the content
| in question.
|
| To quote the case.
|
| > [1] This case concerns the alleged infringement of a
| closed universe of videos posted on YouTube at various
| times between 2005 and 2008. As this Court explained,
| "only the current clips-in-suit are at issue in this
| litigation." SPA54. All those clips were removed from
| YouTube years ago. SPA45 n.7. Viacom originally claimed
| that hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos infringed
| its copyrights, but ultimately identified approximately
| 63,000 clips-in-suit. JAXIII:3135(PP6-7). It turned out,
| however, that Viacom's own employees and agents had
| actually uploaded many of those clips.
| JAIX:2213-14(PP150-152); JAXIII:3135-36(PP8-11);
| JAXXII:5745-46(PP1.63); JAXXIII:5973-75. Even when it
| realized that fact (after years of litigation), Viacom
| and its lawyers still were unable to identify all the
| clips-in-suit that Viacom was responsible for posting.
| JAXXII:5717-20(P127), 5544-46(P11). Many clips-in-suit,
| moreover, are identical to or indistinguishable from
| promotional clips that Viacom now acknowledges uploading.
|
| The non-court filings are way more accusatory but should
| really stick the court filings for matters of fact.
|
| > [2] It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make
| them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts
| using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to
| Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be
| traced to Viacom.
|
| > [2] Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of
| YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could
| not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up
| on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom
| demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to
| YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their
| reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that
| Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom
| itself.
|
| [1]: pg 15
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4135344/143/viacom-
| inte...
|
| [2]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-
| yourself/
| nova22033 wrote:
| _In its filings in U.S. District Court in New York, YouTube
| said that Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, Comedy
| Central and other entertainment properties, secretly tried
| to use YouTube's popularity to promote its content, posting
| "roughed up" videos to make them look stolen or leaked, and
| even sending employees to Kinko's to upload clips that
| couldn't be traced back to Viacom._
|
| Interesting...hadn't heard of this before
| diggan wrote:
| Spotify too (allegedly) had bunch of pirated content to
| bootstrap the service. I guess the difference is that they (and
| YouTube) tried to pivot away from it, compared to Megaupload
| which seemed to have leaned into it instead.
| RyanAdamas wrote:
| Sure you're not thinking of Grooveshark which was the
| original Spotify?
| diggan wrote:
| Nope, I'm sure I'm thinking of Spotify. Grooveshark, AFAIK,
| didn't try to pivot and instead later got shutdown,
| compared to Spotify which seemed to have been able to
| navigate the pivot.
|
| Edit: found at least one source now when I went looking:
| https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-
| spotify-b...
|
| > When Spotify first launched several people noticed that
| some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as
| FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect
| the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay.
|
| > Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that
| decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of
| the usual outlets. There's only one place that could have
| originated from.
| bergkvist wrote:
| Yeah, I remember in the early days, when I installed Spotify
| it would scan my computer for music and upload everything it
| found. I imagine this is basically how they bootstrapped
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Probably mostly Dotcom's attitude tbh
| more_corn wrote:
| DMCA safe harbor says you don't have to actively police your
| content but you have to take it down if a copyright holder
| complains. YouTube had robust tooling to take down content when
| they received a complaint. They got sued anyway, they won
| because the evidence showed they always took the content down
| (and that Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the
| content up there in the first place)
| xp84 wrote:
| > Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content
| up there in the first place
|
| Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.
| robocat wrote:
| Referenced here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259611
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular
| pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put
| everything up in chunks and at the time there weren't many
| super user friendly options to download them as a batch. You'd
| often enough have things where one part would eventually be
| missing and that'd ruin the whole thing. For tv shows it could
| be okay but for films once you're dealing with 10+ parts, often
| without knowledge of playlists, it'd get grating fast.
|
| Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing
| embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume
| that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably
| pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit
| blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| One big (alleged) difference that many folks skip over when
| mentioning YouTube is that Kim actively and not very secretly
| recruited pirates to upload known pirated stuff. YouTube may
| have done a crap job at preventing privacy but they weren't
| actively soliciting pirates and paying them.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Kim was a maverick, and his political connections were weak and
| easy to break. If you don't have the connections, you shouldn't
| be playing such a dangerous game.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It did. YouTube has paid the piper here and continues to do so.
| It pays a lot of money to record labels right now. TV networks
| choose to run their own streaming, and YouTube enforces what
| networks ask for.
|
| Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many
| services now, like Claude, do not let you create password
| accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription.
| Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate.
|
| Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel
| about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's
| a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple
| be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Isn't Apple losing money on their streaming service though?
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| isn't costco losing money on hotdogs?
| quitit wrote:
| It was definitely used that way, early YouTube had a download
| button
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The US seems to have this knack of sliding itself into this
| narrow gap between individuals they're idealistically pursuing
| and something worse. "If I could just slip in there, ooh, that's
| tight, yes, thank you, aah comfy, this feels like where I
| belong".
|
| In their desperate attempt to not lose a fight that's been going
| on for, what, 10 years? 15 years? They're increasingly looking
| like a child that cannot move on from a primary school sleight.
|
| The US look like an ass because the law they're seemingly-
| autistically pursuing, is an ass.
|
| Pragmatism has no place here, it would seem.
|
| Also, downloading from Mega will get you a (partial at least) red
| flag from intelligence / law enforcement.
| andai wrote:
| >Mega will get you a (partial at least) red flag from
| intelligence / law enforcement.
|
| I think this would flag my entire generation, at least back in
| the 2000s.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Mega (sorry: MEGA), not Megaupload, in this specific case.
|
| (the opposite to the case this article is about)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Source for the final claim? Is this still the case? Shit Man I
| distributed a dataset via megaupload for a paper awhile ago. Am
| I now a target of the glowies?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| See reply to antai below. MEGA, not Megaupload.
|
| Re: source. Hopefully I'm consistent, you can go back through
| my comment history. I was raided by the police a bit over two
| years ago. When I got my stuff back (8 months later, no
| charges) the lead detective said that there was evidence I'd
| downloaded things from Mega, and that this was "suspicious",
| amongst a couple of other things.
|
| I got the feeling she thought I was still guilty and had
| somehow managed to get away with the distribution of which I
| was suspected (or it was some kind of retro justification for
| gross violation of my rights and she was taking a front foot
| stance to minimise the chances I'd see what legal avenues are
| available in such situations - turns out very few to none).
|
| She specifically mentioned as suspicious:
|
| - history of downloading from MEGA
|
| - using virtual machines
|
| - having "tor" installed.
|
| Interesting combination of cluelessness (wait until they're
| introduced to containers!). MEGA somewhat stands out in that
| bunch, in that there are lots of similar services as far as I
| know. Makes me wonder if it's a honeypot (but maybe not,
| because then they'd know the only thing I downloaded from
| MEGA was android ROMs).
|
| Other than being outspoken on certain topics online, my
| browsing history is as boring as the next guy's. So I really
| think they put some weight behind MEGA activity.
| 19h wrote:
| As someone working in comint I can assure you that there's
| nothing special about MEGA compared to others in terms of
| flagging.
| causal wrote:
| Seems like a terrible experience, especially the "use of
| virtual machines" being flagged as suspicious considering
| what a benign and widespread tool that is.
|
| Are you based in the US or?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Australia.
| duped wrote:
| You're looking at this through too narrow a lens, I think.
|
| The Government has a duty to protect domestic industry from
| foreign threats, and throughout history, that isn't reserved to
| state actors.
|
| Megaupload was a severe threat(*) to major American industries,
| and Kim Dotcom flagrantly ignored pressure from America to stop
| what it was doing. When that happens the Government gets to
| pick which of its heavy hammers to drop, and KDC is lucky it
| was just lawyers.
|
| You have to look at this through the eyes of the government and
| how it conducts foreign policy, often over long spans of time,
| with the goals of expanding and defending American interests -
| which includes protecting industries.
|
| (* was it? we'll never really know)
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| For the GP: part of (any) gov's power is what you refer to as
| "autistically" pursuing a case. A large org will never be
| nimble or fast enough to catch criminals in the act or
| immediately afterwards. It balances that slowness by
| inexorably pursuing criminals, sometimes at greater expense
| than the cost of the original crime.
|
| Would be criminals _should_ believe that they might execute a
| heist successfully, but that they will need to always keep
| running because the gov is doggedly pursuing.
|
| None of what I am saying is specific to Kim Dotcom, just
| trying to highlight to GP how governments execute business.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| I think this is a good take. Much of the commentary here has
| been on the morality or otherwise of copyright infringement,
| proportional legal response and extraterritorial reach. All
| topics of interest, certainly, but clouding the real story
| here.
|
| This is foreign policy, and the US has pursued control of
| copyright distribution, globally, for a very long time. Being
| from Australia, I remember the sense of disquiet as our
| copyright laws were modified as part of trade deals with the
| US. Many other nations (perhaps most?) have done the same
| (whether the law changes were pushed via the US directly or
| through UN related bodies is largely irrelevant). You combine
| that with the extremely tight coupling of large corporate
| bodies and the US government, and US foreign policy looks
| like authoritarianism.
|
| So I agree that what we see with these extreme examples of
| "Kim dotcom" and "Assange" extraditions are part of a broader
| foreign policy strategy. Where I disagree with your post is
| the statement "American interests". To me, the interests
| served are the conglomerate of political and corporate
| powers, which may be at odds with the average US citizen.
| dangus wrote:
| Here's a thought experiment for you: if you were raped, would
| you want the government to give up prosecuting your rapist just
| because 10 or 15 years passed before they could locate them?
|
| I'm not saying that this crime is on the same level, but
| Megaupload was at one time responsible for 4% of the _entire
| Internet 's_ piracy activity. And it wasn't a non-profit peer-
| to-peer file sharing community like The Pirate Bay or anything
| like that, it was a for-profit corporation directly profiting
| from stolen IP. Kim built himself a gigantic mansion off of
| other people's work.
|
| And he certainly had the means and ability to consult with
| lawyers who almost certainly told him that what he was doing
| was incredibly risky.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Didn't like the guy when he was in the news, but this is too long
| ago, give it a rest. Why does NZ even play ball on this, just
| tell the US to f off.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| Because NZ is a vassal state.
| charonn0 wrote:
| Because the US and NZ have an extradition treaty.
| crtified wrote:
| NZ elected a business-centric government last year. Since then,
| all government decisions involving individuals-vs-business have
| taken a distinct lean towards the business side.
| throwadobe wrote:
| Fuck the MPAA/RIAA
| swozey wrote:
| Are any of the people who were arrested for RIAA/MPAA violations
| still imprisoned? That was such a weird time to be a kid. Scared
| if I downloaded a Greenday mp3 my parents would get arrested for
| piracy and I'd never be able to work in computers.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Make sure your own kids' curiosity isn't stifled by such fears.
| Asooka wrote:
| Oh yeah once they started cracking down I stopped watching any
| mainstream movies, music, etc., especially not anything less
| than 10 years old. You miss out on a banger here and there, but
| it's a lot safer.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I am not particularly sympathetic to Kim Dotcom personally; but:
| Intellectual Property is illegitimate, anti-social, immoral. We
| should oppose its enforcement, both within states and in
| international contexts.
|
| I am reminded of Eban Moglen's "dot-communist manifesto" of 2003,
| worth a read:
|
| https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html
|
| There's also the matter of the USA being able to enforce its
| legal norms on people living in other countries, via instruments
| like extradition but also sanctions for less-friendly world
| states.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| YouTube has a thousand to a million times more copyrighted
| content than Megaupload ever had. And no, not all of it is via
| partnerships with the copyright holders. Kim's problem apparently
| was that he didn't bribe Congress.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| you could argue that YouTube is "trying" to not have illegal
| content. i don't think Mega was "trying" very hard.
| devrand wrote:
| Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
| kube-system wrote:
| YouTube didn't bribe congress. They built significant tooling
| that gave the rights holders what they wanted, even beyond what
| the law required them to.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y...
| .
|
| To this day, rights-holders don't even have to take legal
| action or issue a formal DMCA takedown to have videos taken
| down or siphon off the profits of those who use their content.
| It is even automated.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Google has had a massive lobbying effort for a long time, and
| donating to Congress is a part of it. If not for it, how is
| it that a takedown process wasn't sufficient for Mega, but it
| is sufficient for Google? How is it that the rights-holders
| didn't engage Mega into having such tooling?
| devrand wrote:
| I suggest you read the indictment for Megaupload (Wikipedia
| summarizes it, but they cite the actual document you can
| view): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload_legal_case#
| Basis_of...
|
| The indictment explicitly answers your questions about why
| Megaupload was different from other file sharing services.
| kube-system wrote:
| Quite simple really. Merely having a takedown process isn't
| enough to comply with the law. It must actually be complied
| with. YouTube went above and beyond in this, not only
| complying with DMCA requests, but not even requiring them.
| Megaupload's takedown process was a sham. Yes, they had a
| page where DMCA requests could be submitted, but actual
| compliance was poor, and intentionally so.
|
| Compliance is a critical part of the DMCA. Once a site
| knows about infringing content, they lose safe harbor
| provisions.
|
| Also, how do you think lobbying Congress would even
| hypothetically help YouTube in court? The DMCA doesn't have
| any different provisions for YouTube than it does for
| Megaupload.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > how do you think lobbying Congress would even
| hypothetically help YouTube in court
|
| With regard to Megaupload, this much is simple. The
| Justice Department can freeze an investigation under
| pressure from Congress. Whether an investigation comes to
| its conclusion or not is strongly under the influence of
| Congress.
| kube-system wrote:
| YouTube was found to be in compliance with DMCA in
| federal court due to Viacom's case years before the DOJ
| bought a case against Megaupload. I don't know why
| YouTube would be worried about DOJ investigating
| something they had case law to support them on.
| sam2426679 wrote:
| This quote from Kim, in the op, indicates the same:
|
| > "[T]he obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided
| to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,
| unsolicited, and what copyright holders were able to remove
| with direct delete access instantly and without question."
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, like many criminal defendants, he always _claimed_ to
| be compliant with the law.
|
| They did have an "Abuse Tool" available. The problem was,
| it was intentionally flawed. It was a sham, intended to
| make it appear like they were compliant, when they were
| not. It didn't remove infringing content. It just removed
| the link. Also, Kim intentionally limited content holders
| in the number of requests they could send. So, pirates
| using the system just created more links to the same
| infringing content.
| Permit wrote:
| > Kim's problem apparently was that he didn't bribe Congress.
|
| Can you elaborate? Is there concrete evidence of this or just a
| general feeling that it must have happened?
| gengwyn wrote:
| I'd hope we could be nuanced enough to differentiate lobbying
| and bribing. "Bribing" is what you do in Russia or Tunisia
| when a cop pulls you over and you slip him $100 to get him
| off your tail. Lobbying, while potentially nefarious, has
| completely non-nefarious uses. Private corporations have a
| right to be involved in the legislative process.
|
| If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric
| cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government
| relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Lobbying and donations are just legalized bribery. As of
| 2024, the Supreme Court even strongly legalized financial
| gifts to government officials. Any distinction is morally
| tenuous.
| briandear wrote:
| > If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric
| cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government
| relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
|
| The problem with that is the lobbyist has a voice
| proportional to the money spent by the lobbyist's client.
| If, for example, I wanted to ban electric cars, I wouldn't
| even be able to get an appointment anywhere near Capitol
| Hill. Or if I did, nobody would listen. Just a pat on the
| head and perhaps some gallery passes to watch the
| legislature. If 1,000,000 of us across the US wanted that,
| we wouldn't get on Capitol Hill either. But if a car
| company or $special_interest_lobby wants a meeting -- they
| get it because those people are contributing millions to
| campaigns and PACs. Lobbyists even write many bills for
| congressmen.
|
| If there was consideration on a federal ban for electric
| cars (or whatever,) then Tesla and the other car companies
| can write a letter to their congressman and have it ignored
| like the rest of us. And if they don't like it, then they
| can vote like the rest of us. They can even run
| advertisements trying to convince people to agree with
| them.
|
| Money and lobbyists should not be able to amplify the
| importance of a particular viewpoint.
|
| Paid lobbying should be illegal. It's one half step away
| from outright bribery. The other side of that coin is the
| administrative state official who makes rules favorable to
| a particular company, then "retire" from public service to
| take a highly paid, "consultant" role at the very company
| they helped. Or in Pharma especially, the so-called "Iron
| Triangle" --
| https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3519281-is-there-
| an-i...
|
| https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the_return_of_the
| _...
| janderland wrote:
| This is a place where "intention" matters to the courts. A lot
| of these laws require the platform to make a "best effort" at
| preventing illegal uploads. YT is making an effort and claiming
| it's their best.
| bArray wrote:
| It is rumoured (by locals) that Kim Dotcom has been allowed to
| reside in New Zealand (being a German/Finish) on the basis that
| he spent his money in New Zealand. I don't think they are in a
| rush to extradite him to the US, and the US will not come after
| NZ for the money spent.
| moralestapia wrote:
| NZ is not a random atoll island in the Pacific. Kim Dotcom is
| wealthy, but still way far, _way far_ from having enough money
| to bribe the whole country like that.
|
| Orders of magnitude are a thing.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| NZ also has no shortage of rich people with apocalypse houses
| there
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| How is that a rumour? That's _literally_ how the Investment 1
| and 2 resident visa worked before 2022 when they finally
| scrapped the program. You invest at least NZD $750,000 in
| growth investments. Given that that 's 450k USD, and kim
| dotcom's net value was quite a few million, that was barely an
| inconvenience. Then he just needed to spend the majority of his
| time in NZ to qualify for citizenship.
| Asooka wrote:
| It only took twelve years, but the heroes working at the FBI are
| finally on the cusp of ending online piracy!
| foresto wrote:
| Friendly reminder to all of us that copying is not stealing
| (neither in the dictionary sense nor in the legal sense) and that
| loaded language like that hinders objective discussion.
| slashtab wrote:
| Meanwhile nothing for mega corporation pirating data to train AI.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| It's not pirating. It's transformative and fair use. Derivative
| even in some cases. Each piece of content is but a grain of
| sand on an island.
|
| It's called the open internet.
| trueismywork wrote:
| Training is not pirating, but generating copyrighted data is.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| If generating copyrighted data pirating, then so is being
| served literal images that are shared across the internet.
|
| Should a corporation be able to sue you for simply sharing
| an image of Micky?
| mjhay wrote:
| There's a difference between a fair-use reproduction of
| Mickey and reproducing an image of Mickey that you claim
| is your own original creation (or there was until the
| copyright ran out recently).
| bredren wrote:
| Key here would be transformation rather than reproduction?
|
| Youtube is mentioned in the 2013 brief:
|
| >b. According to the YouTube "Terms of Service," users who
| upload content to YouTube retain all of their ownership
| rights in their content. By uploading their content to
| YouTube, however, such users grant YouTube a license to use,
| reproduce, and distribute such content. >
|
| >c. In general, the further reproduction and distribution of
| videos that are taken from the Youtube.com platform violates
| the copyright of the individual who uploaded that video to
| Youtube.com.
| chgs wrote:
| I my country making a copy of copyrighted works is illegal
| unless you have permission from the copyright holder.
|
| It's impossible to use a copyrighted work to train without
| making a copy of it.
| mhh__ wrote:
| So how do browser caches work then?
| SideQuark wrote:
| Solely making a copy isn't copyright infringement,
| otherwise your ISP, your browser cache, the CDNs providing
| data caching on the internet, your screen, your router, and
| about a million other components in the stream would need a
| license for each piece of data.
|
| Infringing copyright requires far more than this.
|
| And if the output is transformative, then they can read
| whatever public facing information they can find, just as
| you can.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Much like Napster, his only real crime was success. If nobody or
| barely anyone used Megaupload, he wouldn't have been in as much
| trouble.
|
| He paved the way for streaming and digital distribution of media.
| Megavideo in particular had the highest encoding rates possible
| at the time, even superior to YouTube.
| skullone wrote:
| Except, he paid people for, and promoted the upload of
| copywrited works. He knowingly participated and basically
| tailored his products to pirating. Some people love him, but he
| will see his day in court apparently, but no one wants to even
| deal with him because he's gone crazy.
| hinkley wrote:
| We had a friend who threw amazing parties because he had this
| sort of transgressive sense of humor. He got rich, retired
| young, and I fully believe that the professional peer
| pressure was the main thing keeping his screws tight because
| he just fell apart over three years. At one point he was
| telling my spouse he was trying to make himself crazy.
| Congratulations bud, you already are. Sane people don't do
| that.
|
| Predatory people took advantage of his behavior and
| generosity, and by thirty he was involuntarily committed, his
| mother given power of attorney. My spouse was the person
| feeding his mom the information she needed to see to
| intervene. All he had left was the equity in his condo and
| $50k.
|
| I'm not sure I believed the deranged millionaire trope until
| I met this guy. And I watch my younger friends and
| acquaintances for signs of mania that masquerade as out of
| box or transgressive thinking.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| How did your friend get rich, and how did people take
| advantage of him?
| hinkley wrote:
| Massive mooches, and a "situationship" with a woman who
| wasn't quite his girlfriend.
|
| Microsoft millionaire.
| petre wrote:
| Sure, pirating means comandeering of a ship, not distribtion
| of copyrighted works.
|
| He probably has a plan in a nearby Pacific jurisdiction like
| Vanuatu. Best of luck!
| LastTrain wrote:
| The language we humans use in casual conversation is a lot
| more fluid than that, you need to be able to deal with it.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Not when the language is used to accuse someone of a
| crime. He is no pirate, obviously.
|
| > He knowingly participated and basically tailored his
| products to pirating
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Nor is piracy, in the literal sense, the crime he is
| accused of. So I'm not sure what you're up in arms about.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| Source for "he's gone crazy"? Curious about the degree of
| crazy, since he seemed pretty out there from the start.
| sva_ wrote:
| Looking at his Twitter, he peddles a bunch of conspiracy
| theories.
| kube-system wrote:
| YouTube is way more successful than Megaupload or Napster. The
| difference is that YouTube went above and beyond to comply with
| the law and Megaupload and Napster didn't.
| londons_explore wrote:
| With the right third party search engines, you can find
| almost any full movie on YouTube.
|
| They don't have to stop pirates, just keep them in the
| shadows.
| Ringz wrote:
| Which search engines are these? I ask for a friend who is
| doing research in this area.
| spookie wrote:
| Google with search operators wield more results than one
| expects. Theoritically speaking, of course.
| kube-system wrote:
| The DMCA doesn't give anyone a score based on how many
| movies they have, or don't have. What is relevant is that
| YouTube provides tools that comply with the DMCA.
| treflop wrote:
| As someone who used to run an illegal video index, this is
| not true at all.
|
| YouTube had virtually zero enforcement. You could upload
| whole shows and movies and they were never taken down.
|
| Other sites like Google Video or Vimeo did go above and
| beyond to comply and they lost badly.
|
| YouTube started getting heat at some point and that's only
| when they started enforcing, but by then, they already won.
| kube-system wrote:
| They didn't, but then they did, to the satisfaction of the
| Viacom case. Napster and Megaupload never built the tools
| to comply to the degree that YouTube did. Maybe if they
| had, they would still exist.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Moral of the story- ignore the law for as long as you can
| and comply hard enough when you have to. It helps to have
| zirp levels of investment too.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think the other issue is that, if Megaupload and
| Napster actually complied hard, they wouldn't have many
| content or users left. YouTube may have had pirated
| content, but it also had enough original content to stand
| on its own.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > YouTube went above and beyond to comply with the law
|
| History just gets rewritten daily.
|
| They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all.
| What's more, Google Video never had any organic participation
| (i.e. normal people uploading videos of themselves), and was
| almost exclusively pirated content. Its main differentiation
| (long forgotten in the age of youtube-dl) was actually how
| easy it was to download that content compared to Youtube, who
| made it annoying. Eventually Google realized that they still
| weren't going to attract the pirates/copyright violators that
| section 230 allowed them to use as a proxy (piracy still
| preferred Youtube because people were on youtube), so they
| bought it.
|
| Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material, and
| the source of lots of pirated files still being traded is
| directly from youtube. Eventually they started aggressively
| scanning things for copyrighted music (because they wanted to
| make deals with the music industry), and then started
| preemptively responding to any DMCA claim by suspending the
| video so as not to look like hypocrites while they were going
| after music; section 230 implies a lot of helplessness for
| platforms in the face of users that removing audio tracks
| from videos where people were singing copyrighted songs
| doesn't bear.
|
| They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content in
| general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before. Now
| they wanted to push exclusive, expensively-produced content,
| and since producers didn't have any other online outlet, they
| were going to monopolize that, too. They didn't _need_ the
| pirated content anymore.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content
| in general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before
|
| That's a rewriting of history.
|
| Google/YouTube started cracking down after Viacom
| International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc was reopened after
| appeals court ruled in Viacom's favor to listen to it's
| appeal in 2012 [1].
|
| Google did develop ContentID as part of Google's damage
| control [0] when the case was in district court (2007-09)
| but half assed enforcement until the ruling in 2012 re-
| opened litigation, which forced Google's settlement with
| Viacom in 2014 [2].
|
| People seem to forget that the Viacom litigation was an
| existential crisis for Google/YouTube, as the appeals court
| ruling could open the floodgates to litigation, and
| competitors ranging from Microsoft to CBS to the MPAA all
| supported Viacom [3]
|
| [0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114
|
| [1] - https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytime
| s.com/2...
|
| [2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-
| lawsuit-idU...
|
| [3] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-
| news/via...
| kube-system wrote:
| > History just gets rewritten daily.
|
| > They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all.
|
| ContentID has existed for all but 2 years of YouTube's
| entire existence. It was initially released _less than a
| year_ after Google 's purchase.
|
| > Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material
|
| And if they comply with Safe Harbor, it doesn't actually
| matter.
|
| By comparison, what did Napster and Megaupload do?
|
| Napster did nothing. Their argument was that they didn't
| need to comply at all.
|
| Megaupload publicly pretended to comply, but intentionally
| nerfed their tooling to support non-compliance, and
| internally documented that they weren't complying.
| behringer wrote:
| Went above and beyond for Hollywood, not for compliance. The
| tools are only available to the studios. Everyone else can
| sod off.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Did it? If I go to youtube right now, I will get tons of ads
| selling illegal stuff which Youtube profit from. This is
| against the law but it seems that they don't get bothered by
| the law enforcers.
| kube-system wrote:
| The context of what I was referring to above was DMCA, not
| other things.
|
| But regardless, that isn't true. Adsense _has_ been a
| target of legal action for their illegal content:
|
| https://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settleme
| n...
|
| _And on top of that_ , their ads were ruled this month to
| be an illegal monopoly:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-
| antitru...
| okl wrote:
| > his only real crime was success
|
| Nonsense. He has a criminal history going back to the early
| nineties.
| damagednoob wrote:
| > If nobody or barely anyone used Megaupload, he wouldn't have
| been in as much trouble.
|
| In a world where opportunity costs exist, as they do for law
| enforcement, this makes sense?
| kypro wrote:
| > his only real crime was success.
|
| Success even when obtained with some illegality is fine so long
| as it plays well with the interests of elites. Kim didn't just
| break the law, he also painted himself a target by upsetting
| people with power.
|
| For all of his flaws, I think where I'd give someone like SBF a
| significant amount of credit is that he understood very well
| that if he wanted to do dodgy things he had to remain on the
| right side of those in power.
|
| Kim hasn't played the game right. Had he tried to win friends
| from the start he may not be in the situation he's in now.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Which of course simply confirms that current elites are just
| sanctioned criminals that no one dares to challenge.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "If nobody or barely anyone used Megaupload, he wouldn't
| have been in as much trouble"_
|
| And if Captain Kidd hadn't managed to raid any ships, he would
| have avoided the whole unfortunate hanging business. It goes
| without saying that unsuccessful criminals mostly don't get
| caught.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Which kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
|
| I expect different treatment for Pablo Escobar / Chapo level
| drug dealers vs a guy who gave some of his weed to a buddy of
| his for some cash and later bought a pizza with it.
|
| They are both technically drug dealers, just one a bit more
| successful than the other.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's been 12 years.
|
| I wish the 6th amendment meant more.
| aestetix wrote:
| I wonder if people have forgotten the legal grounds on which the
| US claimed jurisdiction. I may be misremembering, but I think it
| was because megaupload.com was registered as a .COM, and the .COM
| top level domain is owned by Verisign, an American company, and
| therefore the US has jurisdiction over it.
|
| I guess one lesson from this is that running out of .COM domain
| names is not a bad thing, because it reduces the grip the
| American empire has on the internet.
| bn-l wrote:
| That tracks with the fact that they use a .nz now.
| floam wrote:
| As long as he's calling himself Dotcom, he is explicitly
| property of Verisign.
| janmo wrote:
| His mistake was to host content in the US.
|
| "Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged
| pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va.,
| which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment
| said." - Jun 25, 2012
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/internet-file-sharing-giant-...
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Wouldn't his mistake have been hosting pirated content?
| junon wrote:
| Legally speaking, depends on the country.
| yunohn wrote:
| Actually curious, in which country is what he did fully
| legal?
| recursive wrote:
| > As of December 2019, Eritrea, Marshall Islands, Nauru,
| Palau, San Marino, and WTO Observer countries Iran, Iraq,
| Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan are not a party to any
| copyright convention.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internat
| ion...
| mfkp wrote:
| Good luck finding a stable datacenter to host servers in
| those countries...
| debatem1 wrote:
| Seems like a business opportunity
| connicpu wrote:
| Somehow I think it may not be the easiest to make money
| in the piracy business.
| chgs wrote:
| The problem isn't the data centre, it's the peering with
| networks in other countries.
| mfkp wrote:
| Probably nowhere, as many countries are fine with
| piracy/copyright violations until you start profiting
| from it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/b6rpzx/
| here_are_som...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> hosting pirated content?
|
| If you run a service that allows people to upload data, you
| are hosting pirated content. The DMCA was specifically
| designed to address this, to create a system whereby those
| who host data are not on the hook for every violation. The
| issue is not that you host pirated content but whether you
| are following all the rules necessary to enjoy safe harbor
| protection.
| slg wrote:
| If you look into the case, this wasn't a situation in
| which they accidentally hosted pirated content as a
| byproduct of hosting legitimate content. There are
| records of internal communication of the business
| discussing how to encourage piracy on the platform. This
| wasn't early Youtube turning a blind eye to piracy with
| plausible deniability. This was a business consciously
| and intentionally using piracy as a growth strategy.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Piracy as a growth strategy was very common at the time.
| Everyone, including Youtube, was just rushing to stay on
| top long enough to translate piracy into money sufficient
| to keep the lawyers away a few days longer.
|
| >> Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006.
| But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer,
| enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had
| said he lost, according to court documents. [..] In a
| July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to
| "steal it!" in an apparent reference to an unidentified
| video clip, according to the court documents. After
| Hurley asked if he wanted to steal movies, Chen replied,
| "haha ya. Or something."
|
| >> Google had its own copyright reservations about
| YouTube before it struck a deal. Internal documents
| obtained by Viacom quote Google executives describing
| YouTube as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft" and
| warning the site "is completely sustained by pirated
| content."
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/youtube-viacom-spat-gets-
| dir...
| slg wrote:
| "Plausible deniability" was the key phrase in my original
| comment. A one off person abusing the system (before the
| Google purchase) or Google executives recognizing that
| "[Youtube] is completely sustained by pirated content."
| is not the same thing as having corporate policies
| designed to encourage piracy like Megaupload did.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > I may be misremembering, but I think it was because
| megaupload.com was registered as a .COM, and the .COM top level
| domain is owned by Verisign, an American company, and therefore
| the US has jurisdiction over it.
|
| You are definitely misremembering and spreading FUD backed by
| your biases.
|
| He was hosting illegal material on servers geolocated inside
| the US. I'm sure if someone were producing and distributing
| illegal material (let's use the extreme example: child
| pornography, for instance) on NZ servers and networks, NZers
| would want to see them extradited.
|
| It has nothing to do with "imperialism".
| aestetix wrote:
| Was he hosting illegal material, or simply creating a
| platform where such material could be held? If you post child
| porn on Facebook, I assume you would get sent to jail, not
| Mark Zuckerberg. It seems that Kim Dotcom is in a similar
| position.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Facebook wasn't created with the primary intention of
| hosting illicit material (Kim Dotcom actively made
| statements along those lines) _and_ doesn 't facilitate +
| protect the hosting of such materials. You can be damn sure
| that if Facebook refused removal requests for copyrighted
| videos, that they (and Zuckerberg) would be in hot water.
|
| You can try to pettyfog the case and move goalposts all you
| like, each time one of your points/misunderstandings is
| debunked, however it's pretty clear what he was doing. And,
| more importantly to the original point, the
| laws/extradition would apply similarly to any nations with
| the same IP laws; "empire" or not.
| aestetix wrote:
| I'm not trying to move goalposts, I was simply looking
| for clarification.
|
| A couple points.
|
| First, wasn't there a huge issue where the data centers
| had money problems because the FBI (or some agency) was
| forcing them to retain all the data, as they didn't
| actually know for sure what was there? Or am I wrong and
| they had a list of specific files hosted on specific
| servers and were able to use that to demonstrate
| wrongdoing? Just because I _say_ I 'm going to hack the
| Gibson, doesn't mean I actually do it.
|
| Second, there is a real jurisdiction issue here. Kim
| Dotcom is a German citizen based in New Zealand. The
| servers themselves are (or were) hosted in the US. Did
| Kim Dotcom _himself_ upload anything to them? I can
| absolutely see the case for shutting down servers that
| might contain illegal data. I don 't see the case for
| extraditing someone to the US for allegedly breaking a
| law that applies neither to his country of origin nor
| residence.
|
| Also, I'm not sure why you're being so angry with me, I'm
| just looking at the facts. I do have a bias, but I'm not
| moving any goalposts, just making sure we discuss the
| actual issues at hand.
| dotandgtfo wrote:
| If we remove the digital aspect of it. What do you think
| the US would do if Kim let anonymous people send him DVDs
| and albums over snailmail and he would burn and mail them
| to anyone who requested it?
|
| Personally I find safe harbour arguments very weak when
| the service provider allows anonymous sharing.
| fluoridation wrote:
| If you want to make a proper analogy, it would be more
| like living in NZ and owning a store in the US that
| receives DVDs and blindly mails out burnt copies as
| requested.
|
| But we don't need to wonder what the US would do in such
| a scenario, since we already know. What's being discussed
| is not that the Internet being in the way somehow changes
| things, but that countries shouldn't be able to override
| jurisdictions like this. If other countries had balls,
| the most the US could do is ask for a person to be tried
| in the country they were in when the event in question
| happened, under that country's laws. What, the US now has
| jurisdiction over every living person? Anyone can be
| accused and tried in the US despite never having set foot
| there?
| deaddodo wrote:
| > What, the US now has jurisdiction over every living
| person? Anyone can be accused and tried in the US despite
| never having set foot there?
|
| If they choose to operate in/through that country, yes.
| If he never illegally hosted anything on a server within
| US jurisdiction, they would never have an argument.
|
| Your entire argument is akin to "oh, I hired someone to
| kill a guy in the Germany, but I'm in China so...too
| bad". They only care because someone was killed (pirated
| material was hosted) in Germany, breaking Germany's laws.
|
| You're delusional if you think other countries wouldn't
| make the same claims. And it's on the recipient country
| to agree or not. Plenty of countries deny extradition to
| the US all the time, just look at Roman Polanski.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Your entire argument is akin to "oh, I hired someone to
| kill a guy in the Germany, but I'm in China so...too
| bad". They only care because someone was killed (pirated
| material was hosted) in Germany, breaking Germany's laws.
|
| What would normally happen in that case is that one
| country would present evidence to the other country,
| which would then prosecute under its own laws and court
| system, since hiring assassins is illegal everywhere.
| You're the one who's delusional if you think countries
| have free reign to impose their laws on people who are
| not physically there. It's called sovereignty. What NZ is
| doing here is saying that it's the US's bitch.
| pembrook wrote:
| It doesn't really matter because, as the dominant world power
| and arbiter of the world's currency, the US can invent legal
| grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone.
|
| The US government is so powerful, they are the only country
| that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen
| or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they
| permanently leave the country. The US treasury will withhold
| the ability to transact in US Dollars from any country that
| does not report the holdings of US-adjacent persons every
| single year.
|
| If you think you're out of reach of a country that treats
| _their own citizens_ as criminals by default the minute they
| leave the country, I have some swamp land in Florida to sell
| you.
| throwadobe wrote:
| > enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen
| or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they
| permanently leave.
|
| That's not quite true. If you _return_ your green card
| ("abandon it"), you no longer have to pay taxes. This makes
| sense as a parallel to being a US citizen, who would pay
| taxes even if they lived abroad.
|
| I'm not saying it's right, but we need to be accurate.
| Aspos wrote:
| Even those who officially abandoned their green cards are
| subject to FATCA for life and often struggle to open bank
| accounts abroad.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| That's false. FATCA only applies to American _taxpayers_
| like U.S. businesses[1], citizens, greencard holders, and
| other residents [2]. It does not apply to nonresident
| illegal aliens, former citizens, or nonresident former
| greencard holders.
|
| [1] In this context, including foreign businesses that
| file a U.S. tax return. [2] Note that for FATCA purposes,
| if a person is a US taxpayer for any portion of the year,
| they are subject to FATCA compliance purposes for that
| tax year no matter how much of that year was actually
| spent as a US taxpayer. However, if they are not a US
| taxpayer at the end of the year, they would not be
| subject to FATCA compliance for the following year.
| afh1 wrote:
| >The US government is so powerful [...] can invent legal
| grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone
|
| Sounds like what a totalitarian king would do.
|
| "In vain they change from a single person to a few. These few
| have the passions of the one; and they unite to strengthen
| themselves, and to secure the gratification of their lawless
| passions at the expense of the general good. In vain do we
| fly to the many. The case is worse; their passions are less
| under the government of reason, they are augmented by the
| contagion, and defended against all attacks by their
| multitude." - Edmund Burke, 1756.
| umvi wrote:
| USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you really
| don't want to pay. That comes with a lot of downsides though
| (no more US passport, no getting rescued by the US if you
| wander into North Korea, etc), which implies the taxes aren't
| for nothing just because you live out-of-country.
| ghnws wrote:
| Pretty far fetched benefits
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| > USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you
| really don't want to pay. That comes with a lot of
| downsides though (no more US passport, no getting rescued
| by the US if you wander into North Korea, etc), which
| implies the taxes aren't for nothing just because you live
| out-of-country.
|
| The USA can, and does, tax non-citizens. Many countries tax
| non-citizens. Go out and buy a foreign stock-they will tax
| you on earnings or dividends. Go visit a country and pay
| the local sales tax.
| achierius wrote:
| What he meant was that the USA can't levy income tax on
| non-citizens living in other countries.
| pembrook wrote:
| You may be surprised to learn the huge role that US
| federal reserve policy plays in messing with the fortunes
| of many countries around the world.
|
| It's quite easy to argue that handing over such power to
| a single government is in fact a large tax on every non-
| US citizen.
| glenngillen wrote:
| If I don't complete my FACTA compliance forms with my
| _Australian_ bank every 2-3 years to (re)confirm that I
| am an Australian, living in Australia, using my
| Australian bank account then my bank will withhold
| certain amounts to cover my supposed obligations to the
| IRS.
|
| Sure smells a lot like levying tax on non-citizens living
| in other countries.
| thesz wrote:
| Ask Tinkov [1] about revoking citizenship.
|
| [1] https://www.expatriationattorneys.com/tinkov-conceal-
| foreign...
| devnullbrain wrote:
| > Revoke citizenship if you really don't want to pay.
|
| N.B.: you have to pay to revoke citizenship.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Dodging taxes is not a valid reason to renounce citizenship
| in the US of A and having renounced citizenship for of "tax
| reasons" is a question on the standard ESTA form. If you
| check "yes", you can't enter the US.
|
| So, legally speaking, you not only lose citizenship but
| also the right to ever step foot on American soil again, no
| matter which other citizenship you gain.
|
| Of course, you can just lie about your reasons on the
| forms.
| pgraf wrote:
| > The US government is so powerful, they are the only country
| that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any
| citizen or person who has ever held a US green card [...]
|
| While it may be true that they are the only ones able to do
| it effectively, there are some other countries with
| citizenship-based taxation. According to Wikipedia[0] these
| currently are: Hungary, Eritrea, Myanmar and Tajikistan
|
| Some other countries have similar policies for tax heavens.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Cit
| izen...
| pembrook wrote:
| There's not a bank on earth (that isn't headquarted in said
| countries) that is voluntarily sharing information with
| Eritrea, Myanmar, etc.
|
| I'm going to venture a wild guess: it may not be that
| difficult to hide assets from the short arms of the
| Tajikistani tax office.
|
| So I don't think it's crazy to assume Americans are the
| only ones suffering under this policy in practice.
| laurensr wrote:
| And then there is FATCA and CRS : when opening a bank account
| for my non-profit I had to answer 15 pages of questions
| related to me, other directors and the non-profit itself. I'm
| a non-US citizen outside of the US.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| The craziest thing about Kim is that he held the FIRST PLACE in
| competitive Call of Duty at some point while running the company.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| I always thought that was impressive, and he was a good player
| but I remember him admitting st some point that he was paying
| people to play on his account which is what kept it at no. 1.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| He is probably going to blame this on Ukraine
| tim333 wrote:
| Kim says "Oops Don't worry I have a plan"
| https://x.com/KimDotcom/status/1823993237931221340
| Tarucho wrote:
| Who backed him?
| heyaco wrote:
| about time. delayed justice is an injustice. making millions via
| copyright infringement has a price; prison.
| chgs wrote:
| In which case why isn't he in a New Zealand prison after being
| found guilty by a jury of his peers in New Zealand?
| nottommo wrote:
| Probably Kim Dotcom has done wrong, but I don't think he deserves
| to go to court and or prison in a country he has never resided
| in.
| sergiogjr wrote:
| I'm not sure that can be applied consistently. Would you say
| the same about heads of drug cartels or human trafficking rings
| (not equating these to Kim, as I'm sure you understand)?
| harperlee wrote:
| I think you should build your argument a little bit more.
|
| I'd say, why not say that also for drug cartels? The only
| reasonable argument that comes to my mind is that some big
| cartel head might have local government influence, but that
| does not apply to Kim and New Zealand, right?
|
| Another possible argument would be that the damage has been
| done elsewhere. But in the case of the dtug cartel, if there
| are victims in 20 countries that why would any third party
| have priority for enforcing their law?
| bamboozled wrote:
| When is the last time the head of pretty much any drug cartel
| was extradited to the USA?
| drcode wrote:
| A couple months ago: https://www.justice.gov/usao-
| sdny/pr/sinaloa-cartel-leader-n...
| maccard wrote:
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/lead-defendant-long-
| running-d... maybe not head, but 3 weeks ago.
|
| There's a bunch of these people extradited all the time.
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