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Comment by bproper | Hacker News Reader

I see. But the company was based in Hong Kong and the founders in New Zealand. Dutch, German and Slovakians citizens were arrested.

So as long as there are some operations based in U.S., they can get to all these folks?

MegaUpload was cited a number of times during the Judiciary Committee Hearing. But they mispoke more often than not.

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> I see. But the company was based in Hong Kong and the founders in New Zealand. Dutch, German and Slovakians citizens were arrested.

If the allegations in the indictment are true, then MegaUpload was likely violating the law in those countries to.

Contrary to widespread belief, the US is not the only country with copyright laws that criminalize commercial piracy.

Yes, if they have operations in the US they can be prosecuted, I believe. What's even worse for Megaupload in this case is that they had started legal proceedings themselves in the US. If they can use the US law, they have to abide them.

So if my operations based in another country infringe US laws, they can get me and bring me there to be judged ? What do we call that when North Korea does that again ? Kidnapping.

If every website suddenly has to obey the laws of every country, it will be an interesting time.

Please, lets be reasonable here. You're drawing a gigantic false equivalency between the extradition process based on international agreements, and the North Koreans black-bagging someone.

If every website suddenly has to obey the laws of every country

The DMCA was the US implementation of two international treaties.

" You're drawing a gigantic false equivalency between the extradition process based on international agreements, and the North Koreans black-bagging someone."

I'm sure those kidnapped will be glad to hear this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition

Not really a new or particularly controversial legal construct. The host country can refuse to extradite if they disagree with the charges.

"So as long as there are some operations based in U.S., they can get to all these folks?"

If there are extradition agreements, sure.

The US had jurisdiction since MU rented about 500 (?) servers in Virginia. If all of their servers were outside the US, they couldn't have done much about it.

I don't think that's true. If we are talking about SOPA here, it wouldn't matter where the servers were. They were using a US based TLD MegaUpload.com and therefore their domain could be "erased". If they didn't have a domain address, then they could look at where the servers were.

Meaning: If they were MegaUpload.ch, they would have needed to SOPA to take the domain down. But they still would not have been able to seize the servers and arrest the operators.

tl;dr: Relating this to SOPA is a bit of a stretch.

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