Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

The MPAA is no better.

> 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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com