Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
reuters.com
reuters.com
"U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material."
Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start from the presumption that if the movie wasn't uploaded on megaupload, some person would have bought tickets to that film ? Is that the underlying premise?
I mean as a consumer I could either buy the movie, or watch an illegal upload of it. Isn't that a false dichotomy?. I could just as well not watch it, if that illegal upload didn't exist, and as such I would not have costed the company one cent.
We saw the same thing with music downloads, the assumption that every one represented the loss of a full priced album purchase or whatever.
It is, and it's been pointed out from the dawn of computer piracy. But the world runs on greed, not on logic.
He used the same premise when he wrote the comedy sci-fi book Year Zero, the story of naive aliens accidentally pirating all of Earths music and the legal consequences thereof, i.e. owning the citizens of Earth literally all the money in the universe leading to the ruination of their delightfully hedonistic utopia. A quick and hilarious read.
<--- encoding subspace transmission --->
<--- encoding failed --->
<--- Begin message contents --->
From: Infiltrator 72a9
To: Glop Flirbstekker
Glorp, stop downloading that Earth music immediately. They've figured out a loophole in Protocol 3 that could make the Level 7 event on Stlafft look like a Level 2! I don't care how much you like Roy Orbison. Stop immediately!
<--- End message contents --->
Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in making you think that is illegal, so please don't spread FUD :)
1) airbnb users illegally converting rooms into short term rentals 2) amazon helping people avoid sales tax 3) uber lyft allowing drivers to drive taxis without a taxi license
As much as states don't want you to think about it, the Constitutional issues were settled back in the 1800s. If you do business with a company from another state, that is interstate commerce and only the Federal government can make laws about it. So, very importantly, your state government can't.
However if the company and customer exist in the state, then state law can apply to both. So companies have to track and apply state sales tax only for states where they have a physical presence.
After that it is all down to what it means for a company to exist in a state. For example if Amazon owns a subsidiary named A2Z Development which is doing software development in California for Amazon, does Amazon have a presence in California?
That's because this leads to incredibly absurd conclusions, such as Amazon 'not doing business' in a state, despite selling billions of dollars worth of merchandise to it. I don't understand how people can claim this to be the case, with a straight face.
In fact, I would daresay say that Amazon.com selling things to residents of Montana means that it has a presence in the state, for the purposes of that transaction, moreso then it does for having an Montana office that employs 8 people who code for AWS.
It's called having a nexus - even a single employee counts as having nexus. I'm not sure about subsidiaries though.
I do not know of precedent involving subsidiaries. But the legal case for it would seem to me to be stronger than it is for affiliates. And even if the courts did rule otherwise, well, if the state really wants to go after a local subsidiary, surely they can make their life hard in SOME way...
According to California law AB153, affiliates count as a nexus. This did not get legislated. Amazon responded by cutting off all California affiliates after that was passed. Then the issue of subsidiaries was raised. After some negotiation, California did not go after subsidiaries like A2Z Development, and Amazon started collecting California state tax in 2012.
You mean two consenting adults agreeing for a price to exchange a service such as a room or a ride in a car?
Completely different than stealing the production of a movie company and giving it to others for free. Hotels don’t own Airbnb rooms and taxi companies don’t own Uber cars which means they only derive their right to a oligopoly via regulation— regulation that historically is as the result of mobsters or other similarly situated constituencies attempting to create artificial barriers to entry.
Why do people like you seem to love the nanny state? Why do taxis need “regulating?” Why can’t grown ups decide who they want to ride with? Why can’t owners of properties rent to people? How is renting to someone any different than having non-paid houseguests? On a practical level, it isn’t. If the concern is increased traffic in residential areas, then why aren’t houseguests regulated? If the concern is security, then why aren’t residents and owners required to undergo background screenings as a condition of buying property?
America is supposed to be about freedom, but it more closely resembles some totalitarian regulatory wet dream.
Taxi regulation is just a money grab. Health and safety is a ridiculous argument. Me driving my neighbor to the doctor is zero different than me driving a stranger to the post office.
“Hacker News..” LOL. Seems instead more like a bunch of old spinsters lamenting the failure of the temperance movement whilst clutching pearls over those youngsters playing jazz records and dancing the Lindy Hop without appropriate chaperones.
Dammit, we should be encouraging the pushing of limits, of testing boundaries and kicking dents in the status quo. We damned sure ought not be actually defending the status quo. Disrupt!
Do you mean two consenting adults copying some files?
If you don't mind ignoring laws around taxis, etc. why a special case for copyright?
So, using Megaupload is completely legal in Poland as long as you don't download software, just operating it and uploading to it isn't.
Don't worry USA you can continue on browsing ;)
It was specially ironic when I was a teenager with a music band, we recorded some CDs of our own music. We were paying extra for the CDs in case we were pirating, so this money went to the SGAE and the like for artists while we were of course the artists who had to pay more! Talk about abuse of power.
Digital media is interesting, as when you receive a copy of it on a physical medium, it is basically unusable unless you make a copy of it (i.e., putting the disk in a computer and copying the contents to computer memory). So to enable people to actually use that copyrighted digital work, the copyright holder grants an end user the right to load (copy) the digital work into computer memory (via the shrink-wrapped license agreement) for the purpose of executing / watching / reading it. And of course typically things like computer programs are installed (copied) onto a computer's storage device, which the license also typically grants permission to do.
Now it could be written into copyright law that if the normal method of using a work is to copy it into working memory, or load it into storage on a computer, that the law would explicitly allow that (or, as an alternative, the courts could allow that via "fair use" doctrine). But instead, the law, courts, and copyright holders are perfectly fine with this ambiguous grey area so that they can reserve a number of rights via the shrink-wrap software license.
You need to make a copy of a book on the back of your Retna to read it, however nobody calls that copying.
It's easy to argue that playing a DVD is not actually copping the DVD as at no point does a DVD player copy the full DVD. Without a durable copy it's no more copping than the back of your Retna.
So, making an image of a DVD isn't illegal, but sending that image to someone that doesn't own a license is. But, ripping that disk to mp4 is illegal if any form of protection is in place, no matter how weak.
Of course, ripping to mp4 and then sending it to someone is double illegal, which makes it legal. I should mention now that IANAL.
There are laws about digital resale though; there was an EU ruling that indicated reselling digital-only products is legal.
"the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
This is how Thomas-Rasset was at one time convicted to pay almost $2M for having shared 24 songs on Kazaa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...
Note, though, that she had to work really hard to get damages that high. As noted in your quote, statutory damages fall in a range. She probably would have gotten near the low end of the possible range if she had not tried to destroy evidence, had not perjured herself in court, and had not tried to blame her children for the copyright infringement.
Note also that she could have avoided this by taking the very reasonable settlement offer the RIAA made before they sued her. She was offering for distribution 1702 copyrighted songs, and they asked for $5000. That's under $3/song.
When she refused and they sued, they only sued over 24 songs. Why only 24 instead of all 1702? I haven't seen anything that explains for sure why, but there are a couple plausible reasons.
First, 24 x $750 = $18000. That's enough to get them the $5000 they wanted, plus a little more to cover the expense of having to actually start a lawsuit to get it.
At this point, everyone in her life that is not a colossal moron should have been telling her to take that initial settlement offer, because when she loses in court the absolute minimum she loses is $18000, which is $12000 more than she could settle for.
Second, for each song that is included in the lawsuit there is paperwork to be dealt with. They will have to introduce into evidence proof that all the proper filings were done at the copyright office, and that they represent the copyright owners and have the right to sue. Each and every one of those can be challenged by the defendant. There's just no point if all they want is what they asked for originally ($5000 to cover 1702 songs) plus something for the extra expense of having to go to trial.
Note also that after the first couple of trials, which first led to a $200k award and then the $2 million award, the RIAA again offered a settlement: $25k. She refused.
Eventually more proceedings got it back down to $200k, and again the RIAA offered to settle for a lower amount, if she would make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.
In an adversarial system (in particular most systems that descend from English law), the claimant/plaintiff/prosecutor generally must claim a quantized liability at the start of proceedings, and then justify the quantum of liability. In some cases, some fraction (or even all) of the quantum may be subject to assessment by the court, which can consider the adversarial parties' pleadings and covering law (staute or case) and alter the quantum. In any event, if the defendant is not found liable, it very likely simply does not matter what the quantum of damages in the claim is (although a very high quantum can have an impact on the assessment of costs payable by the unsuccessful claimant in some circumstances, e.g. if a cheaper court cannot lawfully deal with such a large claim, or if there is over-reach in the face of something like an offer under England & Wales's Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) part 36).
The key point here is that the defending party will generally argue that it is not liable in the first place, and if it is liable then the quantum of damages is too high "for the following reasons...". If the court doesn't agree that the defendant is liable at all, then it usually does not deal with the question of damages, even if how they are calculated by the claimant looks a bit suspect. If the claimed damages are overstated in an outrageous way, many courts will take that into account, and that will not benefit the claimant.
In a case like this there likely will be litigation where Dotcom's litigation team will argue that the $500 and/or $175 million figure should be put to strict proof, and/or that it is unreasonably high (pointing to similar cases, for example). On the other hand, depending on the NZ court's rule on disclosure or discovery of evidence, that may expose them to having their books examined (at some cost) by the U.S. authorities.
> Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period.
No; one may have a license from the copyright holder to distribute the material in question, there may be statutory license, or there may be defences against infringement claims in case law. Remember: there is copyright in everything that is produced from scratch by a human being in practically every jurisdiction in the world. I have copyright in this reply to you. You have copyright in the message I'm replying to. The sentence I quote above is a poor basis for you to raise a claim of copyright infringement since there is an implicit licensing, plausibly a mandatory licensing under HN TOS (since they necessarily made a copy and distributed one of those copies for me to read), a variety of defences based on concepts related to the U.S. doctrine of fair use, and local statute. You are free to liberally quote from this message in reply, and may do so entirely lawfully.
It would be easy enough to presume that everyone is always spending their entire entertainment budget, and a dearth of funds for legal purchases may be why they are obtaining illegal copies. By this reasoning, the damage done due to piracy is always zero. But that's just as clearly bunk.
Some people pirate so they can spend their money on something else--something they would not have otherwise purchased if they were compelled to spend money on the information copy they might have preferred. Thus the media company is damaged because someone spent money on something else they didn't strictly need. Even by this argument, the damages would have to be capped by calculating the total discretionary income of all illegal copyholders and summing them. IP addresses assigned to an ISP serving US residential customers could likely be associated with a number for the median discretionary household income in that census tract.
You can't reasonably say that a homeless person who illegally copied 80 GB of music files from a public library computer is costing the music industry $80 million in lost sales. That person has negative discretionary income. They wouldn't ordinarily buy music until after paying for food, utilities, and rent. You might be able to argue that having already copied the music, they won't buy it when they finally do have the money to do so, but that's not strictly true. A lot of pirates do "settle up", so to speak, for the works they enjoyed most when they finally do get some extra money, by buying things legally when they previously copied them illegally.
So the sky-high plaintiff's calculations involve a lot of assumptions and shortcuts, and a competent defense would surely be able to cut them down to more reasonable, if still practically unrecoverable, numbers. But the court has no need to review those arguments unless the defendant is found liable in some way. Perhaps examination could be triggered even without finding of liability if there were also a counterclaim that the mere magnitude of the accusation constitutes defamation? I am not a lawyer, so I wouldn't know.
A downloader who has made lots and lots of downloads where the claimant has particularized the downloads and properly shown copyright in each them, might also escape with a low offer to settle, since the claimant still faces uncertainties if the defendant puts up a reasonable defence.
Instead, it is easier to aim for an uploader who has uploaded virtually uncountably many copies of a work. Statutory damages are often available in copyright law because if many many many copies are made of a work, it is hard to arrive at an exact quantum of damages, and few people want the courts to be burdened with assessing liability for each and every copy. Instead, statute often gives a "bulk" per-work figure which applies no matter how many copies are made, subject to conditions.
Faced with defending a claim in which one is alleged to be a serial uploader of many many copies of a work, there is no recourse via the type of argument you make. Sure, individual downloads (that one has allegedly uploaded) might be excused as non-infringing for logic similar to the argument you made (or more reliably, by an argument based in fair use or an equivalent, or some statutory exception). However, if there are still many downloads not so excused, the full statutory damages might still be sought and granted by the court.
An additional complication here is that the Dotcom matter is cross-jurisdictional and engages multiple aspects of the law. It is possible that the U.S. authorities sought N.Z. legal advice on what money amounts to use in pleadings, but it is equally possible that they have taken figures as they were made in U.S. proceedings, and can only justify them on the basis that they were made by some third party (and presumably should be answered in court by Dotcom, should he appear, which is at least one facet in the extradition action). A large figure also presumably justifies the ongoing costs the U.S. is incurring in trying to secure Dotcom's extradition, and whoever is making decisions in e.g. the State Department is happy with the $500 million figure ("Dotcom's REALLY bad, we should go after him still!"). On the other hand, extraditions for much lower-level criminals are frequently aggressively and expensively pursued by publicly-funded authorities.
> counterclaim ... accusation constitutes defamation
Statements made during the course of judicial proceedings almost always have strongly qualified -- or even absolute -- privilege in the face of defamation claims. It is hard to envisage any situation in which a court filing could be the basis of a successful defamation claim, unless its contents were overwhelmingly unrelated to the matter of the claim itself. A party can allege that the other party is engaged in abuse of process or perjury, however, and leave it up to the trial court to decide the matter. Such an allegation must be accompanied by credible evidence, however, and the remedies tend to be proportional (up to striking out the offending party's claim or defence, with consequent liability for the other party's costs, but almost certainly not beyond that maximum).
If the sky-high claim form by a studio with copyright in, say, A Random Santa Movie were to also state that the defendant in a copyright infringement claim involving that movie also dresses up as Santa in order to abuse children and elves, then the studio could lose a defamation claim, for instance. However, if the allegation is that the defendant is a serial uploader of Santa-themed movies, that would not be actionable even if the claimant fails to prove that even one copy of A Random Santa Movie had ever been uploaded by the defendant.
In the law of England and Wales there are examples such as Seaman v Netherclift (1876) 2 C.P.D. 53. (excerpts: http://swarb.co.uk/seaman-v-netherclift-1876/ ) and, for comparison, Munster v Lamb (1883) 11 Q.B.D. 568. (excerpts: http://swarb.co.uk/munster-v-lamb-ca-1883/ ). There is other case law covering such matters, however, and the Defamation Act may be engaged in some phases of proceedings. Generally, however, using a court of law to make a deliberately malicious statement with the intent to harm a person's reputation is far from good practice, but probably won't incur outright liability if it is sufficiently true and germane to the proceedings at hand.
Other jurisdictions will have different rules.
Firstly, presupposing that the plaintiff's claims establish liability on the defendant, I think most people would tend to give more credence to their more subjective and speculative claims of magnitude. There would be a significant incentive to unreasonably overstate those claims, knowing that they will not be examined if you lose, and they will be more believable if you've already won part of the case. Furthermore, they anchor the settlement negotiations and the judgment amount arguments, so you'd want them as high as possible anyway. If there is no meaningful penalty for grossly overstating damages, everyone claims they lost a grillion dollars in lost wages, auto detailing, and quantum torment, then hopes the judge won't reduce it to less than a zillion dollars if the case gets that far. The plaintiff eats the defendant whole, and writes the remainder off as a loss, for their tax filings over the next 30 years.
Surely, there must be some penalty for putting a blatant and notorious ass-pull in your civil filing?
If your intent is to never go to trial no matter what, and a claim would only be examined if you were to win at trial, you could put whatever ridiculous crap you wanted in your initial filing, make careful press releases based upon the accusations, then settle, or continue indefinitely, or dismiss without prejudice. Then the damage would already be done. Certainly the courts don't act on claims that haven't been admitted or established at trial, but everyone else can. Most cases never get that far. What could we be missing if we never examine those claims?
I don't think things are as bad as you think, and certainly not as bad as insufficient access to decent professional advocacy in the first place (due to pitifully underfunded systems of legal aid, poor systems of costs control for pre-trial and even pre-claim phases of litigation, and "gang-up" attacks where a private party pursuing a civil claim "inspires" a public prosecutor to make it difficult for the defendant to deal with that claim (if nothing else by having to split attention and resources with criminal law matters, including extradition)).
> imagine a situation where the damage claims would have to be evaluated even if the defendant won, or a settlement was reached, or the case got dropped
In private law (i.e., not a criminal or hybrid copyright case) this will happen only rarely in common law jurisdictions, and only if the judge suspects that one party or the other has been railroaded into an adverse outcome by sharp practice by the other party, and even then it will generally only happen on application (by a party to a court, including an appellate court).
Generally a settlement is considered a matter of contract between the private parties, and the court won't interfere with that unless it has reason to believe the contract is improper somehow. If there is a true meeting of the minds between the parties, the courts will be extremely reluctant to interfere absent a strong public interest. Likewise, withdrawing from a case is generally considered to be a voluntary action by the withdrawing party, and the courts again will generally avoid preventing that. Consider that in either case the court continuing proceedings will impose costs on all parties for the duration, and that ultimately one or more of the parties will be liable for those costs which would otherwise not have been incurred after the settlement agreement or unilateral withdrawal. That does not seem fair at first glance.
(Even in inquisitorial systems a party tends to have the right -- perhaps with agreement with the other parties -- to bring proceedings to a close earlier.)
> wouldn't that tend to introduce biases
Settlement law is an important area of knowledge for a litigation unit, and knowledge being power and settlements (in private law cases) being private agreements, it is unsurprising that the answer to that is "we don't really know because we don't have a full history to examine". Pitching a settlement figure vs the money value of a claim thus remains something of a dark art. Worse, since so few cases come to trial in places where the civil procedures encourage settlements, it is often hard for parties to guess whether their outcomes will be better or worse in accepting an offer vs proceeding to final judgement. It is even harder for parties to think about without expert advice when (as in the English system) costs follow the event. (I.e., when "loser pays", there is pressure on a party to think about how much that will be in the event it does not succeed at trial, especially when considering settlement offers early in proceedings.)
> knowing they will not be examined if you lose
That's not always the case. There can be cost consequences on a partially successful claimant, i.e., one who establishes liability but the court determines a much smaller money amount in damages may not be able to recover its costs from the defendant (and in some cases may have to contribute towards some of the defendant's costs!). This will strongly depend on the procedural rules of the trial court, and can vary e.g. between county court and high court in England & Wales almost as much as between an English court and a U.S. district court.
Moreover, there are money value thresholds which can determine the appropriate court, and if a higher value claim results in a more senior court deciding that its time has been wasted by a matter best tried in a more junior court, you can bet that the claimant may face a costs order that may wipe out any damages awarded.
> meaningful penalty for grossly overstating damages
Systems of private law tend to adapt to such things in due course.
(Indeed, if they do not do so on their own then that may provoke a legislature to try to fix things.)
In the U.K., for instance, overstating damages can lead to prosecution for fraud, and since the 2012 Zurich case [1] it is fairly clear that a trial judge is generally free to strike out the whole claim if a party dishonestly exaggerates a claim, the logic being that if a trial judge cannot trust that the claim is honest, then why should the judge trust any of the claimant's evidence.
Finally, if you do not intend to go to trial you should not file a claim! If you file a ridiculous claim for the purposes you suggest, you will find the defendant will quickly engage a no-win-no-fee (or similar) abuse-of-process litigator and it will cost you quite a bit of money to settle that (and even more if you are stupid enough to contest the matter). In general, it is not easy for a claimant to simply drop a claim (once filed) without the consent of the defendant. (As noted above, withdrawing unilaterally is permissible, but likely to be expensive!)
The details vary by jurisdiction, but in general private law courts are aware that there are abusive litigators and will usually try to disincent them very strongly. This fails sometimes in systems where one can "shop" for a judge on e.g. a subject-matter basis and where judges develop reputations as being particularly claimant-friendly. Specific examples, particularly in the U.S. district courts, have been discussed from time to time on HN... :-) However, one cannot hide such apparent failures of the system from appellate courts forever, and eventually unlucky abusive claimants can find their court-of-first-instance victories very expensively reversed or at least reopened.
(Although exceptionally uncommon, serially or outrageously abusive litigators in the UK -- and that includes legal persons who massively overstate damages -- may get added to this list: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants ; many ministries of justice in commonwealth jurisdictions maintain similar lists. The England&Wales list is almost exclusively litigants-in-person, since abusive companies and charities may be wound down).
- --
[1] Hayward v Zurich Insurance Company PLS [2016] UKSC 48 with an overview online here http://www.9goughsquare.co.uk/news/1195/
Should not? When only 1% of civil cases actually do go to trial, and the system is set up to encourage settlement, that sounds like an ethical argument.
There are plenty of lawyers out there that file their lawsuits primarily for the purposes of producing a settlement--patent trolls are an entire named subcategory of these.
There are plenty of litigants out there that never even intend to get to discovery, and you can just forget about the trial.
There are plenty of unethical litigating attorneys out there.
Some legal cultures are much better at weeding them out than others; some legal cultures even cultivate them as if they are valuable to the profession and the society it is embedded in. They aren't. They're caustic, and worse, they occasionally become elected politicians and elected or appointed judges.
Their numbers are pure fiction.
>I would go as far to say that 99% [..]
>Their numbers are pure fiction.
How ironic :)
It's the subjective devaluation in the market of the content. If goods with zero marginal costs tend towards being priced at zero content creators need to raise the marginal cost of their goods to be above zero. With digital goods, the only ways to do that is to attach risk to the act of copying or distributing and increasing the difficulty of finding the content.
Getting back to unauthorized copying of digital media, the cost could be calculated as the net reduction in perceived value of the good as a result of its easy availability.
In hard terms, rampant copying might mean that pricing sweet spot for DVDs or legal streaming is depressed and that reduction then becomes the "cost" of the piracy to creators.
On the other hand and more topical, after receiving a cease and desist letter and claims from a well known law firm I ignored them thinking I never directly payed for TV before and still indirectly do because advertisement is prised into the products I buy on the one hand, and because of bad availabilty I would have to pay a premium for DVDs which is not even in my budget nor my idea of my money's worth, but you might argue that I am just missing the incentive to work for it so there's indirect economic damage, as much as I hate to say that -- just playing devil's advocate. Ironically, if I had to work for it, I wouldn't have the time to binge watch as I did.
My biggest gripe is probably that media players are full of bugs, so it's unhygenic to load from unknown sources ...
I personally think that the case should be dismissed because the legal proceedings went on for so long and were plastered with rights violations - such as illegal surveillance, property prematurely transferred to a foreign country.
It's been a mix of luck, US Government mishandling the case and the tenacity of Kim.
Don't forget the local (NZ) mishandlings.
When does the sentencing or punishment phase start?
There are arguments suggesting that he and his team knew that there was illegally copied content on his servers and they did nothing about it of their own volition. Is there a law that says that if you see something that was uploaded and you don't believe that it's licensed, you are legally obligated to suo moto delete it? Genuine question
He reminds me of an arch villain that you love to hate from some superhero movie... like The Kingpin. We need a superhero to battle him. He has comic book legend written all over him.
It's not like he's some principled crusader fighting for a precedent that affects all of us. He's just some creep who got rich off of deliberately running a site that facilitated piracy, and then managed to dodge the consequences because he is rich. Whoopitee doo.
Don't get me wrong I think the US copyright laws are screwed up and have been manipulated by awful corporations for decades. But his legal troubles don't really have any consequence on that front, things won't be any better because he wins (and won't be worse if he loses.) So I fail to see why anyone thinks it is interesting on any level.
He actually got rich off of the Dot Com bubble years before, which is why he changed his name to Kim Dotcom.
He embodies a lot of the stereotypical hacker image that people have - overweight, hacked the Pentagon+NASA+Citibank before he was old enough to drink in the US, a touch dramatic, etc. It's only natural that he's given a bit of attention.
Not to mention he really didn't break any law - Section 230 made site-owners not responsible for content posted to their site unless they failed to remove it, and MegaUpload complied with DMCA requests all the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/jan/26/internetn...
> He didn’t hack anything
He claims to have, and I'm fairly sure he's convicted of doing so in his home country, but I'm not going to contest it because I'm not incredibly familiar with that part of the issue. I was going off of his Wikipedia page, which as always can be innaccurate.
He initially got rich off of a blatant pump and dump engineered by himself, followed by some Ponzi schemes, and a lot of credit card fraud, most of which he probably wasn't busted for. It wasn't what we typically think of as Dot Com Bubble money, it just happened to take advantage of that investment climate.
Megaupload was the closest thing to legitimate he has done.
Bullllllcrap.
Megaupload, though, was not that. They paid people who uploaded popular content, which was of course mostly other people's property. They they sold ads against it. If you look at the structure of the business and compare it with a a real cloud storage provider, it's pretty obvious they are no Dropbox:
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Virginia_Eastern_District_...
The indictment has a clear claim that Section 230 doesn't apply, as well as a lot of detail. Dotcom was pretty clearly running a criminal conspiracy, and just thought he was clever enough to avoid getting arrested for it. Had he stayed small, he might have managed.
No, he wasn't technically responsible. Sure, his site complied with takedown requests to the extent they were required to and literally not one damn quarter inch further. Technically, technically, technically.
He also profited directly off of and made no secret about enabling people to skirt copyright laws. I agree they need a lot of work, but you don't get to break the law simply because you disagree with it.
The outcome is that this has been strung out in court so long that companies like Google/YouTube far exceed what the law requires in bending over for the MPAA/RIAA mafia, leading to massive amounts of false copyright claims. The precedent set by MegaUpload was “it doesn’t matter if you follow the law, the MAFIAA is so powerful that the US will send men with guns after you no matter what corner of the Earth you reside in.”
When he was raided it was of no surprise to anyone who was paying attention, himself included. People like to paint this up as "this guy was just running his business in full compliance with the law and Big Government came in with their jackbooted thugs and took away his business" but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
He was openly snubbing the Feds and MPAA, he was deliberately allowing and not even making face attempts to dissuede his users from uploading copyrighted material to share, and was quite aware and complicit of the whole thing, and wasn't one damn bit interested in stopping it because it was making him rich.
I'm just saying, if you want a martyr for people who got screwed by our Government because of overstepping authority, Dotcom is far, far, FAR from the best example of that. Dotcom is more a poster child for the old axiom, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
If I was going to write about someone I think is a much more admirable martyr for the insanity of US copyright laws I'd point to Aaron Schwartz, not Kim DotCom. But that's not what this conversation is about, and nothing I said was untrue.
He showed his ass to the feds for YEARS, not even in like a dignified and well articulated way like Snowden, in an open, flagrant "Fuck you and your laws" way.
And frankly, as broken as the US IP laws are, this whole "you can't enforce X country's law in Y country" is BS. In our ultra-connected global economy, especially in terms of tech companies, if you can skirt the laws of a nation by simply moving to another one, then we might as well have Anarchy and skip a few steps.
> you don't get to break the law simply because you disagree with it
I'm having a hard time seeing where complying with the law in full, but refusing to go above and beyond its demands, is supposed to be an inappropriate course of action when you disagree with it.
I personally am not a fan of "why talk about this one example when there are so many other examples" type comments, because it's literally impossible to talk in any depth about the topic generally if we insist on finding the best example first. We'll spend all our time debating which person is the better victim instead of talking about whether our criminal justice system is working properly.
That is a pretty deliberate misreading of my comment. I'm very obviously saying why does his legal process continue to be news, not whether he deserves to have legal proceedings. Nothing even close to that.
It's news because he has the money to bring the blatant abuses made in attempting to prosecute him to light. Instead of vague accusations of prosecutorial caprice, he's got the resources to document and prove how egregiously broken the system has been in handling his case.
When the process can be used as a substitute for the punishment, the system is broken.
> It's not like he's some principled crusader fighting for a precedent that affects all of us.
He very much is fighting for a precedent that affects all of us. And it really seems like you don't think people should stand up for or publicize those principles if the accused is an unsavory individual. Why don't we stand up for more principled people instead? I think we would, if one of them had the resources to bring the injustices into the light. The fact is, it is so incredibly rare that a person both has the resources and is willing to spend them in a fight to reveal these kinds of unscrupulous prosecutions. He would probably be better off right now if he had just rolled over and copped a plea, but we would all be worse off because the authorities wouldn't be held accountable.
UK's record damages were in above GPB 2M
GPB must be the Guadalupe Banana, right? Perhaps they have punitive damages in Guadalupe...
Ordinarily for white collar crime, you'd expect a knock on the door and to be handed a summons, not full terrorism mode. You'd also expect your government to follow its due process, again not denying rights in full terrorism mode.
Oligarchy at work.
A police raid is no laughing matter. People die all the time, so it's fortunate nobody got hurt.
That's putting everyone involved in lethal danger, no matter what country it's in
They make heavy use of helicopters as there’s only one squad covering the entire South Island, and only two covering the North Island.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
Kim Dotcom was taken by the anti-terrorism Special Tactics Group, which is definitely not the Armed Offender Squad. They train with SAS, and are explicitly designed to take on high risk terrorist assaults. I'm asking how often they are deployed, and of course implicitly, whether serving warrants for copyright infringement is in their usual bailiwick.
We don't have a separate military police force in New Zealand.
Edit: Forgot it's yet another echo chamber community.
This dude is a professional troll and you comparing him to Robin Hood means you are falling for his schtick. The most recent example of his trolling is the fact that he has become one of the biggest public supporters of the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was behind the DNC leaks and not Russia.
Morally I want to pay for everything I use. I music production I own a license for everything I use or demo. It is very simple to pirate plugins (Kayne West pirated DeadMau5's Serum plugin) https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/6897291/deadma...
In the past it was impossible to pay for content and the only place it was available was on torrents. It wasn't available and now people just pay for streaming services because it is available. Also it is just easier to use streaming services.