Megaupload Demands Return of Millions of Dollars From U.S. Govt.
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
The one lesson learned here from everyone involved is: Whatever you do, do not involve US companies in your business.
Try to get an account with a non-US bank or use a non-US financial service company if you're an US citizen / green card holder (or have been that until recently) - they will tell you "no thanks".
I've some time ago even seen Terms of Services on financial web sites that asked US citizens to leave because of the overstretched liabilities the US is one-sidedly trying to enforce outside their jurisdiction.
Far better to have one billion dollar account, than 1,000 million dollar accounts.
And the fact that our companies continue to do exactly the same thing, also proves this out. There's no major international bank that won't take on lucrative accounts with our mega corporations.
What you're talking about is wishful thinking at this point.
[1] http://www.cayman.gov.ky/pls/portal30/docs/FOLDER/SITE83/GAZ...
Actually, there is a whiff of a trade dispute brewing between Australia and US about this.
> "the US has accused the Australian government of misleading its agencies about the Patriot Act’s scope, and warned that its [cloud service providers] should not be barred from competing for the work."
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/trad...
Most of us bend and take it or get the fuck bombed out of us or end up in a bag.
Regardless of what Kim has supposedly done, it's nice to see someone standing up to them.
Anyway, as long as the US political system keeps pandering to the whim of Hollywood, the Internet will keep on knocking it out the park.
In my opinion this action has possibly ruined the future growth of cloud services. I've always been leery of using a third-party server you do not control and the government showing it has no problems shutting that server down, whether it has anything to do with you or not, is a serious problem to consider.
Plus, since hosting services will often put multiple websites on the same box then that's a potential problem to consider. One we've seen before.
What if this happened to Dropbox? What if this happened to Apple's iCloud? Sure, people will say that will never happen but history is full of people saying similar things.
They arrest they guy, confiscate his property => Megaupload is down. Their job is done.
I am sure they probably sugar-coated it using some superficial motives about starving Hollywood actors and set designers. But in reality it is just pandering to the lobbyist pressure from Hollywood.
US Govt acting immorally and often illegally on behalf of giant corporations shouldn't be a surprise (see United Fruit company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company).
The same thing that's happened in every country where they exert their influence: Capitulation.
Obviously, they were wrong.
The bottom line here is: the US turned what is a civil matter into a criminal one by dressing everything up in money laundering and conspiracy charges and it backfired. I'm no lawyer though.
I appreciate that all of these articles are undoubtedly bias in favour of Megaupload however a lot of the facts lead me to believe that it will be near impossible for them to lose. If megaupload do in fact win, surely that will have an immense impact globally? Is it possible to actually quantify the knock on effects of either outcome from a global perspective?
One thing that stands out to me is that most of this argument is against the idea that criminal infringement applies to secondary liability (i.e. faulting these guys for the infringement of others). One problem for them is that the indictment accuses some of them of direct infringement based on some of MU's emails. This can lead to trouble with the NET Act [1], which has the explicit criminal liability they need to extradite here. There are limits, though: they would need to be able to prove that enough infringement had happened to rise to a criminal level.
They also have criminal conspiracy charges in there, though I believe those to be predicated on proving some sort of criminal infringement. Note, however, that on the acts of direct infringement, it's possible for not everyone in the group to be involved. For example, one of the emails I remember about locating a pirate copy of some show was between a couple of employees. That wouldn't necessarily implicate Kim himself unless they could connect him to the act.
There was a lot of nonsense in the indictment, though, trying to make everything sound like it had a criminal motive. Some of the same allegations made in it could be repeated against sites like YouTube, for example. The indictment did, however, contain quite a few emails that made the Mega group look pretty bad. I believe their lawyers already addressed those, saying that their words were being twisted around.
Ultimately, I think this is going to be a fairly unpredictable case.
EDIT: A better explanation: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/is-megaupload-a-l...
They are completely within their legal right to do so.
I'd change that to "trying to do the absolute minimum necessary to APPEAR to comply with the DMCA, if the request was from a party that had enough legal resources to make trouble".
If they had one copy of your file stored without authorization on their servers, but it was accessible through, say, 5 different URLs, their response to a DMCA takedown request was to make the specific URL you knew about invalid, but to leave the file up and leave the rest of the URLs working. That's why I say "appear" to comply.
When they were first shutdown, there were first person reports here on HN from small developers who had their takedown requests ignored, which is why I suspect that you had to be someone reasonably big for them to even bother to try to appear to comply.
Imagine we both rip a track from a fresh cd using the default encoding settings on some standard software. We get two bit-for-bit identical files. We both upload them to MegaUpload, you because you want to do something fair-use compliant while I want to share it with the world. You take your link and use it legally, I take mine and put it one some shady site. The RIAA finds mine, judges it to be in violation, asks MegaUpload to take it down. MegaUpload would be wrong to also take yours down because yours is there legally.
It's not that a certain set of bytes, all that a MegaUpload url represented, is illegal or illegal. It's whether the person who posted it had the right to do so. Copyright is tricky because it's metadata.
And a handgun is made to kill people. But we generally agree there's a limited context in which that is acceptable, so we allow it. If I want to store my files online, copywritten or not, there's nothing illegal about it.
If a file host is like a gun shop, then Megaupload was allegedly like an arms dealer.
And besides, the best analogy to digital lockers? Actual lockers. Their purpose is "hold stuff". If someone uses them for drugs, it's that person who is in trouble. And to presume the intent of the existence of lockers, even if one bus station does cater to gunmen, is silly.
We should all be able to look at lockers and say "there's nothing wrong with that."
The US gov't's actual allegations are not particularly exceptional. If you're of the mind to worry about this case, I think there are other things to worry about in this case.
Maybe you can think of something even more menacing to compare Megaupload with. Nuclear terrorists perhaps? Satan and his legion of demons?
Nice framing on ya pal.
Not saying that's what happened here (haven't read the court materials).
If a print shop in Los Angeles were to serve a high volume of student customers, and the print shop knew they were breaking the law by making copies of textbooks and selling them, the print shop would have a massive liability over its head. It would require proving that the print shop knew what the students were doing.
Exactly. It would require proving. The article is arguing that it did not happen
The world has gone utterly mad.
> Ok I get it, the US is trying to apply their laws onto the world and that is a big issue but this seems like the wrong case to get outraged over.
And what is it that you can do once they do the same for a not-so-wrong case(wrong is your phrasing; I don't think this is the case wrong case to get outraged over). The motives to circumvent the law and go after mega doesn't look altruistic to me. Since for them, it was never about right or wrong, how does your perceptions of morality even matter? You aren't the one making the calls, and the one making the calls aren't doing it because they thought mega business is evil.
> Megaupload was built for the purpose of hosting/sharing copyrighted files. You know it and I know it.
I would be happier in a world where a site for copyright infringement stays in business, compared to a world where a couple of lobbyists can circumvent the law to get what they want.
I go out today and forge a $400 million dollar check from Paul Graham. I put it in at the bank and the teller, who's totally asleep at the wheel, cashes it for me. Now, the government wants to charge me with check fraud, since I signed the check and I'm obviously not Paul Graham. I want to use those $400 million dollars of Paul Graham's money to pay for my own legal defense. Would you say that, since the government hasn't proven that I've done something illegal until the end of the trial, that I should have the right to use all of the money I've stolen to pay for that defense? Or should that account be frozen for the duration of the trial so that, in the event that I am found guilty, the money could be returned to his account?
The second issue is that your example has absolutely nothing to do with the MegaUpload case. If you want to live in a country where the government has the right to seize all your assets and destroy your business without having to justify itself, I won't pretend to understand you, but I'll accept that it's your right. But I refuse to live in a world where that same government has the right to do so to everyone, including people it doesn't actually govern in countries where its laws do not apply.
Additionally, I never argued that the government has the right to seize all assets without justification. First, the government should only have the ability to freeze assets related to the case at hand. I should only lose access to the $400 million in question, not any of my other property. That $400 million should be kept safe, so that it may be returned to me at the end of the trial if I'm found not guilty (another place where the government is failing).
Additionally, I don't believe that the government should be able to do this without needing to explain itself. This should only occur if the government has been able to justify before a grand jury that there is reason to believe that I have committed a crime and that the loss of this money would aggravate the nature of the crime. For instance, in my check fraud hypothetical, the $400 million should be frozen, since my spending it would aggravate the crime. On the other hand, there's no reason for me to be held in prison, since the act is completed. Now, if I'm accused of attempted murder, it is logical that I should be prevented from going near the person I'm accused of trying to kill.
You'll argue that the grand juries are a joke and I'd say that you're right. They are broken and need to be fixed. However, once they are fixed, they should serve as a temporary, provisional guilty in the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
Compare this with how Apple sells iPods. iPods and pirated music go together very well, but Apple makes a real effort to get people to pay for music.
If I gave you a list of twenty things you can do and I state that you only need to do five of them, are you unethical for only doing five? Now add to that where I pay you money on the first five items but then you pay me money for every item completed after that. Are you unethical for only doing five?
You can say that their efforts at doing the bare minimum were making them money and I would respond that's more the reason to change the rules. A business exists to make money and will follow the rules as best as needed to keep making money. Whether the rules concern civil laws, criminal laws, and tax laws. You can see this throughout the business world, it's not a new concept.
You're exactly right about the popular opinion seeming to be that sharing copyrighted content is ok.
Were you, back in the day, suggesting BASF, or who ever, should be prosecuted for selling blank cassette tapes? Were they for illegal recordings, or just recordings?
Presumably too, since google can search specifically for torrents and offers a great way to store files, that it too should be shut down, founders arrested and servers seized?
What happens when encrypted RAIDed cloud sharing happens?
Yes they were criminals, but the response was way out of proportion to the crime. Its like some cop is walking down the street, sees someone clearly speeding, and pulls out his gun and tries to shoot out the car's tires. Catching the criminal isn't worth the chance of someone accidentally ending up dead.
Meanwhile Megaupload might have contributed indirectly to copyright infringement and some of their staff might have copied a file or two themselves. Big deal.
I'm more concerned about the legal system being abused than about something that should have been a civil lawsuit at most. I'm particularly concerned about how they've effectively tried hard to destroy a business before either the business or its principals have even had a chance to defend themselves in court.
Confiscating money; trying to get the data erased. They're acting as if Megaupload and its principals have already been convicted. Meanwhile the case is unravelling more, to the point where the US judged involved has openly questioned whether this will go to trial at all, especially given such "little" issues as whether or not they can even serve criminal charges on a non-US company. Small little issues that the prosecutor should have known very well would be an issue before the arrests and asset seizures.
I can be outraged over the case even while thinking Megaupload probably have engaged in quite sleazy and possibly illegal behaviour.
It does seem as if the Govt. was desperate and, without any correct process or concrete evidence, scrambled to shutter the site and Dotcom as fast as they could. And now it will hopefully backfire, and the internet will rejoice.
They might continue to still go all crazy police state on us anyway, but standing up to bullies is important.
You're right that it's totally out of control - the rule of law is gone. You're wrong about the potential solutions.
The only nonviolent solution is to leave the country and avoid the jurisdictional reach. Take your ball and go somewhere that has the rule of law.
They _will_ continue to "go all crazy police state on us", and that is precisely why it's time to leave. It's impossible to make things better while being persecuted or beaten or censored or imprisoned without trial.
I said mostly operating outside the ability of Americans to restrict (some aspects do, some aspects don't). And I said I think it will help, if the globe pitched in to restrict the US Federal Govt. There's no contradiction there at all. The push-back by international powers would accomplish international restriction of the Feds that US citizens cannot short term (US citizens mostly have no influence over New Zealand justice, nor trade relations with Singapore, nor military relations with Japan, and so on and so forth).
It would take a very large cultural shift to get the US military out of Japan from our side (it would take more than just a new President). Japan, however, can and should kick the US military out tomorrow morning. Ditto Germany.
It's better if you stop thinking of America as a 'normal' nation, and start thinking of it as an international superpower that has 180 military bases around the globe, with its fingers in every pie.
Americans for example have zero influence or control over the Federal Reserve. You'd have to turn congress inside out to then get laws passed that reach to the Fed. Other nations can however change their relationship with the Fed and its banking arms.
American voters would have to reform the entire government top to bottom before they got to restricting CIA activities in Italy (for example). Italy however, can get started on that tomorrow morning.
The US Government is extremely large and powerful, and it has a superpower's reach globally. It makes perfect sense that it would help if the rest of the world pushed back against its international abuses.
Let me provide you an example: I can vote for a congressman, that single congressman cannot realistically stop the NSA at this point, the NSA has a budget equal to the budget of Greece. It would take a complete government overhaul to restructure the NSA, and that will take a long time. Other countries however, at their choosing, can immediately alter what they allow departments like the CIA or NSA to do in their jurisdiction (and or at least make the effort to push back).
The US Government is not one thing, it's a massive entity with many powerful heads that operate independent of each other.
Citizens of other countries are similarly held hostage by their governments too (although some to a much lesser extent than the US). The US however has too much clout over other governments to allow what you state to happen.
People in first world countries are not "held hostage" by their governments.
Why, why, why would you compare America to Second and Third world countries instead of looking to the top of first world countries and striving to be better?
That's like comparing America's murder rate to El Salvador and saying it's perfectly fine. Instead, it should be compared to first world countries, and it's soon very clear that it's not OK and is a serious problem for such a prosperous country.[1]
This kind of comparison leads to apathy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... (sort the list by "most recent", and have a look where the United States sits compared to the next first world country.
Two states murder rates are right up there with Kazakhstan. DC looks, frankly, crazy.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0308.p...
In the early 90s, East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate in the US. (I think that the wikipedia article is wrong - I remember a number significantly higher.) It's right next to Palo Alto, which has a murder every decade or so.
He didn't say that the US didn't need improvement.
The US' diversity means that the comparison is complicated. In fact, when you compare the US apples and oranges to apples and oranges in other countries, you find that the US is doing reasonably well. You're seeing consequences of the fact that the apple countries don't have oranges.
We'd be happy to give some oranges to apple countries so they can show us how to do it correctly....
I mean, either it's United or it's not.
Why do you think that that's true? I ask because it isn't in other circumstances (particle vs wave).
The world doesn't care whether it's convenient.
There are various connections, but geography is the only common one.
It's supposed to be a singular entity where everyone is working towards the benefit of everyone, but that got lost somewhere along the way.
That's from the pledge of allegiance, which was written in 1892, long after the nation was founded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance
More important, you're confusing a goal with reality.
First world countries are routinely "held hostage" by the US government - and more importantly, by Capital. You might notice the reference here was to copyright laws, and we all know how many first world countries have written copyright laws to US spec. recently.
If you actually doubt it is driven by Capital, ask the next government that attempts to create a viable competitor to Visa / MasterCard (or the big four) what happens. Hint: The State Department starts not-so-nicely suggesting this could be bad for trade relations.
As for "second and third world" countries [not the current lingo, my dear], they simply have their governments changed for them by the US if they disagree.
~ Dumber & Dumber here.
Why would Germany do that? They want the US bases there. The people in the areas around the bases have good relations with the people stationed at the bases, and the bases bring in a lot of money to the local economy. In fact, Germany provides subsidies to the US for the bases, similar to the kind of subsidies states and countries give to businesses they want to attract or keep.
It can't, and it won't, for three obvious reasons:
Large sections of the connected people in Italy are well aligned with CIA / US goals [you might want to know about Operatio Galdio]; and in a broader extension, Italy's power-elite are the same as the power-elite in Russia, the USA and everywhere else.
Their economy is firmly under the wrack, and the IMF (and by extension, Wall st / the State Department) have very real hooks to prevent Italy 'devolving' towards anything but Disaster Capitalism.
Power doesn't work like that. You can kick out the CIA, but policy & actual control isn't made by the CIA. The CIA is merely a tool used by the US government - and is probably doing exactly the same thing as the Italian police, which is targeting any counter-culture / anti-Capitalist elements in Italy at the moment.
Ask your local Central American government about kicking out the CIA btw ~ these odd, right-wing, military driven coups tend to crop up.
the rule of law is gone
And that's precisely the problem, as the justice system needs to calm down on passing and enforcing laws that restrict our freedoms and constitutional rights. And the institutions that enforce those laws need to remind themselves that people should be innocent until proven guilty.
The only nonviolent solution is to leave the country
> And that's precisely the problem, as the justice system needs to calm down on passing and enforcing laws that restrict our freedoms and constitutional rights.
Nonsense, that's not your problem at all.
The problem is: A right that doesn't hold for everybody is not a right, but a privilege. Your "rule of law" does not apply equally to everyone, and the only thing that is strong is the "rule of privilege".
Your constitution is a centuries old document whose interpretation is up for grabs to anyone. It, and one half of your legal system isn't even codified, like a sane legal system would. All countries that trace their legal heritage back to England are still stuck with a "Common Law" system (about 1/3rd of the world) instead of writing down their laws in (sufficiently) unambiguous legal code (don't tell me legal code can't be unambiguous until you've seen a proper example of Civil Law legal system[1]), like the rest of the world.
I've seen people pour over this Constitution and the Bill of Rights of yours and try to divine some wisdom from it, say about a right to bear arms, and then another person pointing out some incomprehensible old-English sentence that supposedly mean this or that, and apparently people are allowed to have different opinions about what these documents really mean and this is taken seriously ... WTF???
You might as well stick to interpreting the Bible to base your legal decisions on ...
I mean, I'm all for people having the right to their own opinion and shit, with one exception, and that is the interpretation of legal code.
With bi-partisan decisions such as more security over movement and Internet, American voters have no other choice.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHuiDD_oTk Is your Cat confused about the referendum on the alternative vote on the 5th May?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE&feature=rela... The Alternative Vote Explained
These people should be ashamed. They are part of the problem.
It's baffling they would be so opinionated and cocksure although they plainly didn't know the facts.
I'm curious why these HN readers told bald faced lies. What's in it for them? How many other discussions have they polluted with misinformation?