United States sells Wu-Tang album forfeited by Martin Shkreli | Hacker News Reader

United States sells Wu-Tang album forfeited by Martin Shkreli

justice.gov

120 pointsuptown109 comments

I remember learning about this album because it was the request with the highest bounty on What.CD: https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/5abmpz/martin_shk...

R.I.P. What.CD. :'(

FWIW... It still is the album with the highest bounty on redacted

I gave up on private trackers after what.cd died. Has redacted surpassed what.cd?

Sadly not, although it’s doing as well as could be expected given the reduced interest in torrents that streaming has brought. There will always be certain things like rare scene rips that are unlikely to ever be resurrected.

Same, for music at least. Spotify/Apple Music provides anything I could want. But my tastes were never niche to begin with.

I miss What and Oink. I didn't even bother finding out what the next incarnation was and trying to get an invite, I just gave up and got Spotify. There's still tons of good music that I only ever found on those trackers. The quality of recommendations was also peerless.

Have any of the successors rebuilt that?

There’s RED: https://interviewfor.red/

My gosh. I've just been reading the interview requirements. I need to study spectral analysis, amongst other things. Then sit through a "1-2 hour" interview. To take the interview I MUST be on my home network, I must have my VPN etc. disabled. I must use a laptop/PC, not a mobile device. Can't use CLI for IRC. Other requirements as well.

I've never seen anything like this. I understand that raising the bar to entry is good for a community. What ever happened to having a seedbox and provable good ratios elsewhere.

Is the community/content exceptional?

> I've just been reading the interview requirements. I need to study spectral analysis, amongst other things. Then sit through a "1-2 hour" interview. To take the interview I MUST be on my home network, I must have my VPN etc. disabled. I must use a laptop/PC, not a mobile device. Can't use CLI for IRC. Other requirements as well.

The content was probably taken wholesale from the original What.CD interview. I think What.CD wanted to ensure that people uploading new content (a core part of a private tracker) were able to distinguish obvious FLAC>MP3>FLAC conversions, since most lossy codecs have a lowpass filter which would be quite obvious with spectral analysis.

Turning off VPN etc is probably to allow the tracker to fingerprint you, and make sure that rule-breakers aren't blatantly attempting to register for a new account.

> Is the community/content exceptional?

I think many people treated What.CD's interview and progression as a stepping stone into other private trackers, since their invite forums (available once you upload enough content) were exceptional.

What's successors (RED and Orpheus) are carrying on in the same fashion.

I had a similar reaction. Even though I have some familiarity with the required topics I really didn't like the look of the interview. It seems like getting invited skips all that, but I don't know anyone in that world any more. To be fair there must be a barrier to entry, and having it very high should be good for community quality.

Might be easier to try to find an acquaintance with invites though.

>Might be easier to try to find an acquaintance with invites though

I wish that was the case; we all moved on to streaming services. Now though I want to return and backup everything I've paid for over the decades, as well as hunt down some rarities.

Also Orpheus, which IMO has a better usage/retention policy, awarding bonus points (which can be used to purchase freeleech tokens) for one's seeding torrents: https://interview.orpheus.network/

I love how the government dug through the guy's entire life just to find something they could nab him on and straight up destroyed him. That's some G stuff!

It'd be great if the government more regularly caught, prosecuted, and convicted people at this level of criminality. Otherwise the entire society collapses under the weight of abject corruption, because prosecution is a selective enforcement tool used at the whim of corrupt politicians, rather than an automatic mechanism that operates independently.

He was prosecuted because his ego meant he alienated the fuck out of everybody, including what should have been his allies.

If he'd been just a bit less outspoken theyd probably have left him alone.

Same reason Lance Armstrong eventually went down.

Interesting i didnt realize that.

Yep, corruption sucks.

Not everyone, he managed to romance a reported in the turmoil.

I have a strange opinion that it should be a lot easier to send people to jail and that more people should spend time in jail for real crimes. Ex. First time DWI - straight to jail. None of this "I'm rich and important" or "it's only my first time".

But also that jail time should be short and absolutely not destroy lives. This whole "lottery" thing that jail has become is completely absurd. One person who does zero jail time for a crime while another person has their life destroyed for the same crime.

If we start apply punishment equally without any question then maybe we can get some laws changed.

How about sending fewer people to jail instead, like every other country in the world?

There is no automatic mechanism that operates independently. The prosecution, defense and judiciary are not GPT-3 robots that can mine through centuries of case law in 2 seconds to achieve a perfectly balanced decision.

If you want regular prosecution of white-collar crimes, you may want to support better funding for these agencies, so they can actually put resources behind investigating and trying cases where criminality occurs.

The issue isn't funding, it's structurally dysfunctional organizations. But that's a much harder problem to solve than blaming lack of funding. I was involved with a certain tax collection agency's project that was a never-ending trainwreck that spent decades complaining about being underfunded. When they finally got the 10s of millions of dollars they said they needed, they used it to hire and train college grads RPG (a programming language, if you haven't heard of it) along with how to operate mainframes and other systems that haven't been touched since the 80s. Fast forward a couple years, and every single one of the dozen hires had either quit or moved onto something more glamorous. But meanwhile the maintenance burden had just doubled because of all the new systems written in RPG on a mainframes which they can't retain people on.

I think most of the government agencies problems has nothing to do with their budget, but how they run themselves.

I wonder which countries do a better job with managing technical debt, both in digital and bureaucratic systems.

How much research and experimentation is being done in those areas?

> automatic mechanism that operates independently

Yes, but I think this is more metaphorical than literal. Of course there aren't literal automatic robots doing the work of rooting out corruption; it's a goal.

I would argue that a high-functioning justice system should appear as close to automatic as possible, in order to most effectively create a sense of "if I do wrong, I know that I will be punished" rather than "if I do wrong, I need to figure out how to get around the law."

Should or would aside, it's not an automatic system. Even if it were, the trials themselves would be adjudicated by federal district court judges, who are political appointees. If you've ever watched a Senate judiciary hearing, the questions posed to the candidate are often ideological in nature rather than legal.

I probably seem pedantic, but I think it's important to reiterate the scale of human involvement and imperfection underpinning the entire system in which we exist. The solution to that is not "take the humans out of it", but to iterate that system with incremental improvements and fund it to the level commensurate with its importance to our society.

> If you've ever watched a Senate judiciary hearing, the questions posed to the candidate are often ideological in nature rather than legal.

It hasn't always been this way [1]. There have been controversial candidates at times throughout history, but most candidates got supermajority votes. In modern times, things are incredibly, abnormally polarized.

[1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/SupremeCourtN...

>"you may want to support better funding for these agencies, so they can actually put resources behind investigating and trying cases where criminality occurs. "

I don't think people realize just how much of law and regulatory enforcement is dependent on "who knows who" in the white collar world. A lot of investigations are discretionary and it is surprisingly easy for prosecutors to simply not address something. Would more funding help? I'm sure it would have some impact. But if Martin Shkreli was a big time political donor I suspect things would have turned out differently.

The point is that it should behave like an automatic mechanism. This is a metaphor for reducing bias as much as possible.

The official story was that this was unrelated to the drug price hike controversy. But it makes me wonder if the outcome would had been different had he not gotten all that negative attention in the first place.

Lol, don't wonder too hard. This is a pattern with the feds. If you go out of your way to piss off the public and be a flippant asshole to Congress, you're gonna have a hard time. Long before they announced any charges, I had a conversation with my dad about how the feds were likely to cook something up on this guy.

> cook something up on this guy.

It was PONZI scheme. The only one who did the "cooking" was Shkreli himself.

I don't disagree, but it is my opinion that the nature of financial regulation in the US means that if you own any significant amount of wealth, you reach a level of complexity where you are probably at least unwittingly guilty of a misdemeanor or felony, and few would withstand FBI scrutiny with agents motivated to find something to prosecute you with.

Specifically, I think the law is sufficiently complex that it does allow for a significant degree of arbitrary enforcement.

Maybe, but this isn't one of those cases. This wasn't inadvertent or negligent, this was straight up deliberate fraud.

As much as this guy may deserve it, I don't think we should be celebrating the idea that if the government has an axe to grind with you, they'll find a way to destroy your life.

Oh, does this mean that you're anti-death penalty? White collar crime can exact costs on society close to a Bundy or Gacy type level. Too bad we don't have the death penalty for Corporate crime. Think of what opioids and Purdue Pharma have done to the U.S.

Can one not be simultaneously repulsed and mesmerized by the government's ability to murk somebody that they don't like?!

This is one reason why government should be as small and do as little as possible.

Or have checks and balances.

I’m convinced they did this just to get their hands on the Wu Tang album. The Ol dirty bastards in Washington have always been true fans.

It's not like it's easier to seize digital assets such as stocks in a brokerage portfolio.

Speaking of which, I guess he's completely broke that they bothered to go after this?

He’s going to get out. Do an excel course on Udemy and be back on the road to being a millionaire in no time.

If what you say is true, the Shaolin and the Wu-Tang could be dangerous.

If you're running a Ponzi scheme, it's best to not draw the government's attention to yourself lest they realize what you're up to.

To be fair, the only reason he got pinched was because he ripped off some very wealthy and powerful investors/partners in a ponzi scheme.

The execrable stunt where he jacked-up the price of a rarely used but life-saving drug from $13/tablet to $750/tablet-- that was perfectly legal.

> To be fair, the only reason he got pinched was because he ripped off some very wealthy and powerful investors/partners in a ponzi scheme.

And barely even that. He lost/used their money and then paid it back before they even noticed. While it was wrong, as far as I can make out it was basically a victimless crime.

Meanwhile, it seems like price gouging medication people need to stay alive is still perfectly legal in the US. They scapegoated this little twerp to distract from the fact that the system is still badly corrupted and the politicians changed nothing of importance after this.

The injustice in the Martin Shkreli case isn't that he got prosecuted, it's that so many others did not.

It's disturbing that Skreli openly committed massive financial fraud and you're more concerned about the government doing its job.

Skreli's investors didn't sue him because they profited from the fraud. It's the downstream investors who were harmed here, and they can sue Skreli...and the investors who profited from his fraudulent investments.

The only thing Shkreli is guilty of is risk laundering. Nobody was defrauded. Everyone got paid. He made a huge (relatively stupid) bet that could have hurt a lot of people, but he lucked out and was able to make everyone whole. Actually, a lot of his "victims" made a lot of money.

> 4. How much did investors lose?

> Nothing. Shkreli partly repaid them with Retrophin stock and several witnesses told the jury they ended up with multimillion-dollar profits. One invested $1.25 million in Shkreli’s hedge fund, got $1.6 million back and 150,000 Retrophin shares, currently worth about $2.9 million. Another said she ended up with a $2.7 million profit from a $300,000 initial investment.

https://fortune.com/2017/08/05/why-martin-shkreli-is-guilty-...

People did lose money: most of the investors were out of money for years after the fraud, suffering actual economic harm, and even then were only partially made whole by Skreli giving out shares of his other company, which materially diluted that company's other shareholders. It was a sheer matter of luck that the other company's stock increased in value enough that some of the victims made profits, years after the original fraud.

From a legal perspective, it's irrelevant that on a long-enough time frame the victims ultimately ended up better off. That would be like saying that an attempted murder is a victimless crime if the hospital discovers that the victim has a fatal but removable brain cancer while treating their wounds from the assault.

He committed pretty egregious financial crimes. They didn't have to "dig" far.

People do understand that most people aren't hiding major felonies or securities fraud, right? Most of us aren't evading taxes. We aren't running ponzi schemes. We aren't defrauding lenders. You can scrutinize the situation of the vast majority of people and come up with nothing beyond maybe a tag taken off a mattress (har).

Somehow in the (post) Trump era we have loads of people who really, truly believe it is some sort of injustice when people get scrutiny for the crimes they are actually committing.

It's surprisingly easy to commit a federal offense: https://twitter.com/CrimeADay

There's always a logical fallacy in this sort of argument-

a) There are loads of extremely specific laws for various very specific problems. e.g. Taking obsidian from an obsidian flow federal park, for instance.

b) Ergo everyone commits crimes!. We're all criminals, they just selectively choose what to enforce!

b) doesn't follow at all. The vast majority of people will never even be in a situation where it was possible to commit the overwhelming bulk of laws on the book. And that never would regardless.

FWIW, criminals think everyone is a criminal. Tax evaders think it's just normal. Thieves think everyone steals. Etc.

>"Ergo everyone commits crimes!. We're all criminals, they just selectively choose what to enforce!"

I highly recommend watching "Don't Talk to the Police", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE for a different perspective of where the GP is coming from. While it is true the vast majority of the US Code is something that simply won't apply to you (like the obsidian example), there are plenty of laws on the books that are vague and subject to abuse by a motivated prosecutor. One such example is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a massive topic in-and-of-itself.

>FWIW, criminals think everyone is a criminal. Tax evaders think it's just normal. Thieves think everyone steals. Etc...

...and law abiding folk think they never break the law.

Ever lent someone money at 0% interest? Did you report it on your taxes? If not, you may technically be guilty of tax evasion.

Ever binned someone else's junk mail? Welcome to mail tampering.

There is a big difference between the law as written and the law as enforced. I guarantee you, if you go looking hard enough, there are some downright stupid laws on the books.

Hell look at mask laws! It was a huge controversy in some places last year because minorities in jurisdictions with historical anti-face covering statutes we're damned if they did, damned if they didn't.

Look at San Fran. The DA won't prosecute shoplifters, yet people walk out stores without paying under the statutory threshold. You going to try to say that the law makes even a lick of sense when you get degenerate circumstances?

Or are you going to take refuge in "Well, only the laws that matter?" If we go down that road it only gets worse.

How about... Mmmm. Jaywalking? Loitering? Noise violations that never got reported? Driving overweight vehicles down a road designed with weight capacity 1 ton less? Using an aerosol not perfectly in accordance with the instructions? Test driven an vehicle you didn't have registered on a public road? Improperly disposed of medication? Thrown a lithium ion battery in the garbage? Travelled with something in a trailer that qualifies as hazmat without getting a placard? Speeding? Had livestock escape, damage something, with no real dramatic outcome? Still infractions. Even if charges aren't pressed.

"Look at San Fran. The DA won't prosecute shoplifters, yet people walk out stores without paying under the statutory threshold. You going to try to say that the law makes even a lick of sense when you get degenerate circumstances?"

Let's just focus on this nugget-

-the DA made no such claim

-the threshold in San Francisco is actually LOWER than Texas. So much was made about that when people were truly clueless about what they claimed

-in reality there are almost no prosecutions because the activist police force simply doesn't bother responding

Police nationwide tend to be pretty far to the right (see the NYPD having a barely above 40% vaccination level right now as a good benchmark of that, which as an aside vaccination should absolutely be a requirement for their job), and they like to intentionally do a really shit job if it achieves their talking points.

The guys rushing into stores and filling garbage bags? Yup, the police should be arresting them. That they don't has nothing to do with the DA.

Do people who make ad hominem comments on the internet think that everyone makes ad hominem comments on the internet?

Not only was my comment in no way an ad hominem, it's pretty ironic that you attempt one to denigrate.

Responding to "it's surprisingly easy to commit a federal offense" with "FWIW, criminals think everyone is a criminal" can be reasonably interpreted as an ad hominem. If that's not what you meant, what did you mean by that comment?

It's a general comment relating to the general discussion of how law-breaking a peoples are. Maybe don't take every comment personally?

What makes you think I took it personally? I was just making a general comment about how people who make ad hominem comments on the internet are.

I wouldn't say it's post-Trump. Online discussion boards have long been home to armchair contrarianism. I will say that these days it's couched in "devil's advocate" and alarmist "your freedom is at stake!" type language.

Or, in this case, temporarily embarrassed hedge fund managers that do not wish to have such a fate befall them.

Yes, our federal government does act like gangsters. So awesome!

another way of looking at it is, by successfully prosecuting "The Pharma Bro" and making a big deal out of it, now trust in pharmaceutical megacorporations is higher than ever. not a fan of Shkreli but dude was kind of a fall guy for the rest of his industry.

30 something percent of the people in the united states' are convinced that the pharma companies are trying to kill them.

Which is obviously wrong, the only thing pharma companies want is for you to be sick with an incurable, but treatable illness.

Never threaten a Clinton (I anticipate downvotes.. and they'll be reinforcing my position that they're off-limits)

I, like many people, downvote anything that says something of the nature "I anticipate downvotes", lest you think I downvoted for political reasons

I think "I anticipate downvotes" is fine. "If you downvote me I will lean harder into my position" is basically blackmail (admittedly lame and ineffective blackmail), which is why I downvoted it.

I'm a little more strict, and draw the line at pretty much any extraneous assertion that your audience is going to disagree with you. E.g. "Controversial opinion: ...", "The HN crowd will downvote me, but ...", etc. It's an unnecessary injection of negativity, pettily frames one's self as the underdog, and provokes by implying that the people you're addressing are wrong before they've even replied to you. Obviously the internet is largely not a place to give crowds the benefit of the doubt, but it's critical for places with a shred of the expectation of real discussion, like HN.

Indeed. It's the purest form of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

What's more likely - Chelsea's hacker news goon squad is here to brigade you, or nobody is interested in reheated Rush Limbaugh mid 90s slop?

Are you aware of the drama between Shkreli and Hillary that I was referring to?

The fact of a thing doesn't imply causality, and if causality is evident in this case, it still doesn't provide a license for glib sarcasm.

Do you believe glib sarcasm should require a license?

Only in the United Kingdom.

This is getting downvotes, but it is true Shkreli got his bail revoked for offering $5000 for every strand of hair collected from HRC.

If putting a bounty to harass a person is not a crime it absolutely should be IMHO

The day he started that he should be put in jail regardless of being on bail

>"offering $5000 for every strand of hair collected from HRC"

Am I alone in seeing this as an act of a sophomoric troll rather than an actual bounty put on someone?

First, I think it can be both, and second, it's important to be careful around the common fallacious defense for shitty people where the implication is that they should not be judged or experience certain ramifications (legal or social) because "it's all just trolling", "for the luls", "you can't take what he/she says seriously", "it's your fault for getting offended", etc. There are certainly arguments to be made one way or the other in these cases, but one standout damning feature that's common to a lot of them (including this one) is that of public reception. If you encourage something, all that matters is how likely and severe the consequences of that are, regardless of whether you were "just trolling". If you're a famous and wealthy person with a cult of personality and a politically divided following (or even if you just hit a couple of those notes), it's your responsibility to not offer people thousands of dollars to get hair from your enemies, even under the (conveniently subjective) guise of sarcasm/joking.

I wouldn't disagree with the former interpretation, but publicly offering thousands of dollars for something carries a real risk somebody will take you up on the offer.

It's strange because I think if the same $5000/hair offering were made for an average person it would be much more serious. But in my mind someone who is so prominent and guarded by the Secret Service is in virtually no danger from such an outlandish thing. But I do understand how someone would see it the other way and not be comfortable with the risk at all.

For how many years?

Certainly less than thirty billion

I think there are people whose jobs are to determine the appropriate punishment for criminal actions. They might be able to give you a tighter upper bound

You use the word "but", which implies some kind of inverse relationship between your clauses, but I don't see anything to indicate that.

So if your comment were heavily upvoted you would've reconsidered your position? Or will any outcome whatsoever just reinforce your existing ideas?

What are my existing ideas?

Your post was, "Never threaten a Clinton (I anticipate downvotes.. and they'll be reinforcing my position that they're off-limits)". Your position, AKA existing ideas, are "Never threaten a Clinton", and "they're off-limits", implying that they have special and unfair power/treatment in the political and legal world, but specifically with regards to the specific outcome of the specific case of Shkreli. The parent's criticism was in regards to your attitude on downvotes, which makes sense independent of whether your position is justified or true.

"The contract of sale contains a confidentiality provision that protects information relating to the buyer and price." Wow that sucks, would have been quite interesting to know how the government found a buyer and how much it was sold for.

It's probably some crypto loon who will turn around and make it an NFT

and then 'sell' it for $70 million and no $ will change hands

What would be the justification for making it private anyway? Shouldn't this be transparent?

To prevent the buyer from becoming a target for crime.

If people know who has it, they might try to extort him or worse.

I don’t see any reason the information needs to be public.

That would turn off a lot of buyers because it would bring undue attention. Buyers may not know the exact origin of stuff they're buying. A car for instance could formerly have belonged to a person you might not want to run into. A public record of that purchase however would make it a possible target not just for the original owner, but also any rivals he/she may have.

Well the notoriety of buying it didn't exactly help Shkreli's situation much, did it? If you want wealthy people to take an interest in buying it, it seems sensible.

Presumably because shrekli purchased it under those conditions. He can't sell you the right to state the price because he doesn't own it.

Was this sold in a fair auction? How much was it sold for?

The memo says

> his payment of the forfeiture is now complete

for the 7.4m owed, so was it sold for more? Or was it the first buyer to show up with that amount?

> The contract of sale contains a confidentiality provision that protects information relating to the buyer and price.

Yeah, but how can the US government just sell it to an arbitrary seller? Was it auctioned off?

"Asset Recovery Section" nice way of saying vultures, but sympathy for someone raising the price medication is rarer than NFTs of Mr. Shkreli's mugshots.

If they could just issue a bunch of NFT's to the album, they could make out more by selling the NFT's.

Someone should crowdfund the purchase and dump it to flac on piratebay. I got 5 on it...

This now has to be the most gangster rap album of all time!

Now that is really unfortunate. I'm sure everyone on HN would have liked the opportunity to bid for the album.

This is the ultimate story line for this album. I, for one, am happy with this outcome.

Cache Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.)

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