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Comment by aogl | Hacker News Reader

Awarded NZ$60,000 for “loss of dignity and injury to feelings” haha

A police raid is no laughing matter. People die all the time, so it's fortunate nobody got hurt.

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.

Not in New Zealand, they don't. Although Hollywood did put pressure on the NZ government to do a full tactical raid on this guys house.

They broke into the guys house with loaded automatic weapons.

That's putting everyone involved in lethal danger, no matter what country it's in

And Many people who used Megaupload for legit data storage lost all of it after the US raids. Customer data still hasn't been recovered.

NZ cops do carry guns, just typically not on their person. They're locked in the boot of their vehicles. I have seen an NZ officer with their firearm on them and it's weird enough that everyone takes notice; like seeing litter in a mall in Singapore.

How many full tactical anti-terror assaults, including 9 operators deploying from helicopters in assault landings, has NZ done? Besides the raid on Dotcom, that is.

About 1000 per year, and on average they have to kill less than one person per year, despite 1 million guns for 4 million people.

They make heavy use of helicopters as there’s only one squad covering the entire South Island, and only two covering the North Island.

Seriously? They're doing 3 anti-terror assaults every day of the year? Can you point me to some statistics? I had no idea NZ had such a terrorism problem.

More like SWAT than anti-terror, but yes, our police execute 3+ tactical responses per day.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

You are quoting stats on the Armed Offender squads, which are analogous to US SWAT teams.

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.

Yes, serving warrants and raiding gang houses is what the STG normally do in their jobs as Armed Offenders Squad officers. They're the same officers. The equipment is exactly the same. It just means it's the top few officers who get to train with the SAS.

We don't have a separate military police force in New Zealand.

That's not actually what this court case is about. This case was about the government refusing to give Kim Dotcom information they held about him.

Why the laugh? The State caused him injury. Would it be better to leave the injustice alone? Just say sorry? If this were a civil case he'd certainly be awarded monetary damages.

Not op, but I do agree there is something hilariously ironic about that verdict, given the circumstances. In a “haha serves you right” kind of way.

Compared to payouts in other common law jurisdictions, that is, indeed, laughable.

What would a typical payout be?

Add two zeroes. In commom common law, defamation damages are all, but damages: they are a sum of assumed and punitive damages. If accused is a corp., already large punitive damages are scaled to its size.

UK's record damages were in above GPB 2M

Punitive damages are a daft concept and only exist in the USA, I hope.

GPB must be the Guadalupe Banana, right? Perhaps they have punitive damages in Guadalupe...

I reckon $500 million should do it :P

Ironically, this whole case seems to have turned him into a modern day Robin Hood. I'd say this disaster of a situation has done far from cause him loss of dignity and injury to his feelings. I'd say it's cemented a status that many aspire to and very few ever achieve. His personality has been magnified many times more than it ever would have been by this whole debacle. So to be awarded NZ$60K for this is hilarious. Award it to him for "inconvenience to his life" or "defamation", "libel" or "slander" or whatever, but "loss of dignity and injury to feelings" is disingenuous at best. The guy's infamy has reached heroic proportions.

>this whole case seems to have turned him into a modern day Robin Hood.

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.

Um... Robin Hood was a fictional character. The schtick is what makes the legend. Without the schtick, he's just some schmuck that got busted for trafficking illegal copies of files. Don't confuse "being thoroughly amused by" with "falling for."

At the heart of the story Robin Hood is about a good person who was breaking unjust laws to fight for the little guy. Kim Dotcom wants you to think he is breaking unjust laws to fight for the little guy but he is actually doing it for his own personal enrichment either financially or egotistically. That it the distinction I want to make that I think was missing from your initial comment.

I'll grant you that, but it doesn't make it any less hilarious :P

From this distance, I care about actions far more than motivation.

I assume you're laughing because the sum was so small. It should have been at least 100x larger, in the millions.

Why are you being down-voted? What's going on? This case has been going on for years; he has been through hell. How is this a proper reimbursement?

Edit: Forgot it's yet another echo chamber community.

Agreed, but I will admit I chuckled when I read "loss of dignity" and "injury to feelings". They could at least call it emotional damages. I don't think he was laughing at the amount or at Kim but at the legal title of the relief.

Agreed. The time he’s lost through this attrition is criminal. International Government seizure is ridiculous.

New Zealand doesn't do damages like that, that's an American thing

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