Men who helped run Megaupload sentenced to prison in New Zealand

But good job standing for honest small NZ software businesses! I mean, no way it was done just to protect the interests of those wealthy multinationals right? /s

Disclaimer: actually I do think NZ fares better than many countries on this so let me know if my cynicism is misplaced.

At this point he just gives New Zealand a bad name. With all the propaganda he pushes. So he’s cost every NZ citizen paying taxes in NZ and made the country look bad with his public peddling of propaganda for Putin and the CCP.

This made me think—what if we postulated that companies cannot be victims of a crime. Only physical persons can. So if all you do is harm to a company, it cannot be a crime by definition, the act can only be treated as a company doing harm to another company, and as a company you cannot go to prison

>I don't really separate Megaupload and Mega

As far as I understood Megaupload's business plan was selling "fast" download access to pirated material. I don't care much about piracy, but intentionally making money on it seems somewhat disgusting to me.

I consider Mega a legitimate cloud storage service. Nevermind what I think about the fiunder, I find it to be one of the most privacy minded services, so I support it and wish it well.

Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega. Its loss is a terrible shame; it served as an archive site for loads of material that existed nowhere else. Webcomics, music, videos from dead sites. Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then.

New Zealand chose their bed. They could have been like France and placed more emphasis on diversification and independence (the French does not extradite their own people), or be like Switzerland and accumulate high technology and dominate finance. Instead they let themselves become yet another junior partner in the anglosphere. Their only export of value is their real estate which provides excellent sanctuary for billionaires seeking refuge from geopolitical uncertainties. They could also have been like India and remain non-aligned, or been like Israel and have lobbyists that punch above their weight. Instead they chose to let themselves to be walked over, and let their citizens be extradited at the behest of foreign powers. The country places more emphasis on liberal popularism than effective governance. Clearly giving hugs on camera and issuing mask mandates is more important than solving the real estate crisis.

Mega was a re-thinked Megaupload trying to accomplish the same thing but they are very different as Mega is built with a different tech/business architecture to try avoid crossing the lines into illegality that Megaupload crossed.

The original Megaupload was built to take advantage of the market opportunity existing in the grey area between copyright infringement and personal sharing. They were not trying to make something illegal, instead they were trying to make something as close as possible to illegal while still being able to argue that they are technically legal, which they failed, as the powers-that-be decided that they crossed the line into illegality and persecuted them. After the failure of Megaupload they tried to do the same thing again with Mega, but armed with the new knowledge of what is now considered clearly illegal, what will get the persecutors knowing on your door, they redesigned the new product to not cross those new lines.

More specifically, Megaupload fell because it was provable that they knew about the individual instances of piracy, so they designed Mega around end-to-end encription, so Mega users can still pirate things but Mega can always claim ignorance as a defense. There was/is no difference in persecutor priority in regards to copyright (copyright infringement is still a top priority evil today), just a difference in what they can prove against those two different companies.

Fun fact: I had my house raided by police with semi-automatic weapons on Thanksgiving while I was hanging out on the couch with my kids.

It wasn’t about money or any illegal activity. Just a very very mentally unstable ex-wife.

>The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega.

It also had to do with popularity, I recall reading back then that MU was like a two-digit% of internet traffic, it was BIG. I don't know about other countries but in Mexico everybody was downloading stuff from there, some (pirate obv.) movie websites were nothing more that a shitty frontend that streamed content right from MU. When the US (RIAA and whatnot) shut down MU it was a huge blow against piracy.

Mega(.co.nz) could have been an exact clone of MU including the content and still no one really cared to move there, so the copyright mafia didn't even bothered.

I do find it frustrating how news articles will often describe a complex case and refer to the "victims" of the guilty party, while omitting any discussion of who those victims were, and (sometimes maliciously) leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.

For example, if all you knew about Theranos was that Elizabeth Holmes was an archetypical sociopath CEO who ran a fraudulent blood testing company, then an uncritical reading of a headline like "Elizabeth Holmes appeals compensation payments to Theranos victims" might pull on your heartstrings - that damn sociopath sold fraudulent blood tests to cancer patients and now she's stiffing them for the compensation she owes them! But if you have a bit more context on the case, then you know that her "victims" were actually some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, like venture capitalists with billions of dollars under management, and war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former members of the Intelligence Community. They failed to do any due diligence, and were duped into investing other people's money into a founder selling vaporware. Instead of cutting their losses, they leveraged their power to weaponize the media and justice system to enact their retribution on her.

The same applies here. The only "victims" of Megaupload are massive corporations with teams of lobbyists who have spent decades capturing politicians to protect their monopolies by legislating barriers to entry and criminalizing threats to their otherwise fragile business models.

Meanwhile the users of Megaupload just want to watch some movies, but the corporations can't figure out how to distribute their content in any reasonably usable or affordable way. So instead of fixing their business model, they deputize their pocket politicians to prosecute the only people who managed to provide what the users actually wanted.

So yes indeed, it's hard to muster much sympathy for the "victims" of Megaupload, aside from the innocent users of the service who just want to pay some reasonable amount of money to watch movies and TV shows.

The big mistake Megaupload made was charging copyright holders a fee to delete a link to their copyrighted content, but not deleting the content on the backend.

This was what allowed the prosecutors to bring out racketeering charges, bring the full RICO act to bear, etc.

I wouldn't believe a word he speaks or writes. Following his twitter thread the past 10 years is really sad. Not sure if it's some sort of mental illness or if he does it on purpose but he seems to have developed some sort of hate for the United States. It's clear that the way they raided him was not fair but the things he writes and the conspiracies he spreads are disgusting.

He bullshits constantly and expands his legend to well beyond what it actually is. It's entirely in character for the US to do this. They've demanded the extradition of children over LulzSec script kiddying before.

I don't think so. I remember, Megaupload allowed to view movies, which you could even watch online. After a few minutes the movies stopped and asked you to pay if you wanted to continue. Everyone knew it was a database of pirated movies. Saying they are equal to youtube etc. is just an insult to people who used the site. At that point, everyone you asked would have told you it's a pirate site.

No. For the same reason, you can prosecute a separate federal crime based on the same conduct even if a particular State has prosecuted that conduct under its own statutes. This is called the "separate sovereigns" doctrine. Keep in mind that at the time the Constitution was written--and for a long time thereafter--there were almost no federal crimes (counterfeiting, piracy and customs offenses come to mind) so that crime was a State matter.

IANAL, but they weren't convicted of crimes against US companies but NZ ones. If the US got them they could theoretically be charged with "different offenses" than the ones they were charged with in NZ.

That said, it is much more complicated than that: http://opiniojuris.org/2019/08/30/the-u-s-supreme-court-on-i...

I know you shouldn't throw people in jail even in part because of bad opinions... but Jesus Christ, listen to him talk about Putin, Russia and NATO, and try to be the impartial hand of justice.

I have to say, that as a fellow human being, I probably WOULD piss on him if he was on fire.

But then I'd probably piss on him if he wasn't on fire too.

:)

I'm confused why people hold him in any esteem. Is it just because he's a maverick? Cause you can find better ones. It's like when people mourned John McAfee like he was some great martyr; there are better rebels to attach your affection to.