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Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They actually reprimanded employees if they actually took something down for real.

Go find the court papers for the indictment. They include a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other top executives that show how the place actually worked.

mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal.

I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotcom allegedly/apparently made.

Do you remember when Dotcom was pushing Russian propaganda? He (along with Assange) said he had evidence that it was Seth Rich and not the GRU that gave the emails to Wikileaks. Of course, he never released that evidence.

This is part of a counterintelligence investigation.

Why were Dotcom, Assange, Bannon, Manafort, etc carrying water for the GRU? I don’t know, but having an unrelated tax/copyright/fraud charge might get them to talk, or it might not.

This seems like a "conspiracy theory".

Which part? Dotcom claimed personal knowledge that Seth Rich gave the hacked emails to Wikileaks? Here he’s saying it [1]. That Assange did the same? Here he is alluding to it[2]. Mueller and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Report said Seth Rich has nothing to do with it[3]. Or do you think the Seth Rich conspiracy didn’t come from the Russian state? Here’s a story pointing out that it came from the Russian SVR[4]. So now we are left with the question, why would Dotcom claim personal knowledge of a Russian State created conspiracy theory that provided cover for the Assange and the GRU? He sounds like a person of interest to me.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQgID8pZVw

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-report-julian-assange-...

[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11/740608323/the-origins-of-the-...

As sibling comment indicates, someone like Dotcom will say anything at any time. He's kind of like CIA in that respect. I love the link to the M5M sock saying Trump has no chance in 2016, barely two months before he is widely believed to have won. Why is the name "Seth Rich" mostly brought up by "believe-the-dominant-narrative" cheerleaders? Are you guys feeling guilty about something? Why not just obey his parents' wishes? It's impossible to know for sure, but it's most likely that what you'd prefer to call a "hack" was actually a leak by someone other than Rich. [0]

NPR are run by John Lansing, previously responsible for external propaganda as head of "USAGM". Now he handles internal propaganda. It's funny to read that very detailed report, full of all sorts of picturesque details with no sources about those three hours in the dark. Oh wait, Deborah Sines had to go OTR to CYA her cold case. That was worth picking this scab, in 2019.

Liberal Democrats (as differentiated from actual progressives) don't have imaginations, so they assume any widely-held belief must come from somewhere specific. If it's a belief they don't like, they have to blame a nefarious source. People connected to the Clintons have been dropping like flies for decades. When Epstein died, the most commonly-searched phrase was "Clinton body count", even though Trump had "partied" with him too. (Trump can't hire assassins because they insist on being paid in full.) Nobody had to be told by Russians to blame HRC for the death of someone on her campaign. When coupled with embarrassing public leaks of DNC shenanigans, lots of people independently decided that Rich might have been connected. It's best to ignore Rich and pay attention to who says what, and how that relates to facts actually in evidence. (e.g. DKIM-verified emails.)

[0] https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...

Dotcom's troubles pre-date anything involving him with Wikileaks. He relocated to Hong Kong in 2003 (and again to New Zealand in 2009) precisely to shield himself from European and American prosecution, as he was starting Megaupload. He's been in the crosshair of copyright police ever since. Trying to "shake him down" by using charges he was clearly expecting for a decade, would be a pretty silly strategy.

As for anything he says or does, it should all be taken with a massive grain of salt. The facts, even before Mega, show him a lier, a narcissist, and a huge self-promoter. He's fundamentally just a scoundrel with no real ideological background beyond "anything that makes me money should not be illegal". Taking his word at face value is chasing shadows.

You're absolutely right that these two things can be true at once. I commend you for your level-headed evaluation and I wish there were more comments like yours.

>Go find the court papers for the indictment.

No i dont think i will. onus probandi, you'll need to cite your sources if you want anyone to take this seriously im afraid.

Dotcom was raided in new zealand with a guns out swat style team of tactical commandos and helicopters for what amounted to a civil court issue in his own county. his servers were illegally seized, his assets frozen, and then he was railroaded to the US and told to defend himself penniless despite overwhelming domestic controversy which inevitably led to political fallout for leaders in new zealand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom

He cited a source, he cited the court documents...

> "if you want anyone to take this seriously"

I hope I'm not the only one finding irony in the total lack of punctuation and capitalization in here

> and then he was railroaded to the US

I agree that the treatment of Dotcom by the US is, essentially, legalized international extortion and the NZ government should have put a stop on it a long time ago... but he is still in NZ.

The full story, not without irony, is that the mansion Dotcom was renting was then purchased by a family whose entire business fortune evolved from the facilitating the mass production of plastic children's toys based on US movie IP.

> Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company

Can you claim that against any file storage and sharing company that won't look into the content to detect possible copyright violations?

The MPAA is no better.

> The cases are more properly pursued in civil court ... that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs

I don’t think it is possible to defer the moral and ethical question about the activities of these groups. Copyright holders have tried the civil option and it does not work. It is too expensive to pursue casual pirates, and too difficult to identify hardcore pirates without the investigative powers of a law enforcement agency. If you’re not okay with the criminal investigation, then I think you need to be okay with these piracy groups continuing to exist, rather than offering the civil courts as a moderate alternative.

Perhaps that should be taken as a sign that MPAA and RIAA are overstepping acceptable behaviour and should back off

... rather than abusing international laws intended for serious infractions

The rest of the world should say "did they shoot innocent civilians in a foreign country? ... no, oh well then we'll put it at the bottom of the pile and get back to it when you , the USA, have cleaned house on REAL criminal activity."

Just how screwed up does "justice" have to be to put corporate profits derived from rentseeking on digital goods over war crimes ... ?

I’m not disagreeing in principle, but there are criminal statutes on the books put there by Congress for copyright infringement, and it is the Federal government’s job to enforce these laws.

I don't think New Zealand has a "Congress"?

You're not trying to say USA has the right to make laws in other countries are you?

I mean I know USA does this, but it seems indefensible?

The US (like every other country) negotiates agreements with other countries to handle crimes committed against persons or entities in their jurisdiction.

This is nothing new or unique.

According to the article, court documents list victims and crimes occurring in New York and New Jersey. Supposedly this group misled distributors there into giving them copies of movies which had not been released.

mrandish’s comment had three paragraphs, but I was mainly responding to the part of it that was concerned with US law, not the Kim Dotcom fiasco. New Zealand does however have a criminal statute on their books for copyright infringement for commercial gain, and an extradition treaty with the United States.

If your concerns are the activities of the American Federal government, you take that up with the US Congress for writing the law. If your concerns are the activities of the New Zealand government, then take that up with the New Zealand Parliament; but today’s news largely concerned a Trans-Atlantic multi-country operation and an indictment filed in the US Southern District of New York in which the acting authority is the United States, not New Zealand.

How about similar aggression towards arresting and pursuing the people doing ransomware.

There was a big story a few months ago about the feds going after international phone scammer rings with a bunch of arrests. Also a big Nigerian scammer ring last year. They also include indictments of people mostly overseas.

> Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers.

Copy that. I never pirate and I hardly ever spend money on media.

I think you should be cautious about extending today’s pattern about piracy (ie they are already high consumers) to a scenario where piracy was easy and safe for distributors.

The piracy wac-a-mole game makes piracy somewhat difficult for an average person.

If it were as easy and safe as Netflix then everyone would pirate, and it would have a major impact on the entertainment industry.

I imagine piracy enforcement is done to keep it in check, not prevent it from happening at all.

> frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers.

aka those customers have money (and the MPAA and RIAA want to bleed them dry).

is alleged to have caused “tens of millions of dollars” in losses

In short, a typical day for an investment banker. Odd how one is legal and the other one gets you an international secret police task force.

These are criminal cases. If you owned a software company and someone broke into your git repo and started selling your software as their own, would you want the police to be involved?

It’s not the same. It’s like you shipped your software to people and someone took the copy you sold them and gave to it someone else.

...while keeping a copy for themselves. And then reselling that copy over and over.

It’s not the same; It’s profiting off someone else’s work.

But it is not breaking and entering.

It’s still a criminal offense.

Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.

That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions, and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.

And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.

Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong.

To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication.

Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of objective reality including conflating a granted monopoly with physical property. There is a difference even if illustrations would have to be rather fantastic. If merpeople or aliens from Alpha Centuari were making copies of our goods they would not even be violating our laws because they wouldn't be party to any treaty with them and out of our jurisdiction. Not so with literal theft where a freight captain would be justified using force in self defense against sea people/aliens.

You're twisting the argument. Pirates aren't copying content in a sealed room, they are distributing it to people for free. If you kept making copies of Harry Potter and gave it to anyone for free, it's not delusional to argue that JK Rowling would be far poorer than she is now. Harry Potter is an exceptionally popular product so the reduced revenue may still be enough for JK Rowling, but less popular and more niche content may not work out well enough for their content creators.

And the content industry is massive, revenue wise, which explains why the government is expending such large resources to protect its interests.