Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I'm far more concerned with the stuff that governments get away with, including infringement of the freedom to share information.
Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.I can't celebrate this at all, and I am never sympathising with legal thuggery. It is just naked power exerting itself and it will always be ugly.
> It is just naked power exerting itself
and it's a relatively minor showing of it. Compare it to direct assasination of foreign nationals (of which both the US as well as russia has done). The chinese stationing covert forces to try to police their migrant nationals overseas (spy stuff basically), or if what snowden leaked is as widespread is it is alleged, the amount of hoovering of information and surveillance that exists!
Maybe we'll have a generation of people with a backbone again who will be able to free us from government oppression.
The trend is going the other way, so I think we're heading to socialism-ville for a repetition of last century's lessons.
It is, for people like me, who have actually experienced living under a socialist regime.
They were more socialist in the 1970s, when the country suffered greatly under the socialist government. Popular writer Astrid Lindgren was taxed 102% of her income at one point. [1]
[0]: https://scandinaviafacts.com/is-sweden-socialist/
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania
You realize that if everyone thought that, the world would be a worse place?
they have no business going after just a single man so fervently, he's a foreign national and the websites weren't based in the US
meanwhile US is losing influence and trust on geopolitical stage, shouldn't that be the bigger issue
edit: im being rate limited so heres my response to comment below:
I didn't say anybody was replacing US, merely they are losing credibility and prestige on world stage and this isn't recent and not slowing down.
I don't think any country will be able to replace US and its freedom of maritime navigation anytime soon.
China is in no position to project as its undergoing internal turmoil. Neither is Russia. BRICS also won't offer much.
One potential non-zero chance scenario is the northern artic sea routes opening up due to rising temperatures melting ice bypassing the need to route through singapore and suez canal which would put Russia back on the power map.
US is a hyperpower and there is no equal.
Maybe a unified Korea with extended northern manchuria territories can fill the vacuum left by China and Russia in the region. I don't really see any other candidates.
National security is very far from the only scenario where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for better or worse.
If you say the US is losing influence, then who is taking their place in your view? Is China / the EU actually gaining influence?
To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without permission, such that you now possess it, but they no longer have it.
To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy of another person's work without their permission.
Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of copyright infringement are losing is not their property, but the potential extra profit they could have made if they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and distribute their work.
Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their property. Copyright infringement is illegal because (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less incentivized to create things because they won't be able to profit as much.
a. Go and correct them about using language wrongly
b. Find the heart and return it to its owner
c. Understand the meaning correctlyLet’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
IP theft is a form of stealing fruits of labor.
The definition of theft is:
a : the act of stealing
specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to
deprive the rightful owner of it
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
> [...] just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.
Please assume good faith when discussing here. I personally don't think that the concept called "wage theft" is actual theft, for the same reasons I don't think copyright violations are theft. In fact, I don't think I ever used that term anywhere, in this thread or in the past. So please don't attribute to me thoughts that I didn't express.
> You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Why does the fact that something is or isn't theft imply whether or not it is immoral? A lot of things are immoral but aren't theft.
> Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Sure, that offends my moral sensibilities. But it's still not theft.
That said, I think it's a gray area.
Let's say you develop a recipe and start cooking it for people. Perhaps you're the first person to ever make chicken parmigiana. Then I copy that recipe and start my own restaurant that sells chicken parmigiana. Does that feel immoral to you? Probably not, because we've grown up in a world where (due to arbitrary cultural traditions) we're okay with "stealing" creative food recipes but not creative musical or story elements.
My personal moral intuition is that, the more complex a creation gets, the more I feel it's immoral to copy it. For example I'm less upset at someone who copies a riff from a song, or at someone who writes fan fiction, than I am at someone who copies a book wholesale and tries to pass it off as their own.
But they have no jurisdiction as he was not doing that IN the US. When the Pirate Bay guys were persecuted, the US got Sweden to convict them. They weren't extradited to the US.
>..charged in 2012 with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.
Often with US law enforcement where there's a will there's a way even if it doesn't strictly stick to normal legal practices. See also Assange, and if you read Howard Marks book Mr Nice there's another example of where they got him in an unconventional way. Plus of course a variety of drone assassinations.
That is how Dotcom wants it characterized. Everyone else sees a fly-by-night website run by an eccentric millionaire making money by playing fast and loose with the law. It is one thing to be an outlaw subverting oppression by distributing free bread to poor people. It is another to be a bootlegger selling vodka under the table and then throwing huge invite-only parties with the profits.
How would US citizens would feel if another country, say China, wanted to extradite a US citizen because he allegedly violated Chinese copyright law?
Dotcom is absolutely right in saying that US is playing world police.
International crime can be a tough problem to solve. Who gets to decide what is a crime, how it should be judged and punished?
Probably how Swedish citizens felt when China 'extradited' Gui Minhai. At least in US you have due process?
See also https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan....
> US is playing world police
NZ and US have a bunch of shared laws, trade and extradition agreements and stuff. It's not like US dropped in and snatched Dotcom without any NZ cooperation. Not world police, just boring international justice.
This is underlined by other US excesses, ie [1] or the fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other states, but there are very few US citizens detained elsewhere (in democratic systems, not used for some political deals).
[1] "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody. The antithesis of fairness and basic human equality rights.
Americans commit exceedingly little crime internationally. Even in ultra-low crime countries, US citizens rank below native citizens per capita. That is probably why.
I applaud the USA for fiercely defending its citizens' rights, even against the governments of other countries.
Relatively recent, though involved diplomatic immunity too: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/us-declines-uk-extra...
If those two things are present... well, then it is what it is. Now, I doubt China would be able to provide the fair trial part, but if we're trying to compare your situation to what Kim Dotcom is going through, it's a question we have to answer. I'd much rather take my chances in a US courtroom than a PRC courtroom.
Hmm, excellent question. And for context, America is going to give Kim Dotcom a functional life sentence in what Americans like to call "pound-you-in-the-ass prison". For sharing files. He'll be given more years than harsher than most murderers.
Dragging a foreigner (especially) into the country to be put into a metal cage for violating copyright is disgusting.
Unlikely. He'll probably be sentenced to a minimum/low/medium-security prison facility/farm. Over 80% of American federal inmates are in a facility meeting one of those classifications [1].
The federal sentence (using that for comparison since the federal government carries out IP law in the US) for first-degree murder in the US is either life in prison or death by lethal injection. Dotcom is exceedingly unlikely to spend the rest of his life in prison and is obviously not eligible for the death penalty. He'd probably be looking at a decade or two at most. Obviously, that sucks for him, but your assertion that he'll be treated worse than murderers and be SA'd regularly in a prison housing violent inmates is simply not true.
[1]https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sec_l...
So, no, what you said isn't absolutely true.
Many of these are public companies that anyone can buy shares in. Tons of people have part of their life savings in US stocks - these people all own a slice of the rights to various works of art.
Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it, it's OK to ignore their rights?
As an aside, here's a list of public companies [0]. 7-8 of them are "trillion dollar companies", and only one (Apple) has a stake in media (that I know of) and that's a very minor part of their business. The media business is not a very good one to be in.
Let's not pretend these companies give the slightest hint of a shit about morality. They'd destroy the world next year if it meant they could earn a penny more of profit this quarter.
As long as companies like Disney are pulling moves like this [1], I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if these companies are in the right.
The only reason Dotcom (a non-US individual with 0 ties to the US in any way that should matter) is being extradited is because US politicians are pathetically cheap and easy to buy off, and Disney and all the other big media companies have infinite coffers with which to do so, not because of some vague bullshit about morality or property rights.
It's like that for companies. It doesn't matter if Disney sucks in many ways, if they own something, they own it.
If you think this is vague bullshit, then I'd invite you to read up on how societies tend to work without it. Even communist China instituted reforms and amendments in recent decades cementing the concept of private property ownership.
And Dotcom does have a tie to the US that he willingly and knowingly created: he committed a crime against their citizens and companies.
You can argue that there's too much protection, or that it doesn't afford equal protection under the law for smaller parties.
I don't think anyone other than Disney shareholders gives an iota of a damn if others pirate movies/shows/music from the big guys. And I especially don't think most people would seek extradition for a guy who hosted a piracy website, especially, that's the type of thing psychopathic execs and their ilk seem to be into. Especially someone who's not even a US citizen or has any affiliation with the US.
Also, keep in mind we're talking companies like Disney here, who are currently fighting a legal battle [1] because someone died due to their negligence and using the argument that agreeing to the T&C of their streaming service absolves them of wrongdoing in a person's death.
So yeah, don't expect anyone to feel sorry for the plight of the poor soulless megacorporation here, they'd destroy the earth if it made them half a nickel more in yearly profits.
Again, you can make the argument that these protections are too broad or too durable, but it's not in anyone's best interest for intellectual works to be unprotectable under law.
https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/parties/remarks/NZ/... says it wasn't until 6 years later that it joined. But maybe a different treaty?
Although NZ has agreements with Aus and the US, you'll find on the ground that kiwis are actually not super fond of the US.
We won't let US nuclear ships into our waters, and we actually have quite a good relationship with China.
NZ is also quite self sufficient in many ways and so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from potential conflict.
I suspect the small size of the economy, the small number of people in it, and lack of strategic importance in military matters are what keep it protected from potential conflict more than it's self sufficiency and distance. In fact, if anything was to create conflict would be someone trying to capture that self-sufficiency to support their own population.
Small country, fairly neutral stance, little involvement in international conflict, and huge distance.
Follow that up with alliances and there's not much reason to come to NZ, other than for a holiday!
Also what he was doing is also a crime in NZ otherwise he wouldn't be extradited.
You might object this evidence by telling me that you bought all seasons of House only because you had been streaming it illegally before, and that you wouldn't have done so without previously streaming it – but in most jurisdictions, this kind of "business procurement" does not cancel out the harm done in the first case.
Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me not buying it is on you.
My "counter evidence" to your example could be something like: I bought House on DVD 10 years ago because my friend who had pirated it told me it was a good show to checkout.
Is that legally how it works?
This sounds a lot like being guilty until proven innocent...
There is no harm done in the first case. You say you would have bought House if you couldn't have streamed it, but I say that's nonsense. If you didn't want to pay for it you would have borrowed it from a library or a friend.
I think there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated. If I illegally download a song/movie I wouldn't have otherwise bought, did anybody lose out? There was a reason Napster was popular in colleges, because many of those people were cash poor. Music industry revenue peaked in 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again. Also, the entertainment industry are not multi-trillion dollar conglomerates. Not even close. Disney is worth $160B and Netflix is $260B.
That being said, if it were up to the music industry we'd still be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 for an album we only like one song on and we wouldn't be able to create out own playlists. You can only fight the consumer for so long (and they fought long and hard). That's to say nothing about the morality of repeatedly increasing copyright from 14 years to life plus 70 (which is BS). The Beatles' great great grandchildren (or whoever owns the rights later on) shouldn't still be benefiting from intellectual property.
> Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen from another country using the power of the state, and drag him before their feet is tyrannical.
This is what rule of law is. KDC knew he was breaking the law and not only didn't do anything about it, but invested in an encouraged it to benefit himself financially. Even after being charged and having megaupload shut down, he then tried again. Do you really feel sorry for him?
> there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated
I'm not sure how relevant the harm is. It seems like copyright law doesn't have exceptions for "harmlessness"* -- and even if that were a carve-out, it would be a stupid one for the kind of offenses we're discussing, since it hinges on hundreds of millions of individual 'butterfly effect' decisions and how they hypothetically would have unfolded in a fictional world without piracy vs. the real world. No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue. Maybe "Firefly" was boosted massively in its long-term commercial success by piracy, but some $400 physics textbook had materially less sales. I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.
*I'm aware there are specific exceptions for things like fair use and timeshifting -- I just don't believe all 'harmless' acts are protected or that that was ever even intended.
Just that is an indication on how little piracy affects revenue, the effect is at best so small that it's effectively invisible.
> I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.
Because discussing about the real financial impact of piracy is a sure way to throw a lot of pretty extreme copyright laws out of the window.
They really don't want to start this debate. Piracy is just a boogeyman at this point to pass ever stronger IP laws and the large IP conglomerates are pretty aware of that.
That's because the music industry was incredibly slow to adapt to the internet. They basically took a full decade to react and lost revenue in the process.
More than two decades of studies show there is no harm to these companies and that pirates spend the most on content.
Piracy is flat out a net good for humanity and society. No convincing counter-arguments can be made.
The only example where harm could be said to happen is with very small content-creators who would be relying on income to get started, but even then I don't think that matters.
If you're the source of a creation and people want to see more, they will fund it. It need not be funded by everybody that will or has viewed or enjoyed it.
It actually also hurts the content creators themselves. The music industry spent too much time fighting "internet distributed" music and the only alternatives they pieced together were too restrictive to the way people actually consumed music. "Want to listen on more than one device? Pay multiple times!" was their attempt back in the day.
Not sure if you know this, but there are tens of thousands of people involved in making a movie or TV series. Many making minimum wage and many who own businesses that are employed by the studios like catering companies. Or transportation companies, or even all the companies who tech they use like the camera's they use to film said movies.
ALL of those people? Their employment DEPENDS on movie studio's and the work they do to keep them gainfully employed. When you pirate movies you're not taking money out of the faceless multi-trillion entertainment companies, you're taking money out of the people's pocket who are integral part of creating the movies and shows you watch and who's livelihood depends on their continued employment by those companies.
Take a studio like New Line who put out the Lord of the Rings movies and was wildly successful until a series of flops effectively closed the studio:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/featu...
From 'Nightmare on Elm Street' to 'Lord of the Rings', New Line Cinema created some of Hollywood's most influential blockbusters. But now its 40-year history is in tatters following a string of big-budget box-office flops.
Also, I would consider pirating a perfectly valid protest of what producers have done over the last two years, dragging their feet to break the backs of unions in advance of negotiations. Hollywood, Atlanta, New Orleans, NY, all filming far less over the last two years due to producer’s greed and hope that they can enjoy these pesky trades entirely by automation and AI. This has done more damage to tradespeople than pirating ever did.
Fortunately, it’s pretty clear that it will not be feasible to make a coherent movie or TV show via AI in the near term. Hopefully consumers vote with their wallets too and don’t buy or stream any content that is made without trades.
https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for...
It is an industry that employs real people from artists to studio engineers to musical instrument and equipment companies to the bartenders at the venues. Those people are sharing a smaller pie than they used to before Internet piracy devalued their music.
In your opinion it's tyrannical. Sure, most certainly a non-violent crime against a wealthy corporation isn't on the same level as murder or assault. At the same time, copyright infringement is conceptually not that different from property crime.
You would want the police to arrest someone who broke into your home and stole your movie collection.
You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own website.
It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
Don't forget that Megaupload was specifically designed to enable piracy and discourage other uses of the technology. It wasn't a file storage service that could be used for legitimate personal use because unpopular downloads would be deleted. The company actually paid people via an incentive program to upload popular files that were copyright infringing. This wasn't just "YouTube is bad at playing whack-a-mole with DMCA claims," this was a company that was responsible for something like 4% of all Internet piracy all by itself and actively encouraged it.
It's not like they were a company that didn't have access to lawyers who could warn them not to do what they did. Kim deserves his fate because his own hubris invited it.
You really think if Spotify came along in 1998 that all the major record labels would agree to give them their entire catalog for $10 a month? Back then they were selling a single CD for around $20.
Piracy existed a LONG time before Napster hit the scene.
If you do that you'll get a very misleading answer. That low payment he got was for writing credit on a song with 17 writers.
But the main reason streaming gives less revenue than CD sales isn't a "devaluation of music" thing, it's because streaming is closer to radio.
> It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
For many (if not most?) software businesses nowadays, the code itself holds little intrinsic value. If someone were to steal my SaaS code, it's unlikely they could deploy it and sell a similar product. The value of my business lies in its domain expertise, not in the code being a trade secret. Many internal projects aren't open-source simply because opening them to the public would require significant maintenance. Otherwise, there would be no issue in sharing the code, as much of what's built today is based on open-source projects.
Similarly, if I'm selling an application and its code is leaked, people would still prefer to install it from the app store. Few would go through the trouble of compiling the code and deploying a "hacked" version.
This contrasts with the 80s and 90s, when illegal copies of floppy disks and CDs posed a significant issue for some software businesses. However, times have changed. Nowadays, people prefer to pay for the support of a SaaS or the convenience of installing an app from a store, complete with updates.
There are exceptions, but I believe most software engineers don't work on projects where the code itself has significant value that needs to be protected by copyright laws.
The situation with music is somewhat similar. People have stopped buying physical media because it's no longer practical. Even those who collect CDs, vinyl, or tapes typically use streaming platforms for most of their music consumption.
Humanist values include right to property ownership, and the right to get the benefits of your work. Artists deserve that, and can sell their rights to big studios if they want.
Just because it's easy to copy something, or just because studio execs were idiots who wouldn't get on board with streaming, or whatever else, doesn't mean it's morally right to copy someone's work for free.
It's perfectly fine to copy someone else's work. The immorality comes in when you start using physical force to punish people thinking thoughts you feel entitled to.
Copying scientific ideas (with attribution!) is completely OK and good.
Having heterodox ideas is vital for society.
Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to) is the worst evil.
But making a movie is a commercial enterprise that involves risking a bunch of capital. It rarely pans out to make a profit. Copying it without payment is a very minor form of theft, but it's still theft.
If the content is a movie created in the last 100 years, it was almost certainly created to slot into that revenue model.
The artists have a right to sell their property on their terms. And if they decide to do so by selling their rights to a studio, then that's how it is. And if you don't like corporations, contracts, or the revenue model, then that's completely irrelevant to the parties involved.
Furthermore, what is and isn't legal is a product of the legislature and the judiciary. Let's not forget that people write laws and interpret laws. They aren't some function of the cosmic order, though it's convenient to posture them as if they were.
When someone "has the right," it's because a group of people gave it to them, and anything that can be given, can be taken away. The fact that we forget this reality is a massive collective hallucination. Once you know how the hallucination works, it's hard to buy into it ever again.
TLDR; The arrow of implication doesn't go from reality -> laws. It goes from laws -> reality.
The pirated works were created under this understanding of the rules.
In other words, movies and games were financed and made at great expense and effort with a view to selling copies and tickets and making money off of VHS rentals / Netflix streaming. Piracy is a clear subversion of this, and by the way, if it became mainstream, would break the industry that creates some of the things we like.
While the law isn't part of some cosmic order, there's nothing written in the stars that entitles you to every creation of every other person, at your convenience, for free.
I'm glad there's room for both and the gray areas in between.
Do we, for example, have an obligation to those who play by laws we believe to be unjust?
Like forcing people think that copying is theft? Or that by clicking a button you agree to few hundred page agreement you couldn't possibly read or understand?
If movie productions were so concerned about profit, maybe they should stop all the Hollywood accounting nonsense.
The industry has just made several films surpassing a billion dollars. The industry is absolute fine. And someone downloading Deadpool isn't stealing or doing any harm to that industry.
If people want to pay for it they will, and if they don't they won't. If I don't have enough talent to make a lot of money from my work, then that's the only reason - not piracy.
for sharing or facilitating the thinking of thoughts you feel entitled to.*
This was also a time before mass copying and distribution on a massive scale.
1. All information wants to be free.
2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free".
3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free for personal profit is immoral.
1. All information wants to be free.
Information on the order of complexity of a movie cannot want anything.
2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free".
Nearly free to copy, doesn't mean you're free to take it.
3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free for personal profit is immoral.
I get the sentiment here but I don't think it follows in the context of an artist creating something specifically to make money from it when it gets distributed.
To try to own information is like trying to own a flame. I lit your candle with my candle, so I own the flame on your candle. Making a copy is the same. To claim you own the copy is just plain stupid.
Information can be any collection of bits. You can copy these easily and almost for free.
But almost nobody cares about information in the abstract. I'm talking about specific, artful arrangements of bits. Lots of effort goes into making sequences of bits. (we can give our sequence of bits names like "The Lion King" or "Windows 98"). You only want a copy of these bits because of the effort that went into it.
Of course nobody can control how you flip the bits on your hard drive in practice, but that's missing the point. It's a particular arrangement of bits that you find entertaining or informative or useful, somebody put a lot of work into making it that way, and it's this creative effort that you end up enjoying and paying for, not the actual bits.
And of course you are depriving the artists of something - a royalty payment. The art was likely created with a view to that royalty payment. Which is why you want to pirate it in the first place. You want to enjoy the creative work without having to shell out for it.
You can come up with elaborate arguments about information theory, but in the end this is what it comes down to - pirates want other people to create value for them, for free, and will howl about "corporations" and "information wants to be free" to try and justify it.
I don't owe artists any royalties just because they say so. If they demand a kiss they won't get it either. I won't be bound by arbitrary restrictions around the physical matter in my possession.
There's a lot of "me me me" in this. If you want to live in a lawless society where morality revolves only around what is physically possible, that might be possible on some remote island; but don't be surprised if nobody on that island bothers to build any million dollar flame-lighting machines for your benefit.
2. No. It becomes easily copyable.
3. Irrelevant, given the problems with 1 and 2.
The phrase means "want" in the same way water "wants" to flow downhill.
> Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?
Now you have a pointless thread five deep.
The premise was that these services didn't actually perform the piracy, its users did. Kim Dotcom played both sides of the field, much like how social media platforms are right now with the whole "we're not a media company" but wanting all the profits of providing services that those companies do.
I'm not saying I agree, but it provides context as to why people felt Kim Dotcom was a hero.
Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross. He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.
You can re-read the first line of my comment if you think I'm putting those two things on the same level, and you will see that I agree with:
> He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.
It is like posting “You have interesting thoughts about Kim Dotcom. What is better, paragliding or parasailing?”
Am I the only one that didn't read either that way? I think a lot of biases are hanging out in this conversation.
Human understanding of humans and human social structures (which one needs to make just rulings) isn't objective. To claim otherwise is not just subjective, but incoherent. It's an infinite regress. Many people throughout history possessing ideas that we now consider to be stupid were convinced of their objectivity.
FWIW, I think this vendetta against Kim Dotcom is way out of line, and wouldn't have happened if he were more important.
Also Data Protect was a fraud masquerading as an information security company. I was living in Germany then and it was a joke in the infosec space.
The top-level poster appears to be proposing a general rule for how people should behave. But how suitable is it really?
The way to explore that is to test it out by trying other inputs, as the GP did here.
> He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.
That is noticeably different than stating, "it feels gross so don't do it".
It also seems designed to shut down criticism of the original proposed rule -- or at least that's the only interpretation I can ascribe to it. This is bad because that original proposed rule is bad (in my opinion) and deserves criticism. Ihe best kind of criticism of any rule is "Let's try this other input, and see if you still agree with the conclusion".
It "being designed to shut down criticism" is a wildly subjective take at best and at worst way more spurious than anything they or I am suggesting. I think your bias is showing and you are doing everything in your power to avoid addressing the point that "he was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower."
This "point" isn't connected in any way to the original proposed rule, which is what is under examination here. So when the GP sought to test that rule by applying it to a different type of person, this "point" does not amount to an objection -- it's simply irrelevant.
I don't think I can make this any simpler.
So would you like to address the topic or would you rather continue playing pretend with imaginary rule sets for conversation?
Ironically, it's you who is attempting (and failing) to shut down criticism instead of addressing it.
Victims are victims. We just overlook victims of the state because of a biological religious adherence to revenge. Righteous violence and all that jazz.
Publicly available information supports the fact that Snowden was also an opportunist - the vast majority of the material he leaked was unrelated to domestic surveillance, which was his stated purpose for leaking.
Numbers don't lie.
> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?
Or maybe even more generally to people like Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffet? Because maybe at some point enough should be enough?
While they want you to believe that, there’s no correlation between being rich and being best, or even good, at anything. You’re not the best athlete because your mom and dad were the best athletes. But if your parents were wealthy, you’re wealthy.
If they want standards to be applied ”consistently”, great. They can start by paying their taxes.
Why shouldn't this quantity be softly capped at some value to prevent natural runaway towards 100%? What's wrong about capping it on the other side slightly above zero for the purposes of personal survival and preventing organic deterioration?
> Or maybe you're suggesting the rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits away?
Obviously that.
> and who would they give it away too?
That is really irrelevant. The money they gave away can literally be burnt and it would still improve the situation. Money is not value. Money is just a score indicating how much value are you entitled to obtain in the future.
> The federal government controls more money than any entire private business
Is that true? Despite trillions of debt? There are national governments in the world (and not small ones) that currently owe more to businesses than they own assets.
Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success. Once you win everything you should step aside and let others have their fun. You shouldn't feel compelled to punish your body even harder for years to come and others shouldn't have to wait till your performance deteriorates.
I don't agree with this definition of money. The vast majority of money doesn't represent human output/labor and none of it is created by human labor. Probably the simplest to understand example of that is crypto. It represents trillions of USD in wealth and has almost no human labor input or output. That's a simple example, but certainly not the only example.
> Is that true? Despite trillions of debt?
Yes it's true. It's not even close. The US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out. They could save up for roughly 6 months and buy out the most expensive company in the world (apple). A company that has been growing their wealth for 50 years. This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money. Moving money from the grossly rich to the insanely unthinkably rich doesn't make much sense to me.
> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.
What problem does this solve? I don't have anything much against it either, but I can't find any reason to do this.
I agree. That's completely not what I said.
Money is how we keep track of what fraction of the future output of others (of our civilization really) someone or some organization is entited to command (consume or destroy for their needs or schemes) in the future.
> US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out.
I'm still not convinced. You can spend a lot when you are incredibly deep in debt. Spending doesn't make you rich.
> This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money.
The point is not giving money, it's taking the money away. Because there's a limit of how much control over others any single person deserves regardless of what they did.
>> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.
> What problem does this solve?
No global problem. But professional sport takes a huge toll on the body and pretty much excludes those people from any useful form of activity for entire span of their career and possibly later only for our grotesque entertainment. I don't agitate for limits in sport but that's just an example that reasonable limits may benefit people in many areas.
I still misunderstand you, I think.
> Money is how we keep track of [...] output of others
How do I reconcile that you agree money doesn't represent the output of others, while understanding this comment that says it keeps track of the output of others?
> Spending doesn't make you rich.
I would argue that being rich doesn't matter at all. We can always print more money. The only part of being rich that matters is the influence your spending represents. Otherwise it's nothing more than numbers in a computer database and has no impact on the world. The fact that the government spends so aggressively is what makes their influence so powerful and scary. Unlike rich individuals, the governments wage war frequently. I would much rather see random people have obscene net worth rather than see major countries grow their military budget, building weapons that are even more efficient at killing poor people in other countries.
> Because there's a limit of how much control over others any single person deserves regardless of what they did.
agreed, that's why it matters so much as to where the money is going when you take it from rich individuals. Giving it the federal government grows their military budget, which the president of the US has complete control over. A single individual with the authority to launch a full-scale invasion tomorrow. Compare that to elon musk or bill gates. Their purchasing influence is infinitesimally small compared to the same money utilized by the federal government.
> sport takes a huge toll on the body and pretty much excludes those people from any useful form of activity for entire span of their career and possibly later only for our grotesque entertainment.
valid argument. I don't agree with it, but I don't find the argument to be inconsistent or without merit.
Simple. If for example government decides to print million dollars and give it to you for no reason then it doesn't represent any economic output of others yet you having it means that you are entitled to acquiring some economic output of others in the future.
Basically you can easily get money by contributing nothing or even by destroying economic value, but this money entitles you to acquiring economic output of someone else. Money is nothing more, nothing less, just a right to useful things people other people (and their machines) do.
> I would argue that being rich doesn't matter at all.
Great, so you don't oppose taking a significant part of wealth of the people that hoard so much of it, right? Since it doesn't matter at all.
> Unlike rich individuals, the governments wage war frequently.
Business literally devastated entire planet, is in the process of acidifying the oceans, raising sea levels, poisoning biosphere, destroying communities, health, lives, all the time. I don't think governments will ever do this much bad (unless WW3 happens). All thanks to unchecked power of having too much money and wanting even more because it's allowed. You seriously underestimate impact of greed and overestimate impact of governments.
> agreed, that's why it matters so much as to where the money is going when you take it from rich individuals
I'm telling you for the third time that it doesn't have to go anywhere. It can be burned as easily as it was printed. And no value is lost. Only the share of influence on the future changes so that the richest loose a bit and every one else gains a bit.
> A single individual with the authority to launch a full-scale invasion tomorrow. Compare that to elon musk or bill gates. Their purchasing influence is infinitesimally small compared to the same money utilized by the federal government.
Small handful of tobacco industry owners cooperate to kill 8 million people each year and they are allowed to do that. It's perfectly legal. Just 10 years of this and you have deathtoll of WW2. I think if a person in power suddenly on a whim decided to kill 8 million people a year there'd be some questions form the electorate.
And that's just a single small industry and only one small group of rich people.
And you know this how?
Now he spouts off their official propaganda.
Only very sheepishly and obliquely. If he's supposed to be their mouthpiece, he's a pretty meek and ineffective one.
> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?
I don't think it's a relevant comparison, but I do think that particular suggestion should apply to them. Imo a fundamental component of "succeeding" in Western culture is in how quickly you learn which parts of which systems act on perverse incentives or actively against the good of the people, and subsequently being able read the room when there's an opportunity to play hero; sticking your neck out might earn you a smily face sticker next to your obituary, but more likely it'll end up screwing you, and it's naive and/or arrogant to think that this time will be different and you'll singlehandedly rid the ocean of pollution (metaphorically). Realizing that you can't rid the ocean of pollution doesn't mean you should start dumping more trash into it, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't do your civic duty to reduce your personal waste, but it does mean you have to set your ego aside for your own benefit, because in practice and in all likelihood you'll make practically zero or even very negative difference, and put a real tangible target on your back, in whichever context this plays out.
Could be a safety meeting at your company in which you're just a peon and you feel like speaking up about a code violation, could be that you're a young Mr Beast employee that wants to vouch for their co-worker who's making less but doing more, or it could be that you want to make your company's website more accessible, in any case, unless you very clearly have the latitude to do so and control over the outcome, don't, because you'll screw yourself or someone else.
Drive as well as you can in your lane, whatever that means to you, and if you don't like it, signal and change lanes, then do it again.
This also means not overexerting oneself on things that require real tangible sacrifice but have only tenuous, nebulous, or only marginally more financially beneficial outcomes. Don't sacrifice too much time alone or with your partner or family or in nature for shipping yet another arbitrary AI SaaS bs product that will disappear in a week, pick the relevant battles and demand am important outcome, we don't have enough time to squander on such asinine missions. Again, that doesn't mean don't do work, or earn money, or help others, or whatever, just be careful how much of your life you trade for some 1s and 0s.
How on earth are you labeling the people persistent to a fault "superficial"???
Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but, in their case, now the law is something entirely different and unexpected.
+10x Twitch. I still remember JustinTV ..
>>>> Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated
Could you please elaborate ? The implication is that other similar sites were not removing child pornography or similar ?
That's how the service that we now know as Twitch built its resilient infra: battle tested with a bunch of teens broadcasting random stuff. No one batted an eye . So i was using JustinTV (Twitch) as an example of piracy that was overlooked, because because someone big had invested in it.
Hell there was a whole monthly meeting and magazine dedicated to that sort of behavior. Criminal? Yes. Part of hacker culture? Also yes.
Too bad Mr Goldstein lost all credibility (that he may or may not have had) when he started shaming folks for not taking the clot shot.
I mean, if your definition of decent requires you to be a fraud and a conman, then no.
---
My father, while he certainly pirated a lot of software back in the 90s, wasn't stealing any phone cards, or doing any embezzlement. Presumably, that makes him not decent with computers.
(You probably can tell the difference, because I doubt you think that the former should be a felony.)
Off the top of my head, Cliff Stoll did some pretty hackerish stuff on the right side of the law.
Many people seem to forget or not know that all along his career he went ripping off fellow nerds and hackers left and right for his personal gain. He spied on them on his BBS, stole their secrets, defrauded them, ridiculed them, even tipped them off to law enforcement when it was beneficial to him. He proudly admitted to doing all of this in german interviews.
Kim and his endeavours are undoubtedly part of hacking history, but he himself was never part of the culture. He couldn't give a rat's ass about the culture if it weren't to build his legend and bedazzle his followers. All he really ever wanted was cold hard cash, Rolexes and cars.
Now come again about Goldstein?
And, much as it may surprise you, large numbers of "computer nerds" did NOT engage in any unlawful activities.
But your mention of "clot shot" certainly clarifies why you would be simping for a low life POS like Dotcom.
Why not both?
The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. And that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice. This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and convivence for the end user of course; though outside of Linux ISOs there's little question what kind of files people are sharing), screwed him.
Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK. Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him 10... bet he regrets that now.
"Better safe than sorry" is certainly, uh, safer. But I don't know if you can really say the DMCA requires it.
Which of course explains their allure and the desire to retroactively improve their origin stories. They stand precisely in the face of what the OP himself retroactively considers.
> "I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved."
Which is the mantra of the bullied. As if we aren't the government. When precisely did we all decide that copyright should exist for a term of life PLUS 70 years? The government does not seek our permission when applying these laws to us yet we have to implicitly sacrifice our freedoms in order to blithely comply with it?
And we all know that the problems with these individuals is not that they committed these crimes, it's that they explicitly called into question this very authority in the first place. That the government then uses this as further justification to destroy these individuals lives, permanently destroy their liberty, and broadcast a chilling effect over anyone who would ever attempt to improve these policies is what inspires people to lionize these figures.
I’d be willing to bet a massive amount of money that most pirated media is less than a few years old.
I don’t believe that we as a society are ever going to decide that copyright protection should be less than that.
A society where we have open, legal access to all the cultural pieces of the last century is very different from our own. And it seems difficult to know how it would affect both the consumption, but also the creation of media.
Sometimes, when I argue about this IRL, I'm told that we are practically there because of piracy. But this is a debate of tech enthusiasts, we know how to download, we now how not to get caught. The majority does not
You could ask the same question about the Hollywood studios that were built on evading patents.
What he did was clearly illegal - because the studios make the laws.
He started it as an improved successor to megaupload, but something shady happened about 2015ish with a Chinese investment firm doing some kind of hostile takeover.
I like this. Us internet boomers got to learn and get everything for free. The new kids coming in are paywalled to hell :)
I think enough time has passed that I can say this openly: I worked for an ad network that was used by MegaUpload. Most of the traffic from his site was fraudulent bot traffic. Mysterious advertisers would repeatedly rebuy ad placements that were clearly not generating any returns. There was definitely things that didn't add up to the point I would error on the side of believing the government on this one.
The problem is that government doesn’t have a line, that line is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses is a fool’s errand. Copyright holders, the government, and powerful interests are entities that have no problem playing dirty.
[Citation needed]
Teach a man to fish and all that.
I didn't post it because he (and you) can search for yourselves. Literally first result for "uk illegal meme".
I too would love to know the story behind that claim because, having lived in the UK for a good number of years, I’d guarantee there would be more going on than simply just what the GP suggested.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/09/two...
I suppose in a way advocating for arson and hate crimes is an "illegal meme"..
At which point is the boundary between meme and instigator?
THIS is why the Second Amendment. It's easy to revenge-kill a crazy, it's harder to revenge-kill a government. Keep your governments small and your crazies armed!
Do you have a source? There's plenty of disinformation on the internet, and I'm curious to learn what has happened.
You know how nuts that sounds to me as a mathematician?!
There’s also a limit to going too far in connecting abstractions.
I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.
Even in the extreme case, where it really does contain images in binary format, there is only the latent potential of that being transformed into something objectionable, several steps removed.
If this was the accepted norm everywhere, then practically every adult in the US would be guilty of some latent potential crime, after several degrees of separation.
e.g. even though lunatics use knives in mass stabbing sprees, we don’t assign blame to those selling knives or knife making equipment in stores where the lunatic happened to have gone shopping.
If we are talking about a physical book containing 1s and 0s that represent CSAM, I'd ask how you encoded the image to get the binary representation...
Intermediaries who likely cannot recognize it and won’t think twice about reproducing it, even if later on it does get transformed back.
What the original impetus for creating and distributing it is irrelevant to anyone subsequently encountering it.
To continue the knife analogy, even if the knife factory was also in fact owned by some maniac, the salespersons in the retail stores still not assigned blame even if they promote the knives.
The salespersons are just random middle men who couldn’t possibly have been expected to personally investigate the actual background or provenance behind what they’re handling.
You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...
1s and 0s can be sending bitcoin to a hit man to kill your wife. In this case, link to harm is indeed obvious, and evil and years in jail are justified. Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
I don't know if theres a correlation between evil and jailtime. The debate around the severity of punishment is different than the debate about whether or not something should be illegal. I do think my (US) justice system is very flawed, especially around sentencing.
> Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
I can take a stab at it. Simulated CSAM :
* if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.
* has the potential to normalize the distribution of CSAM due to #1
* has the potential to normalize the consumption of CSAM.
To address the comments being birthed around unproven causal relationships- yeah I know. The parent asked for arguments. Besides, a study into this doesn't seem very ethical or possible.
I am not able to discount the "ick factor", but I'll try to make a counterpoint.
All of the arguments I can think of to the contrary center around free speech, false positives and weaponization. That's where I think the challenges are and where subjectivity can cause issues. Without a real person, it's difficult to assign a simulated age unless a prompt is captured or other context. Otherwise it becomes the job of a person or other 'AI' to guess the simulated age of the image.
Yes, but at the same time it'll greatly devaluate the real CSAM. It'll be like flooding the black market of perfect copies of rhinoceros horns. People won't have any economic incentive to create real CSAM.
No matter how abhorrent a picture is it can not harm anybody by merely existing. Harm can (or may not) only be inflicted to others during its production or with its demonstration.
Banning possession of pictures produced without participation of any living person other than the viewer makes no sense.
Banning possession of child abuse pictures used to make sense because possessing implied buying and buying incentivized production which depended on actual child abuse. Nowadays nobody has to be abused and I'm totally fine with weirdos using whatever pictures their sick imagination may want as long as this keeps them satisfied enough to be able to keep their wicked desires secret from every living person. I don't want the police to bust such people as long as they don't actually harm anybody and don't pay anybody to do the harm. No crime without an actual victim is worth ruining anybody's life, whatever kind of freak they are.
It's the same logic most countries use to ban possession of firearms. Their presence greatly increases the risk of lethal violence and suicide, despite being harmless to people when used correctly at the range or for hunting. The lack of need for firearms weighed against the harm they cause to others makes it a hard sell for remaining legal.
Firearms may get a pass because they have real utility in self defense, but there are no positive benefits to having an endless stream of fake child abuse.
I've watched my own three children learn to talk, then to write. The human mind is also trained on inputs.
For a more than just relevant part of people who would play with weights on a model to create anything that compensates for "child abuse" with "fake child abuse", the risk of lowering the threshold is extremely high. VR, AR, fake news and the scripted nature of some world events that are driven by common subgoals of interest groups are decrementing the opaqueness of the line between reality and delusion/illusion. Loss of reality & dissociation from humanity are things, especially among people with a fanbase & influence, money, power.
Games & TV and their influence are obvious and they do erode the threshold as well but it's reversible because the player is not the creator of his reality while with gen ai, prompts & weights, the player becomes more and more capable of simulating his own reality based on his derived preferences & idiosyncrasies. Games and TV have constraints that are set by the devs and show runners and all the crews involved in the process. Gen AI doesn't have that.
I have not tried to reduce my hypothesis but there's plenty of discussions and research into mental health crisis, recurring and one-time/impulsive (sexually) violent behavior as well as the correlating &or causal psycho-pathologies.
But I'm not a scientist. I just think. And sometimes I read.
It matters anyway. It's hard studying this stuff in the lab. Relevant measurements in the field need to be isolated but that can mostly only be done in retrospect and we are talking about LLMs, what can be generated, what will be generated and should it be legal or not?
Should the system prepare? Can it? What kind of colony will we become? Are there multiple endings/"liminals"/paths? Who (exactly) cares? Who will be affected? Who is aware and who isn't? Who is misguided (maybe it's me)?
If I was a different kind of idiot in the past, I would have made the money to have the peace of mind to dive deeper but as it stands, just babbling some thoughts isn't gonna get me anywhere. Except that it stimulates to put it into words and maybe get something coherent on paper some day, something that isn't purely wannabe-megalomaniac, but constructive ^^
That statement is carrying a lot of non-evidence with it.
Say my fetish is chocolate. If I ask an image generating AI to give me a photo of an adult made of chocolate and covered in sprinkles, that doesn't necessarily mean it was trained on that specific thing.
You don't seem to understand that "potential" is not "actual" (and also conveniently says nothing about actual probabilities). I could claim almost anything is "potential".
Eating grapes could "potentially" result in choking. Living in a house made of wood could "potentially" result in dying in a house fire. Driving over 70MPH could "potentially" result in hydroplaning if it is raining.
Why do we not care more about the "actual" harm (and its probability), as measured by science?
Oh, of course- Things that are banned are difficult to study, which is why people can invent any beliefs about them that they want to.
What's crazy is that my library contains naked photos of ME as a toddler (I scanned a bunch of old slides in a few years ago) and I have to of course wonder if that is going to get flagged. (My parents were German immigrants. Germans DNGAF about human nudity, unlike the puritanical Americans.)
There's a cost to automating this. You might say "well a human can tell" but humans don't scale.
Regarding the evaluation of everything else, I find it useful to ask what the concrete demonstrable harm is that has been done. Not the hypothetical harm, mind you. So for automatic generation of self-indulgent pornographic material (or for example things that are not even possible in reality such as... hentai?), I don't see an issue unless it is acted upon and demonstrably harms someone or violates consent (harm caused by creating a court case should not count towards this since that is circular reasoning). Most people who are only attracted to adults have fapped to content that is something they would never do in reality; I don't think it's a strong argument that the mere possibility that that might occur is enough to ban it.
the problem with CP is ... sigh ...the violations, the harm, the unconsentability, the trafficking, the exploitation, the "gateway drug" problem (which might or might not be the correct model of this psychopathology), and the other negative externalities.
It depends what is considered unlawful, obtaining the tears and causing the harm, or is it enjoyment of chemical compound?
Since when? Some people keep local copies of their media. Censorship and arbitrary license disputes can have streaming content snatched away at any moment.
Tell me a legal streaming service that I can use while swimming and I'd consider using it.
Until then, I'll stick to my MP3.
And what do you think people use now to store their music offline?
But really, how often are people offline? For me it's only when I'm on a flight, and I can prepare for that by using spotify or youtube and pressing the download button on a playlist.
I am when I am hiking, camping, or have poor reception like in my apartment complex. There are vast swathes of the globe that do not have connectivity at all.
Also, worth considering the online service could change its offering or die at any time. Songs I like are routinely removed from various online platforms, and it enrages me every time.
I agree with you with content changing being one of the many downsides of relying on streaming services. I just think that most people are willing to accept the trade off.
Curious what you have done instead?
UK law does not prohibit memes. It prohibits incitement to riot, as does US law. It prohibits incitement to murder, as does US law. In fact, these acts are illegal in almost every democracy in the World, even the most progressive and liberal ones, because they are reasonable statutes to extend common law (protecting people and their property from damage by others).
In recent weeks, a young man born in Wales to Rwandan-born Christian migrant parents, diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, stabbed three 6-year old girls to death at a dance class. He attempted to murder the other children in the class, and the adults who intervened.
The "illegal memes" as you put it, were that he was a foreign-born Muslim who had entered the country illegally (all aspect of this narrative are false), and that people should riot to show their displeasure, and kill Muslim migrants to "save our children".
Seeing these "facts", mobs rioted in multiple towns over the course of a week, injured multiple (unarmed) police officers, caused tens of millions of pounds in damage to private property, and attempted to burn down a hotel with 200+ migrants (including children), staying in it, while many people of colour were individually attacked, their shops looted, their homes and cars damaged, and so on.
Arresting and charging the people who did these things is an obvious priority.
Arresting and charging the people who spread misinformation (I believe it was actually disinformation - purposeful, intentful lies), and suggesting that riots and murder should take place, are just as guilty of incitement in the UK as they would be anywhere else in the World.
The internet is not a fantasy land. What you post has real World consequences. If you get together in a private forum and plan to kidnap, rape and kill a celebrity (a case also tried in the UK recently), that's not "online meme banter", that's conspiracy to kidnap, rape and murder. You're going to prison, you're a threat to public safety.
The lines you say the government don't have, they're there. They're called "laws". Some of them are arguably unjust - I've campaigned against some IP law extensions in the past, including the introduction of software patents in the EU (when the UK was still a member), and think RIPA was a tragedy of law making - but to say that laws are irrelevant and action is defined only by the resistance a government faces is absurdly cynical, naive, and simply not true.
Your last sentence leads to an obvious question: what do you think people should do instead of "sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses"? Do you think inciting riots and murder are the way to go?
Yes, people are frustrated about many things in the UK (lack of affordable housing, dentists, decent jobs etc). But a most of these things are down to austerity, poor governance and the greed of the ruling classes. They aren't caused by relatively tiny numbers (29,437 in 2023) of desperate people coming across the channel in small boats. They are just a convenient scapegoat.
Migration of all forms is at a record high in the UK [0], yet violent crime is at an all-time low. How is violent crime correlated to migration, as so many people claim on Twitter, WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages?
"What about the money we spend on them?", some ask. Well, contrary to popular belief, asylum seekers don't get mainstream benefits [1] and legal migrants aren't entitled to public funds until they have been granted indefinite leave to remain [2]. NHS costs need to be paid for either through the IHS scheme, or directly at 150% of cost [3]
"Oh, employed are they? Taking jobs off locals, are they?", the pub bore starts to snort. Well, no. Nobody really wants to spend 12 hours a day running a corner shop, or working in a field picking sprouts on minimum wage, which is why there are record levels of job vacancies in the UK right now. [4]
I'll ask again then, where are the previous drops? Migration does not cause increases in crime by any measure, the only costs incurred are caused by delays in processing, they're not "taking anybody's else's job" and overall migration leads to higher tax incomes, and they pay their way for services through taxes on jobs no local wants.
So please, spell it out for me. I'm really curious about those previous drops. I suspect that you may have been lied to.
[0] https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2193-9039-...
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
[2] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
[4] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
> The 2023 CONTEST report indicated that 75 per cent of the Security Service (MI5)'s caseload was from monitoring Islamist threats.
I don't support the violence and ultra-right (or just right) wings. I think that people have the right to protest.
What about burning down a community library because somebody had put the lie up on a local Facebook page that “all the kids books have been replaced by copies of the Quran”? Never happened, somebody lied, the lie spread, mob burns a public library down. Is that a legally protected right to protest?
On the 75% number, well, now you’re showing your hand. I will take your insistence you’re not a fellow traveller at face value, but I do need to point out you have drawn a line of association that the far-right want you to, they do it all the time, and it’s intentional and harmful.
You have called out a number referring to Muslims, but the “protests” were meant to be about immigration. Do you not think British people can be Muslim?
So let’s dive into the numbers [0], and have a think about something important.
In table 2.1 we find “Number of persons arrested for terrorist-related activity, since 11 September 2001, by self-defined nationality”. 3,302 of these people (62.6%), define themselves as British. It seems to me that by the logic of the dominant group being the dominant threat, MI5 should be spying on every Briton they can - these British people are all a threat to public safety!
Ah, but of course that’s not what people mean by “British”, is it? And there’s the problem. This is thinly veiled Islamophobia and racism. The far right like to suggest that “Muslim” and “migrant” are synonyms. It’s othering. It’s dehumanising. And you just showed you unconsciously agree at some level. Many people do, and it’s that sort of lazy thinking that means a) we never solve the actual problems we face as a society and b) create divisions when there don’t need to be any.
Migration has never been the risk some think it is. Protesting it by looting shops in your local high street is transparent thuggery. Provoking people to do so because of “immigrants” (nudge, nudge, we all know the targets are all brown people), is incitement to racial hatred. Threatening British born people because of their religion and skin colour because of “immigration” is - I think you can agree - not a reasonable form of protest at any level. The objection isn’t sound, never mind the protest action itself.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/operation-of-police...
1. a lazy sponger who just came here to live on benefits
and
2. taking your job
Sky News interviewed someone recently who said he was against immigration because it meant he couldn't get a job. It turned out that this guy was a convicted sex offender who had been in prison for his offence. But no, it was definitely immigrants to blame for him not having a job.
These people know what they're doing. All the crowds at the riot are the same kind of person. Yes, it's scary that the government has such power, especially when the government is usually so socially and technologically inept, and usually panders to the hateful people rather than prosecute them. I think the situation was that an online post was having a direct influence on the real world; there were people actively carrying out the requests.
Definitely something to keep an eye on, though. Then again Youtube comments sections are still full of homophobic comments, often including suggestions to imprison or kill people like me; would the people leaving those comments feel so brave when unmasked? Why don't they put their faces on what they say?
When the internet was even younger, and he called himself Kimble, he sold out other pirates to save his own ass.
His attitude is of a selfish and greedy person. Nothing to be admired.
How do online communities discuss controversial subjects while ensuring good-faith participation?
I don’t think newcomers should be excluded from conversations…what’s the requirement; 12, 24, 48 months? Who determines that? Account age isn’t the best indicator of good-faith participation (accounts can be hacked, bought, etc.).
Instead engage with the content itself and where it comes from to determine if it seems to be in “good-faith”. Ironically, writing off someone’s opinion based on a single (potentially unrelated) fact is probably “bad-faith”.
From the guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
No, you make tools which are easily copied and spread which disempower states and groups and instead empower individuals to act unimpeded. You make tools which make it impossible to enforce copyright or any other state imperative because everybody has the tools needed to neutralize the group attempting to use force.
The correct answer is to formulate software and memes (human software) which act as viruses which infect the local carriers of the overall social operating system (in America it is some flavor of American Westernism), turning the original operating system non-functional (Bezmenov's demoralization), and steamroll the reigning technocratic elite off top the tiger and install yourselves, or your StateDAO, or whatever.
When the system is going to take at least a decade, that should be treated as a pending life sentence or execution, and I admire anyone who fights it to the death even. Just don't go in, get housed in concrete, work for $0.68/hour they deduct 75% for housing from and then sell you bricks of Ramen for $1, while dodging shivs from behind. At that point it is too late to act to defend yourself!
You need a year of this treatment if you disagree with me!
Set it up right and you can thumb your nose at all of them forever.
> Schmitz was arrested in March 1994 for selling stolen phone numbers and held in custody for a month. He was arrested again in 1998 on more hacking charges and convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud and 10 counts of data espionage. He was given a two-year suspended sentence; the judge of the case described Schmitz's actions as "youthful foolishness".
> In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump,resulting in a €1.5 million profit for Schmitz.
Also, that he used many of these things to enrich himself and live a lavish lifestyle does not exactly make him more likeable to me.
This is just _dumb money_. Also I dont see how this is different to many crypto marketeers today.
Russia or China wouldn't have extradited him.
Also, he'd probably live a peaceful, wonderful life had he not flexed and talked shit on Twitter so much.
he always had this and has always been selling snake oil. He might gotten some clout with mega but he always has been a charlatan.
I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored content or product placement stuff in music videos).
It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked down on TV content.
Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like extortion, it’s unfair anyway (prices constantly increasing, and you still get ads even if you’re paying… might as well go back to pirating stuff)
Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts within the DoJ
>Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom show that many top Googlers — all the way up to co-founder Sergey Brin — were concerned about YouTube’s copyright piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google’s ethics.
>[...]
>Google executives — who previously had referred to YouTube as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” — nevertheless agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-cal...
I mean it's actually a pretty good argument.
If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be expected to police it?
> [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission."
---
Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10 times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other links would still let you download that file.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
Only if copyright holders voluntarily upload their content in a complete crazy manor. Otherwise the argument doesn't work since uh the copyright holder can easily identify which uploads were infringing.
> The only interesting thing here is that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it.
Lawsuit is public record, feel free to link to those emails.
---
Also from reading the lawsuit, Google removed the content in question.
To quote the case.
> [1] This case concerns the alleged infringement of a closed universe of videos posted on YouTube at various times between 2005 and 2008. As this Court explained, “only the current clips-in-suit are at issue in this litigation.” SPA54. All those clips were removed from YouTube years ago. SPA45 n.7. Viacom originally claimed that hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos infringed its copyrights, but ultimately identified approximately 63,000 clips-in-suit. JAXIII:3135(¶¶6-7). It turned out, however, that Viacom’s own employees and agents had actually uploaded many of those clips. JAIX:2213-14(¶¶150-152); JAXIII:3135-36(¶¶8-11); JAXXII:5745-46(¶¶1.63); JAXXIII:5973-75. Even when it realized that fact (after years of litigation), Viacom and its lawyers still were unable to identify all the clips-in-suit that Viacom was responsible for posting. JAXXII:5717-20(¶127), 5544-46(¶11). Many clips-in-suit, moreover, are identical to or indistinguishable from promotional clips that Viacom now acknowledges uploading.
The non-court filings are way more accusatory but should really stick the court filings for matters of fact.
> [2] It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.
> [2] Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
[1]: pg 15 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4135344/143/viacom-inte...
[2]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/
Did it occur to you why they did that? Perhaps to make them appear legit on a service that was well known for piracy in the first place? The big difference here is that megaupload was not as popular as youtube among normies. So they didn't bother to leak there. Or maybe they did, and we just don't know yet. Dotcom could still come up with the same defense in the coming trials and it would be hilarious. Especially since there is research that show that piracy can boost media. So if Viacom didn't do it, someone else certainly did. The double standard is very real.
No need to for speculation. Viacom can explain their own behavior which they never do and just admit it happened and they also later informed YouTube about it the next day.
> The double standard is very real.
Maybe go read the lawsuits. Reading poorly summarized (or not even summarized) content of it is really not going to show the differences.
No one is speculating here. Read the discussion again. The argument was literally "if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well"
That is blatantly false. No need to sugarcoat this.
You're conflating emails from Google Videos with YouTube ... Those are separate products and at one point even competitors. That would be like using emails sent amongst Trump staffers to prosecute Joe Biden for treason.
Keep in mind, that quote is in relation to why Viacom "roughed up" their videos. Which you literally asked for speculation on in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41266386 .
Interesting...hadn't heard of this before
Edit: found at least one source now when I went looking: https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...
> When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay.
> Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.
Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.
Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo
Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate.
Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.
Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.
Back in 2012 you could upgrade the RAM yourself. Now there's no real alternative.
I read this and din't quite understand the argument, but realized (if I understood) this is saying that if you are a content host, then you need a lot of resources to deal with copyright violations, so it's hard to compete against these hosts.
Safe harbor in the DMCA isn't perfect, but a world without safe harbor would be a world with a lot less freemium products, that's for sure.
How does that prevent sharing, you can just setup email forwarding with someone else you want to share the account.
not impossible. Having to forward login emails creates more friction than sharing a password once.
You can set up automated email forwarding, its a one time process just like sharing passwords.
In their desperate attempt to not lose a fight that's been going on for, what, 10 years? 15 years? They're increasingly looking like a child that cannot move on from a primary school sleight.
The US look like an ass because the law they're seemingly-autistically pursuing, is an ass.
Pragmatism has no place here, it would seem.
Also, downloading from Mega will get you a (partial at least) red flag from intelligence / law enforcement.
I think this would flag my entire generation, at least back in the 2000s.
(the opposite to the case this article is about)
I remember a quote (from close to 20 years ago?) that anyone who uses GPG lights up on NSA's radar "like Christmas lights". This seems to be the same thing.
Re: source. Hopefully I'm consistent, you can go back through my comment history. I was raided by the police a bit over two years ago. When I got my stuff back (8 months later, no charges) the lead detective said that there was evidence I'd downloaded things from Mega, and that this was "suspicious", amongst a couple of other things.
I got the feeling she thought I was still guilty and had somehow managed to get away with the distribution of which I was suspected (or it was some kind of retro justification for gross violation of my rights and she was taking a front foot stance to minimise the chances I'd see what legal avenues are available in such situations - turns out very few to none).
She specifically mentioned as suspicious:
- history of downloading from MEGA
- using virtual machines
- having "tor" installed.
Interesting combination of cluelessness (wait until they're introduced to containers!). MEGA somewhat stands out in that bunch, in that there are lots of similar services as far as I know. Makes me wonder if it's a honeypot (but maybe not, because then they'd know the only thing I downloaded from MEGA was android ROMs).
Other than being outspoken on certain topics online, my browsing history is as boring as the next guy's. So I really think they put some weight behind MEGA activity.
Does that mean usage of all file lockers are equally flagged as suspicious?
My memory gets a bit patchy here, but I'm pretty sure the detective said something along the lines of "MEGA is only ever used for <thing I was accused of>". Which struck me as blatantly false and indicative of either an agenda or incompetence.
And I tend to subscribe to Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I think Hyphanet or IPFS or the like with fixed and padded bandwidth links will be the next step in privacy. Again, there are consumer ISPs selling netflow data!
Are you based in the US or?
Ready your proximity Geiger counters, they're already on their way (bellies full)!
The Government has a duty to protect domestic industry from foreign threats, and throughout history, that isn't reserved to state actors.
Megaupload was a severe threat(*) to major American industries, and Kim Dotcom flagrantly ignored pressure from America to stop what it was doing. When that happens the Government gets to pick which of its heavy hammers to drop, and KDC is lucky it was just lawyers.
You have to look at this through the eyes of the government and how it conducts foreign policy, often over long spans of time, with the goals of expanding and defending American interests - which includes protecting industries.
(* was it? we'll never really know)
For the GP: part of (any) gov's power is what you refer to as "autistically" pursuing a case. A large org will never be nimble or fast enough to catch criminals in the act or immediately afterwards. It balances that slowness by inexorably pursuing criminals, sometimes at greater expense than the cost of the original crime.
Would be criminals should believe that they might execute a heist successfully, but that they will need to always keep running because the gov is doggedly pursuing.
None of what I am saying is specific to Kim Dotcom, just trying to highlight to GP how governments execute business.
This is foreign policy, and the US has pursued control of copyright distribution, globally, for a very long time. Being from Australia, I remember the sense of disquiet as our copyright laws were modified as part of trade deals with the US. Many other nations (perhaps most?) have done the same (whether the law changes were pushed via the US directly or through UN related bodies is largely irrelevant). You combine that with the extremely tight coupling of large corporate bodies and the US government, and US foreign policy looks like authoritarianism.
So I agree that what we see with these extreme examples of “Kim dotcom” and “Assange” extraditions are part of a broader foreign policy strategy. Where I disagree with your post is the statement “American interests”. To me, the interests served are the conglomerate of political and corporate powers, which may be at odds with the average US citizen.
That's a fair criticism, and thank you for the insightful comment that I think gets at what I was talking about. I think at the heart of it is the question of whether what's good for American industry is good for the American people, and that question almost never has a good answer.
I have complicated feelings about this issue, because on the one hand, I have experience working with these media organizations and I can tell you they are extremely adverse to change and would prefer dumping money into legal battles than even consider innovating. They will always be dragged kicking and screaming into doing it. And the pressure that piracy put onto the industry did lead to some innovation that was for the better. No example is better than early Hulu, which was an industry collaboration, and at its heart was an admission of failure of legacy business practices to put television and later film on the internet for free (and then later, for a price).
On the other hand, entertainment is an extremely important American industry. It's one of our chief exports and a source of soft power. It gets people around the world to learn English without us shipping teachers to foreign countries, it teaches Americanisms to people who've never visited the country, and helps influence not only the perception of America but allows us to export American values to countries that don't have them (whether or not that's good or moral is up to you to decide). Those are all good things for the American people when we're exporting or importing anything else, and in the globalized economy that's the kind of soft power that has second order effects on every other industry.
When that industry is threatened and they can point to a specific foreign actor that is maliciously targeting them and making it harder for the industry to operate efficiently, then yea, it makes sense for the government to bring down the heaviest hammer they possibly can and flex their hegemony on allies to put an end to it. And in terms of pragmatism, it's easier to shut off the threat at the source than to deal with the effects domestically while suffering those internationally.
This is an antiquated example, but it's why the government invaded Tripoli in the early 19th century. America was dependent on exports of their goods to Europe, and Barbary pirates threatened that. So instead of just accepting what happens overseas, they joined with Sweden and sent naval squadrons and marines to force the state of Tripolitania to enforce peace (through war). You could say that was some conglomerate of political and corporate powers with exporters, but at the end of the day it was crucial for the fledgling state to make others understand they shouldn't mess with American ships at sea. And it's something we do to this day, by putting naval forces on major shipping routes and effectively destroying piracy as an institution. And we, the American people, get lower prices and higher profits as a result.
All problems smooth away the moment some based brogrammer chad puts in a pull request on a clone of Hyphanet's Opennet (call it Onionnet), and just swap out all the IP address variables for .onion address variables and clean things up.
Literally. I might do it myself even and I hardly know how to terminate a C string! Nationstates are going to love me dicking with the code...
I'm not saying that this crime is on the same level, but Megaupload was at one time responsible for 4% of the entire Internet's piracy activity. And it wasn't a non-profit peer-to-peer file sharing community like The Pirate Bay or anything like that, it was a for-profit corporation directly profiting from stolen IP. Kim built himself a gigantic mansion off of other people's work.
And he certainly had the means and ability to consult with lawyers who almost certainly told him that what he was doing was incredibly risky.
I’d say, why not say that also for drug cartels? The only reasonable argument that comes to my mind is that some big cartel head might have local government influence, but that does not apply to Kim and New Zealand, right?
Another possible argument would be that the damage has been done elsewhere. But in the case of the dtug cartel, if there are victims in 20 countries that why would any third party have priority for enforcing their law?
That's not really relevant. No one is arguing priority. "Priority" implies there's 20 countries fighting to prosecute someone and we need to resolve it. In this case, it was a cooperation between multiple countries who agreed someone needed to be prosecuted, regardless of which country did it.
Because New Zealand is willing to and he broke the law in the U.S. as well? Why would there be an argument at all?
You were criticizing someone's argument and brought up two points of your own that don't make sense to me. Drug cartel members DO get extradited.
There's a bunch of these people extradited all the time.
He doesn't have US nationality and he was living most of his life in Germany and New Zealand.
We have copyright treaties signed by most nations. I think the copyright infringement crime shall be judged at the jurisdiction the suspect is living and committed the suspecting act.
I always assumed all decent countries have that, and of all especially the USA which is famous for things like "The Hague Invasion Act".
It’s called the open internet.
Should a corporation be able to sue you for simply sharing an image of Micky?
Youtube is mentioned in the 2013 brief:
>b. According to the YouTube “Terms of Service,” users who upload content to YouTube retain all of their ownership rights in their content. By uploading their content to YouTube, however, such users grant YouTube a license to use, reproduce, and distribute such content. >
>c. In general, the further reproduction and distribution of videos that are taken from the Youtube.com platform violates the copyright of the individual who uploaded that video to Youtube.com.
It’s impossible to use a copyrighted work to train without making a copy of it.
The bit copyright idea is so flawed it almost feels satire.
Infringing copyright requires far more than this.
And if the output is transformative, then they can read whatever public facing information they can find, just as you can.
What the heck are you going on about with isp, router, screen etc? Btw, have you heard about HTTPS and what it does, while we are at it?
This is one rule for corporations and another rule for individuals.
Additionally, there is often with little or no recourse when the latter are falsely accused.
Look and the frustration of YouTubers evoking DMCA takedowns for including 5 seconds of a commercial song accidentally.
Show me the money.
Amiga (never heard of him during my scene time), then his alleged mobile ISDN service, MEGA.
He seemed like the shady poster child for every trend who got stopped before jumping once more publicly on Crypto.
then used those proceeds to launch his other businesses
I really enjoyed Megaupload & rapidshare those were almost as good as the WaReZ days if not better: direct links to any digital content without waiting for seeders
It's a shame. Arresting Dotcom won't do anything to curb piracy in fact it would raise the stakes even higher and more untraceable leading to more uncensored content that would be deemed "harmful"
Dotcom should've chosen Russia or China instead of NZ but obviously the quality of life isn't quite up to par with NZ. Russia dacha outside moscow would've been great for him without worries of US extradition.
[0] https://venturebeat.com/games/kim-dotcom-modern-warfare-3/
When MEGA launched Kim was well known enough where his new service got tracktion on it's own.
The only difference is the "we encrypt everything so we don't know what users upload" trick, which seems to have worked so far (and branding and stuff).
Megaupload took steps to specifically support piracy. When a movie studio would report a pirated copy of one of their movies, Megaupload would tell the studio they removed it but in reality they would only make it so the specific link the studio new about would stop working. They would not delete the underlying file and any other links would continue to work.
This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation. When child porn was reported they were able to kill the reported link and the underlying file, thus breaking all links to it.
>This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation.
This, and the rest of your comment makes sense in 2024, but not around 2010.
Back then:
* All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem at the time. You were even able to find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
* Most of these companies (including the "good ones"™ like YouTube) thrived under this (unlawful) sharing of copyrighted content. Measures against it were being actively developed and tested and there was a big backslash from the platform's users as they were being introduced, i.e. it wasn't an armchair software engineer's "easy problem". When these platforms incorrectly labeled and removed content due to copyright infringement, it was a bit of a scandal, with many of these events reaching the news and people boycotting platforms and threatening lawsuits.
* Piracy was huge compared to today, torrents were almost the norm. Not trying to justify it, just trying to put in context what internet users used the internet for. If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it. The "market" was there, with or without Megaupload. I would even go as far as to suggest a wild point of view where Megaupload was actually a victim of piracy as well.
* A lot of legislation around this was not in place and/or mature enough. Some landmark cases around Section 230 were just starting to take shape. It was not black or white clear whether a platform should be responsible for its content or not and what are the legal requirements for them to address this liability.
* The overall sentiment of tech people (even in communities like this one) was that internet services should behave like utilities, in spirit; I still believe this to be the right approach. It follows from that that whatever misuse of them made by end users should hold them liable and not the utility provider.
At Megaupload they were not eventually removed. At Megaupload the same physical file could be accessed by different URLs. When a rights holder reported the content Megaupload only made it so the specific URL no longer worked.
> If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it.
He was encouraging it. Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
They published list of the top downloads, but first checked them for pirated content and removed those items from the list. What purposed does that have other than trying to hide the infringement?
This is not true. All DMCIA requests were properly addressed and the content removed.
They even had a dedicated page to submit these requests, years before YouTube and others did so.
>Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
I would like to see a source for this.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-edva/legacy...
> On or about February 13, 2007, ORTMANN sent an e-mail to VAN DER KOLK entitled “my concerns about the thumbnails table.” In the e-mail, ORTMANN asked VAN DER KOLK to create “a dummy lifetime premium user,” stating that “[t]his is very important to prevent the loss of source files due to expiration or abuse reports.”
The company was literally reposting copyrighted material under puppet accounts.
I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution.
The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new business models / protecting current models in law, and then a fair amount shaking down and sorting out happening as new technology hits the scene, going back to radio. Each of these waves has led to push / pull between distributors, retailers, artists and song writers, and whether or not you like it, that’s the system we have today.
MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. But, it wasn’t the wrong model using tech of the time. It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly.
That's the killer, right there.
"existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been ignored by tech bros for a long time.
As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse).
If we take that away, guess what happens?
No one wants to do it, anymore.
This may be an issue, with AI-generated creative content. Unless the AI is truly better than human talent (and "better" is in the eye of the beholder), it has the very real prospect of turning the commercial creative industry into gray goo.
[EDITED TO ADD] Watching the karma count on this post, yo-yoing up and down, has been fascinating. This seems to be an issue that people have very strong feelings about.
That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career.
I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes.
Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products.
I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count.
So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different?
I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country.
People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?"
I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill.
We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
This transaction does not need IP protection at all.
Actually, that's what I do, these days. Take a gander at my work. It's not exactly "Hobby grade" stuff, but I don't make a dime from it.
I'm grateful for the many years of being a professional, that helped make it possible for me to do it creatively, these days.
I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported.
Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.
You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.
But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to).
Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.
It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
In fact, if you look at the behavior of many tech company legal teams, that seems more like what tech corporations do, than individual creatives.
This is the stuff I did in the 1980s, when I was considering making a living at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry
The jury's still out on that.
The music industry can't hold a candle to some of the raw destruction that has been wrought by tech.
It's just balanced by a lot of good (and making tech billionaires isn't really what I consider "good").
In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales.
I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop.
This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers.
The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a pirated game, is a lost sale.
A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.
AutoCAD, in particular, used to be[1] super smart about this and went out of their way to get their toolchain in front of high-schoolers (even back when that involved pricy copy-protection solutions like physical dongles).
[1] Not to imply they are no longer super-smart about it; I just no longer have clear signal.
I pirated every single game I have ever bought first, with the exception of games that had Demos. If it's a Denuvo game, I refuse to ever buy it (especially since the pirated version is guaranteed to be a better experience).
What leads to lost sales in the video game world (at least if we look at people like myself) is making bad games, whether it be horrible optimization issues, bloated spyware like Denuvo, broken/buggy games etc.
Like Gaben said, people have no problems with paying for stuff, it just has to be high quality and reliable, and most modern games are neither for the most part.
Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.
To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties.
Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same.
As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.
[0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent
[1] Fascism with extra steps
[2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.
You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different despite the name similarity.
MegaUpload existed as a file hosting service. It was widely used by pirates, and MegaUpload earned a lot of money off of hosting pirated files because users would buy subscriptions to MegaUpload specifically because of the pirated content that they could download, without the limitations that are placed on the users of the free tier.
With a paid subscription you got:
- Multiple parallel downloads
- Much faster speed
- No waiting time between downloads
A similar service was RapidShare, also popular with pirates.
Pirate sites would typically split downloads into multiple parts due to restrictions on upload size on MegaUpload, RapidShare and other file hosts like that. They would then upload these parts to MegaUpload and RapidShare and one or two other file hosts so that:
- If files were taken down from one host they might remain available for a bit more time from one of the other hosts
- Free users could speed up download times by simultaneously downloading the different part files from different hosts. So you’d start a download for part 1 from MegaUpload, part 2 from RapidShare and part 3 from some other host. Then you’d occasionally check on the slow progress and the countdowns from each sites before they allowed you to download another part, and continuing downloading parts from each as soon as they allowed you to again after you finished downloading a previous part from them.
The connection to Mega is that after MegaUpload was shut down, they started Mega and they made it so that all uploaded files were encrypted client side during upload and the URL contains a fragment with the encryption key so that it’s decrypted client side and the key is not shared with the server (unless of course the JS served by the server is modified to explicitly send the key to them either during upload or download).
This solved a problem for the pirates and it solved a problem for Mega.
Previously when a file was taken down, the host would usually make note of the hash of the file that was taken down and not allow that file to be uploaded and shared again.
Now, with encryption users could reupload the exact same parts without having to do anything on their end. And the users downloading did not have to do any extra steps either on their end either.
This benefits the pirates greatly. When you’ve spent 3 days downloading a bunch of part files and suddenly the remaining parts are all taken down and their hashes banned it sucked to be a pirate. But with this automatic encryption the same parts could be reuploaded and new links could be posted to pirate forums and the users could pick right up again where they were in the progress of downloading all the parts.
Less work for users uploading. Less work for users downloading. Happier users. More paying customers.
And in addition to more money, Mega also have less work to do as now when someone argues that they should police the uploads better they can point to the files all being encrypted and then not having the keys to decrypt the files there is no way that they actually can inspect the files they are storing for their users. (Again unless they modify the JS they serve to their users so that they intentionally send the key to the server.)
Of course, encryption benefits everyone. Not just pirates.
But at least to me it appeared strongly that the main motivation for building Mega and having it use this client side automatic encryption and decryption was very specifically because of the experience they had with takedown requests for intellectual property hosted on MegaUpload. It’s a neat way to cater to the pirates and encourages them to become paying customers of Mega.
I still find it surprising that so many people use Mega (at least enough that it can stay in business) when BitTorrent can easily saturate a downlink and is free.
Magnet links are also hashes, so when you retrieve torrent metadata from your peers from a magnet link that data will also be verified for integrity.
However, if the original torrent itself was made from malicious data then it’s still gonna result in malicious code on your system.
Interestingly though, it is probably far more likely that a torrent with a very low number of seeders is malicious, than that a popular torrent contains malicious data in the files you download.
I suppose it could still be possible that the malicious code sent by a peer was targeting a weakness in your torrent client itself though. And that they could get remote code execution on your computer that way.
The main thing I would worry about with torrents is that your IP could be seen in the swarm by one of the companies that monitor torrent peers on behalf of rights holders and send you a nasty demand for money and threats of legal action.
If you are connected to a server, the server is the only connection(and only one with a log) but with a torrent, there are multiple connections so multiple parties could be keeping logs.
Depending on how a file is split in the torrent, it could be possible to add malice data with a collision: https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/
It's up to the courts and to them to decide. Perhaps they are doing it already, but just keeping it low-profile, so the "real" dangerous people get attracted to the service and caught.
Like VPNs.
One of the complaints the US case had was that MegaUpload specifically did not do this. They de-duplicated uploads by hash internally, but when one download URL was DMCA'd, they only disabled that one URL and left other URLs with the same hash accessible.
He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows
Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks about that but images online are constantly breaking copyright law.
They even paid people to upload high demand popular copyrighted files. They crossed a number of lines that other companies of the era didn’t dare cross.
As far as equating Kim Dotcom to Assange and Snowden, if it isn’t clear by now that Assange and especially Snowden are Russian assets by now idk how to convince you. Like, Snowden tried to travel to Ecuador via Moscow and Hong Kong? Coincidentally just stopping by at the number one and number two intelligence agency adversaries of the United States? He could have just flown from Miami to Ecuador directly. Why didn’t his original plan involve flying to South America? It’s so obviously suspect in retrospect.
But Kim Dotcom isn’t a political retribution target on that same level anyway, he’s just an egotistical idiot who thought he could play with law enforcement and get away with running a for-profit piracy website.
The one thing Kim has in common with Assange and Snowden is that he could have avoided a decade of self-imposed house arrest and/or exile by facing justice in court and taking the L. But Kim is attached to his ideals so much that it he’s wasted a good chunk of his life with this issue hanging over him, all because he doesn’t want to give in to the pragmatic reality that he brought upon himself.
except they did a bad job by replacing tracks that sounded similar and then deleting the original.
From the beginning, Kim's company put itself front and center in the piracy world. It was advertised as an alternative to BitTorrent and you were meant to share links with others.
When licensors and eventually authorities asked him to stop, he laughed at them and doubled down.
He's played the pirate the whole time, and he's hated authority and venture capital and IP every step of the way.
There's a reason he would up where he is versus the other IP grey area companies and products that became wildly successful. He deliberately chose this path.
Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.
Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.
Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.
Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.
Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
I believe that's incorrect. See Plex Pass, and Plex shares are a common form of sharing pirated content.
Of course not, but they had no moderation for a long time so that that's what people were using it for. At that scale it's not an oversight, it's a customer acquisition strategy.
Once they hit critical mass they killed the feature as one would expect before negotiating lucrative deals with distributors via Google Play Music and eventually Youtube Music.
I think the line is very blurry, the only difference is one side is doing it very quietly and strategically, while the other was blustering their way through.
May be worth to compare the usual tactics of IP owning companies to what happened to Kim. I have a feeling that it could be shown that the kind of treatment he got was not very probable for a normal piracy case, even after accounting for his eccentric behabiour.
ALSO politically he was a failure but not so much that it was not worth paying attention to him as challenger of establishment. Even those normally ignorant of related topics but active in politics may have seen him as an agent eating their votes.
I also don't think you can be held responsible for what your users do with your service, especially if you are complying with DMCA requests.
They're shooting the postal service just because it bothered some powerful people.
This is happening because Media is a powerful lobby in the USA and Mega is a nobody.
Just another example of government corruption, move along.
Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...
I'd say it would be a a reasonable perspective if his case was being tried where the offences actually took place and/or where he was a citizen of and not a country who refuses to give the same rights to non-citizens being tried there compared to citizens[1] and wasn't even where the offense took place. This is absolutely chilling for anyone who isn't an US citizen honestly.
An applicable case would be someone being extradited from the US to the UK to be tried for a crime that happened while they were in a different country.
DotCom is not a NZ citizen, he's a resident.
Considering the number of countries that extradite their own citizens, the bar for "selling out" and "mockery" must be quite low.
And most extradited people don't have the luxury of being able to delay their trial by 12 years.
No. What I said was that this is a mockery of jurisdiction. I seem to recall that DotCom lived in South Korea when what he's being accused of happened. Whether he's a citizen of NZ or not, this is a joke. The US has no legal right to demand his extradition just because the servers were in the US. It's just using political power to get its way. Like I said in a different sub-thread, what, it now has jurisdiction over the entire planet and can require anyone anywhere to follow its laws?
The general rule is that a crime takes place where the victim stands. Where the perpetrator stand is a potential secondary location. The alleged victims here were "standing" in the US and so the US is proceeding with the case.
Trials in a third location are extraordinarily rare. Only things like the ICC or some admiralty proceedings involve trials in a third location.
I also think it's odd to talk about this being the "general rule" when there's plenty of crimes/infractions with no victim.
The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor crimes will not get them in hot water because other people do worse but keep on the low down, but time and again you see these guys being made an example of, probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.
So I guess like, don't behave like an asshole generally, but specially if you're also committing crimes. Kinda like not breaking traffic laws if you have a dead body in the trunk.
More likely because those people remain naïve about the real world. In a past career I had some interaction with IP enforcement lawyers. They were stuck in the past then and have not really evolved. Their understanding of "the internet" extends only to those things discoverable via google search. Megaupload was knocked down because it was so visible. Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA cannot see it.
How so? Google is a major distributor of most pirated material through YouTube and their search engine still makes finding stuff easy. I'd argue that p2p is nearly irrelevant nowadays and server-oriented distribution is the main model.
At that point, I had gotten really good at spotting counterfeits, so I really doubt we were selling any counterfeits, especially when they couldn't come up with a single instance. The publishing companies continue to do this because used books cut into their profits.
I just sent my lawyer after them and they never came back.
Amazon and the publishers eventually came to an agreement that there were certain textbooks they just won't allow to be sold as used on their platform.
My wife asked me last week to help her get a textbook in a format that could be viewed on a reMarkable tablet, which can read PDFs but won't work with arbitrary DRM schemes. I checked my options and found the publisher selling some DRM crap, and some clearly illegal sites selling DRM-free PDFs. Since I found plenty of people vouching that they'd received what they bought, I chose to (using a Privacy card number) willingly buy from the criminals, since they were the only ones willing to provide me what I needed: an unencrypted PDF that we can actually use on the device we want.
I know publishers are afraid someone will email the PDF to the whole class, so that's why college textbooks probably ought to be folded into tuition, that way (1) publishers can get paid for the correct number of copies and (2) someone who actually has to pay the money (the school) is somewhat in the loop on textbook selection. It's broken now since those actually paying (students) have no say in book selection.
I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the consequences, then there is no rule."
E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket, so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi...
I'd still be more likely to say the officer is making their situation worse. Take away the false dichotomy of loud and obnoxious vs calm and compliant and consider someone who doesn't answer irrelevant questions and is waiting for the officer to do their job (calm and not compliant). That person might have their situation worsened by the officer who thinks the person they're talking to is obligated to answer to the officer's whims.
(Based on what I've seen of police body camera footage.)
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with Kim Dotcom's case. It sounds like he's been more on the "loud and obnoxious" side and the authorities involved are not city response officers; it's hard to draw a parallel. Just pointing out that "you're just making it worse for yourself" is something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
> Something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
Yeah, probably right. But, also, yeah, easier sometimes to just appease the bully and move on with life.
I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our society that needs to be eradicated.
Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this composure the entire time.
Growing up or re-evaluating ideas you got when you were 14 is also not against the rules.
What are you doing to justify feeling like this? Is it just out of abundance of caution? When I interact with police it's usually for boring reasons - like I broke some petty law and they justifiably question me about it (and more often than not just let it slide, but they don't have to -after all they're just doing their job).
The tricky thing about a principled stand in favour of civil liberties is that you spend a lot of your time defending scoundrels, because it's their civil liberties that are most in danger from the mob and government. And once their rights go, yours are sure to follow.
[0] If you disagree, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
> [1] On August 4, 2017, the trial jury found Shkreli guilty on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty on five other counts which included wire fraud.
Granted, the case started in 2015 probably in response to him hiking the prices in 2014 but the thing he was being an edge lord about isn't what directly did him in. However, Capone didn't go to prison for murder either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Criminal_convic...
Something tells me the extradition orders only work one way — if the US Government wants it.
Who knows. To be fair it took years and seems to have been given due process. But how much of it is “leaning on” the countries? Recently on his X interview with Musk, Trump bragged about “how quickly” he was able to use US leverage to extradite people they wanted, from LATAM countries! And everyone was like “right on!”
In a way that makes it much easier to argue against the idea that IP protects creators and not their pimps.
A road paver is a great thing to have, but if I rip a three-lane highway through my neighbor's back yard, you can be damn sure someone's going to try and stop me.
He'd have one more option to fight tyranny, if your government didn't disarm the populace.
Imagine being yanked out of your home country by a foreign power and their corporate overlords with the prospect of living the rest of your life in third-world prison conditions, for the crime of allegedly reducing their balance sheets from $550B per year to $545B per year.
> things designed to kill people are illegal
Your government doesn't have guns?
not great to take away firepower from citizens while the terrorists have guns.
you end up waiting around for the police, which may or may not be prepared or even arrive on time.
The underlying problem for Megaupload is that what they were doing is illegal in over 180 countries (basically any country that is a party to a major international copyright treaty or convention).
A good general rule of thumb is that if you want to host something that is illegal in country X hosting it in country Y without an extradition treaty is not sufficient. You should pick a Y where it is not illegal there. Otherwise even if Y does not care enough to go after you, if Y has good trade or other relations with X the may respond positively to encouragement from X to go after you.
All the Federal agencies have been weaponized. SEC only went after companies like LBRY, Inc because their founders and platform share information they don't like. The real fraudsters on Wallstreet get away with anything.
The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO.
I do not think he's a criminal. A big (massive, maybe) fine should have been more than enough.
>>I do not think he's a criminal "He was arrested in 1994 for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was convicted on eleven charges of computer fraud, ten charges of data espionage and various other charges in 1998 that he served a two-year suspended sentence for.[7] In 2003, he was deported to Germany where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and after five months in jail awaiting trial he received another 20 months suspended sentence" (From Wiki)
>>The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO. Yeah it was over the top, but he had firearms on the property and bodygaurds....
I'm with you that he should have just been fined, but he made a tremendous amount of money very deliberately (despite his protestations) trafficking illeagaly in Warez, I geniunely think the US is right to go after and nail him.
As a New Zealander, our government should be far more judicous about who it grants visa's to - he should have prima facae been refused his original visa on the basis of his prior convictions (I am sure there is a good story about why this was (incorrectly) overlooked by NZ officials). This ultimately is not a problem of New Zealands government/judicial system making, they have very fairly given Kim every chance to appeal and hear his side of the story - whilst he engages in games of attempted political manipulation for his own aim. The chickens must come home to roost at some point.
IMO I dont think Kim deserves the publics sympathy, the shield of New Zealand residency or that he is a good faith operator.
I should have added "in the context of this lawsuit". An edit now would be disingenuous.
I guess one lesson from this is that running out of .COM domain names is not a bad thing, because it reduces the grip the American empire has on the internet.
"Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said." - Jun 25, 2012
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/internet-file-sharing-giant-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...
If you run a service that allows people to upload data, you are hosting pirated content. The DMCA was specifically designed to address this, to create a system whereby those who host data are not on the hook for every violation. The issue is not that you host pirated content but whether you are following all the rules necessary to enjoy safe harbor protection.
>> Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006. But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer, enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had said he lost, according to court documents. [..] In a July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to "steal it!" in an apparent reference to an unidentified video clip, according to the court documents. After Hurley asked if he wanted to steal movies, Chen replied, "haha ya. Or something."
>> Google had its own copyright reservations about YouTube before it struck a deal. Internal documents obtained by Viacom quote Google executives describing YouTube as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft" and warning the site "is completely sustained by pirated content."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/youtube-viacom-spat-gets-dir...
You are definitely misremembering and spreading FUD backed by your biases.
He was hosting illegal material on servers geolocated inside the US. I'm sure if someone were producing and distributing illegal material (let's use the extreme example: child pornography, for instance) on NZ servers and networks, NZers would want to see them extradited.
It has nothing to do with "imperialism".
You can try to pettyfog the case and move goalposts all you like, each time one of your points/misunderstandings is debunked, however it's pretty clear what he was doing. And, more importantly to the original point, the laws/extradition would apply similarly to any nations with the same IP laws; "empire" or not.
A couple points.
First, wasn't there a huge issue where the data centers had money problems because the FBI (or some agency) was forcing them to retain all the data, as they didn't actually know for sure what was there? Or am I wrong and they had a list of specific files hosted on specific servers and were able to use that to demonstrate wrongdoing? Just because I say I'm going to hack the Gibson, doesn't mean I actually do it.
Second, there is a real jurisdiction issue here. Kim Dotcom is a German citizen based in New Zealand. The servers themselves are (or were) hosted in the US. Did Kim Dotcom himself upload anything to them? I can absolutely see the case for shutting down servers that might contain illegal data. I don't see the case for extraditing someone to the US for allegedly breaking a law that applies neither to his country of origin nor residence.
Also, I'm not sure why you're being so angry with me, I'm just looking at the facts. I do have a bias, but I'm not moving any goalposts, just making sure we discuss the actual issues at hand.
Personally I find safe harbour arguments very weak when the service provider allows anonymous sharing.
But we don't need to wonder what the US would do in such a scenario, since we already know. What's being discussed is not that the Internet being in the way somehow changes things, but that countries shouldn't be able to override jurisdictions like this. If other countries had balls, the most the US could do is ask for a person to be tried in the country they were in when the event in question happened, under that country's laws. What, the US now has jurisdiction over every living person? Anyone can be accused and tried in the US despite never having set foot there?
If they choose to operate in/through that country, yes. If he never illegally hosted anything on a server within US jurisdiction, they would never have an argument.
Your entire argument is akin to "oh, I hired someone to kill a guy in the Germany, but I'm in China so...too bad". They only care because someone was killed (pirated material was hosted) in Germany, breaking Germany's laws.
You're delusional if you think other countries wouldn't make the same claims. And it's on the recipient country to agree or not. Plenty of countries deny extradition to the US all the time, just look at Roman Polanski.
What would normally happen in that case is that one country would present evidence to the other country, which would then prosecute under its own laws and court system, since hiring assassins is illegal everywhere. You're the one who's delusional if you think countries have free reign to impose their laws on people who are not physically there. It's called sovereignty. What NZ is doing here is saying that it's the US's bitch.
Oh, gotcha. You're a child.
You could have just lead with that.
The US government is so powerful, they are the only country that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave the country. The US treasury will withhold the ability to transact in US Dollars from any country that does not report the holdings of US-adjacent persons every single year.
If you think you're out of reach of a country that treats their own citizens as criminals by default the minute they leave the country, I have some swamp land in Florida to sell you.
That's not quite true. If you _return_ your green card ("abandon it"), you no longer have to pay taxes. This makes sense as a parallel to being a US citizen, who would pay taxes even if they lived abroad.
I'm not saying it's right, but we need to be accurate.
[1] In this context, including foreign businesses that file a U.S. tax return. [2] Note that for FATCA purposes, if a person is a US taxpayer for any portion of the year, they are subject to FATCA compliance purposes for that tax year no matter how much of that year was actually spent as a US taxpayer. However, if they are not a US taxpayer at the end of the year, they would not be subject to FATCA compliance for the following year.
FATCA does not apply once you are no longer a US taxpayer. Moreover, the FATCA regime has been copied by so many other countries (including the EU) that there is now a global version of FATCA called CRS (and the procedural system for implementing CRS is known as AEOI).
FATCA is now considered the least burdensome implementation of CRS, which has been implemented by all OECD countries, China, India, and Brazil.
If a bank is turning you down because you answered "YES" to the FATCA question, the problem isn't FATCA. The bank is trying to avoid an audit and it's a huge red flag not to do business with them.
Banks are run by people and they are private businesses. Humans don't follow laws like computers follow instruction, we are flawed creatures. Businesses will mitigate risks wherever possible, and refuse to work with customers who carry added risk all the time.
While in theory this shouldn't be causing people trouble and preventing people from getting locked out of the banking system or forcing them into unfair agreements, in reality, it is.
It turns out government regulation has unintended consequences. Just because it's "wrong" for them to interpret the regulation in this way, doesn't change the fact that many many established, legitimate banks are doing it "wrong." Nor does it help the people suffering the consequences to point your finger back at the wording of the regulation and say "Ackshually..."
If a foreign bank won't open an account for you because you were once American, the problem is that the bank has something to hide. Full stop. End of story.
Sounds like what a totalitarian king would do.
"In vain they change from a single person to a few. These few have the passions of the one; and they unite to strengthen themselves, and to secure the gratification of their lawless passions at the expense of the general good. In vain do we fly to the many. The case is worse; their passions are less under the government of reason, they are augmented by the contagion, and defended against all attacks by their multitude." - Edmund Burke, 1756.
The USA can, and does, tax non-citizens. Many countries tax non-citizens. Go out and buy a foreign stock-they will tax you on earnings or dividends. Go visit a country and pay the local sales tax.
It's quite easy to argue that handing over such power to a single government is in fact a large tax on every non-US citizen.
Sure smells a lot like levying tax on non-citizens living in other countries.
I did not see that in his comment. He said tax. You are making a pretty big leap.
Your comment is wrong too and here is the IRS link on when nonresident aliens have to file American taxes. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxa...
No, that's exactly what I meant. It's implied from context that I am talking about taxation of people living in other countries. The bit I was directly replying to from root post:
> The US government is so powerful, they are the only country that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave the country.
So I replied:
"USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you really ..."
[1] https://www.expatriationattorneys.com/tinkov-conceal-foreign...
N.B.: you have to pay to revoke citizenship.
So, legally speaking, you not only lose citizenship but also the right to ever step foot on American soil again, no matter which other citizenship you gain.
Of course, you can just lie about your reasons on the forms.
While it may be true that they are the only ones able to do it effectively, there are some other countries with citizenship-based taxation. According to Wikipedia[0] these currently are: Hungary, Eritrea, Myanmar and Tajikistan
Some other countries have similar policies for tax heavens.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Citizen...
I'm going to venture a wild guess: it may not be that difficult to hide assets from the short arms of the Tajikistani tax office.
So I don't think it's crazy to assume Americans are the only ones suffering under this policy in practice.
Are any candidates actually against this farce? Or are they all simply working for the companies behind this?
To explain why, we must keep in mind that all states are in a perpetual crisis of legibility. They have more force than anyone knows what to do with, while having no idea of what happens in their territory or whom to use that force on. To make matters worse, most democratic states - and nearly all states in the Anglosphere - have been constitutionally handcuffed to restrict their investigatory powers. This is an existential threat to the state, and so the state will take any chance it can get to impose legibility upon the people by force, lest the state be replaced with something worse.
I've worded the above like some kind of conspiracy theory, so let's remember exactly who we're talking about: the "I'm-just-doing-my-job" types. If your job is to investigate crime, then the 4th Amendment is an annoying hurdle you have to think about constantly. But it's not a high hurdle to jump over because most criminals are profoundly stupid. Drug kingpins are more of a problem, however. Organized crime is the criminal equivalent of an MLM, so you can pick off a bunch of idiots at the exterior, but not people running the organization. This is where law enforcement gets creative, weaponizing things like tax law and - yes, civil forfeiture - to cut at the root.
The pattern of how democratic states deal with limitations on their power that prove inconvenient is simple: they cheat. Or at least, they cheat the spirit of the law, if not the letter. For example, if your job is to investigate foreign threats to the country, you're not fighting criminals. You're fighting the Borg[0] - an existential threat that learns from and adapts to everything you do, even the successes. For the CIA/NSA, having to get a warrant is like running a marathon while having both hands tied around your back and wearing a pair of cement shoes.
Data brokers are the perfect workaround. They built the perfect panopticon and used social engineering to get people to consent to it. The CIA and NSA buys shittons of their data and mines it to find threats to the state because it's significantly easier and less complicated than getting specific warrants to collect specific data.
Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for positive propaganda. Here, we're working around the 1st Amendment, not the 4th. The US government can't legally compel Hollywood to make propaganda, nor can they prohibit Hollywood from making movies that denigrate US actions. But they can still pay Hollywood to make propaganda[1], they'll downplay the critical movies to save face, and even if they don't, it'll make America look like they're aware of and fixing problems they have no interest in fixing. So when the US government treats a storage platform for stolen songs as an existential threat, it is specifically because they are fulfilling their end of a deal with Hollywood.
But there's a catch. Those constitutional restrictions were put in there for a reason. If the CIA can buy data from data brokers, than so can China's MSS. American lawmakers are so irrationally afraid of TikTok because China figured out how to use the CIA's own weapons against it. The government's defense of the TikTok ban is page after page of redactions. They can't publicly say they know TikTok is a Chinese intelligence asset without telling the judge enough information to blow the cover of every CIA agent in China, but the black highlighter[2] itself is an admission.
Same with the anticompetitive actions. The late 90s saw the US government bring the hammer down hard on the tech industry[3], and then suddenly stop. Why? Simple - the tech oligopoly became useful to American interests and so was given a pass, to the chagrin of America's other sweetheart, Hollywood. Politicians only realized how much power had been actually ceded to big tech by accident. Social media made the mistake of ceding power to Donald Trump, who used it to run for president legitimately, lost a re-election campaign, and then attempted a feeble self-coup. Twitter and every other tech company rightfully shut him down, but this exposed how much power they really had been given in the political process. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter in a vain attempt to restore Donald Trump's influence[4], ensuring that the concern over Big Tech would be bipartisan.
I still can't point you to a politician to vote for, but I can at least point you to an ideology and a person who talks about it: the New Brandeis movement[5] and Cory Doctorow specifically. Louis Rossmann is also a good option if Cory is too left-wing for your taste. Lina Khan is a huge figure in neo-Brandeis and she runs the FTC now, which is why the FTC has been trying to do its job again[6]. I single out antitrust here as it is the enabler of all the other abuses I've detailed above. You need economic centralization in order to get perfectly funded propaganda machines or privatized spying and censorship.
[0] I hope Star Trek is still culturally relevant enough for this reference to land correctly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y
[2] https://www.theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-h...
[3] Examples include the antitrust actions against Microsoft, the copyright actions against Napster and Grokster, and various legislative attempts to either force computer manufacturers to include copy protection hardware or force online services to have upload filters for copyright.
[4] This is an after-the-fact justification; at the time Musk was high off Tesla's stock price and bought Twitter basically in the same way one buys a bunch of shit they don't need off Amazon at 3 in the morning.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brandeis_movement
[6] And let us hope to $DEITY that she succeeds, lest we find ourselves living in South Korea.
Seems unfair to not mention that the US here was aligning with the Bernie convention[0] (life + 50 years, Copyright Act of 1976[1]) and then latter aligning with European countries[2] (+70 years "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"[3]). Seems like something that might happen without any payments for propaganda. Also, I don't want to watch a 2 hour YouTube video, so maybe you can leave a link for the specific point about the US exchanging copyright extension for propaganda. Not even sure what propaganda would even be needed in 1998 - there were no wars, no China or USSR, no 9/11. Somehow I doubt the YouTube video will mention these points either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided
to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload"
He paved the way for streaming and digital distribution of media. Megavideo in particular had the highest encoding rates possible at the time, even superior to YouTube.
Predatory people took advantage of his behavior and generosity, and by thirty he was involuntarily committed, his mother given power of attorney. My spouse was the person feeding his mom the information she needed to see to intervene. All he had left was the equity in his condo and $50k.
I’m not sure I believed the deranged millionaire trope until I met this guy. And I watch my younger friends and acquaintances for signs of mania that masquerade as out of box or transgressive thinking.
Microsoft millionaire.
He probably has a plan in a nearby Pacific jurisdiction like Vanuatu. Best of luck!
> He knowingly participated and basically tailored his products to pirating
Vanuatu is a no-go.
They don't have to stop pirates, just keep them in the shadows.
YouTube had virtually zero enforcement. You could upload whole shows and movies and they were never taken down.
Other sites like Google Video or Vimeo did go above and beyond to comply and they lost badly.
YouTube started getting heat at some point and that’s only when they started enforcing, but by then, they already won.
History just gets rewritten daily.
They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all. What's more, Google Video never had any organic participation (i.e. normal people uploading videos of themselves), and was almost exclusively pirated content. Its main differentiation (long forgotten in the age of youtube-dl) was actually how easy it was to download that content compared to Youtube, who made it annoying. Eventually Google realized that they still weren't going to attract the pirates/copyright violators that section 230 allowed them to use as a proxy (piracy still preferred Youtube because people were on youtube), so they bought it.
Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material, and the source of lots of pirated files still being traded is directly from youtube. Eventually they started aggressively scanning things for copyrighted music (because they wanted to make deals with the music industry), and then started preemptively responding to any DMCA claim by suspending the video so as not to look like hypocrites while they were going after music; section 230 implies a lot of helplessness for platforms in the face of users that removing audio tracks from videos where people were singing copyrighted songs doesn't bear.
They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content in general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before. Now they wanted to push exclusive, expensively-produced content, and since producers didn't have any other online outlet, they were going to monopolize that, too. They didn't need the pirated content anymore.
That's a rewriting of history.
Google/YouTube started cracking down after Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc was reopened after appeals court ruled in Viacom's favor to listen to it's appeal in 2012 [1].
Google did develop ContentID as part of Google's damage control [0] when the case was in district court (2007-09) but half assed enforcement until the ruling in 2012 re-opened litigation, which forced Google's settlement with Viacom in 2014 [2].
People seem to forget that the Viacom litigation was an existential crisis for Google/YouTube, as the appeals court ruling could open the floodgates to litigation, and competitors ranging from Microsoft to CBS to the MPAA all supported Viacom [3]
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114
[1] - https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idU...
[3] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/via...
> They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all.
ContentID has existed for all but 2 years of YouTube's entire existence. It was initially released less than a year after Google's purchase.
> Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material
And if they comply with Safe Harbor, it doesn't actually matter.
By comparison, what did Napster and Megaupload do?
Napster did nothing. Their argument was that they didn't need to comply at all.
Megaupload publicly pretended to comply, but intentionally nerfed their tooling to support non-compliance, and internally documented that they weren't complying.
But regardless, that isn't true. Adsense has been a target of legal action for their illegal content:
https://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settlemen...
And on top of that, their ads were ruled this month to be an illegal monopoly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-antitru...
Nonsense. He has a criminal history going back to the early nineties.
In a world where opportunity costs exist, as they do for law enforcement, this makes sense?
Success even when obtained with some illegality is fine so long as it plays well with the interests of elites. Kim didn't just break the law, he also painted himself a target by upsetting people with power.
For all of his flaws, I think where I'd give someone like SBF a significant amount of credit is that he understood very well that if he wanted to do dodgy things he had to remain on the right side of those in power.
Kim hasn't played the game right. Had he tried to win friends from the start he may not be in the situation he's in now.
And if Captain Kidd hadn’t managed to raid any ships, he would have avoided the whole unfortunate hanging business. It goes without saying that unsuccessful criminals mostly don’t get caught.
I expect different treatment for Pablo Escobar / Chapo level drug dealers vs a guy who gave some of his weed to a buddy of his for some cash and later bought a pizza with it.
They are both technically drug dealers, just one a bit more successful than the other.
Asking, because his "plan" is very likely that. Some folks have been know to travel in boxes inside a container [1]
All of the anglosphere is clearly not a good destination choice as they are basically all vassal states.
Russia does not look to hot right now either, and the PKR is basically not an option for a very long list of reason.
China ?
Any other suggestions ?
Asking for a friend.
With some 'diplomacy', Julian Assange was brought home after near 15 years fighting for BS extradition charges.
The news and politicians in Australia follow almost lock step with whatever our US overlords allow us to say.
It's been more of a thing lately with them trying to secure the pacific away from China's sphere of influence and the biggest 'dumb' thing from our government is that silly submarine deal (under something called AUKUS) which is about as good as our F-35 jets purchased (totally useless IMO).
There's probably some bootlickers in NZ trying to gain political favour / power by brown-nosing with the US of A.
But hey I'm a pacifist and will be told that I'm a weak man who will lead to the downfall of civilisation so oh well.
If we’re heading to regional war, US nuclear subs will be here regardless
Even Darwin is a massive permanent US base
Our current, imperfect, civilisation exists because we largely succeed in keeping the whims of these minorities under control. It's a depressing thought, but if I don't accept it, I'll be disappointed in humanity on a daily basis.
That's why diesel-electric submarines are best suited for coastal defence, especially of small countries, whereas larger countries with huge areas of territory to protect benefit from having nuclear submarines.
Whether it's the right decision for Australia to get these subs under AUKUS is a fair debate, but it's not at all accurate to claim that they're using 'old' technology that is being superseded by AIP.
You don’t have to be a Sinophile to know Keating’s right about AUKUS
alt-headline: Paul Keating is right, AUKUS will turn Australia into US protectorate
The ex-PM is the only person offering a convincing explanation of AUKUS. And it's a damning one.
subscription: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-keating-aukus-aust...
On the economics | robustness of the deal:
This deal is getting worse all the time.
Courtesy of the latest details of the AUKUS agreement tabled yesterday in Parliament, we now know that the moment it becomes inconvenient for the Americans or the Brits, there’ll be no submarines for Australia:
Cooperation under the agreement is to be carried out in such a manner as to not adversely affect the ability of the United States and the United Kingdom to meet their respective military requirements and to not degrade their respective naval nuclear propulsion programs.
Those programs, as even ardent defenders of the program admit, are already pretty degraded. The Americans have shifted from building two Virginia-class boats a year to one this year, and delayed the construction of the next generation of nuclear submarines by five years to 2040. The new generation Dreadnought-class boats under construction in the UK have suffered serious delays and astonishing cost blowouts.
Somehow, with around $10 billion of Australian cash, both programs will come good, to the point they can build boats for the US and UK, and for Australia, and help Australia build its own. It’s normal for defence policy to double as heavy manufacturing policy, and Australia has a rich history of wasting billions making things here that we could have bought far cheaper from other countries. Where AUKUS is unusual is that Australia will be using its defence policy as heavy manufacturing policy for the US and UK as wellhttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/15/paul-...
I am not an expert on any of the above.
Other than that I can't see what situation they'd be useful in practice though. If we get into a war with Indonesia, China or the like that is the end. There will be no winners and we'll either lose or be ruined. One of the lessons in the modern era is if a country can't defend itself with diplomacy then it is in a lot of trouble.
I assume we're buying this gear as some sort of realpolitik tribute-style thing for the US military industrial complex. If the point isn't to give them money I doubt we're achieving our goals.
You are absolutely correct.
I wish more folks understood this.
Fighting China with those submarines is a similar idea to fighting the US with those same subs. The plan is not to do that. It won't work out well for us.
2) Keep going with your thought, you haven't gone far enough. If diplomacy works because you have the means to defend yourself, why aren't we fighting the US? We can't possibly defend ourselves from them, and realistically we'd probably struggle to annoy them if they attacked us via a proxy war. And yet there is no realistic scenario where they fight us. Why is that, hm?
At the same time, I do not think there is any justification for war or harming others non-defensively.
The amount of money and human power we piss away with wars and conflict is so sad. Humans are the most advanced and capable complex adaptive systems in the world. Why waste such a precious resource?
With all our intelligence we're still programmed to behave in particular ways, and it takes a lot of effort to even try to break out of it, and that's only possible if you're aware of it - which most people aren't.
Ironically, I think societies and cultures need long periods of peace (not in an extreme sense, but rather enough peace to allow for safer conflict) to have the time and ability to introspect on their heuristics and biases, as well as integrate other people's perspectives.
It takes seconds to destroy what it took decades to build.
If someone is pointing a mortar at your house, you want to get rid of the mortar, but you also want to keep your house, so it's likely that you will look for ways to remove the mortar, that don't include it being fired.
If you have a strong neighbor that wants to take something you have by force, how do you get them to instead practice diplomacy with you?
The only way I'm aware of is by projecting enough of your own strength that they think it might not be worth it to try and take by force.
Military might is an arm of diplomacy.
I also know nothing of Australian politics but Paul Keating seems to have some curious views regarding China:
> Keating brushed aside human rights concerns about China by arguing there are “disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uyghurs”
> Keating is a noted dove towards China. He has previously labelled Taiwan “not a vital Australian interest” but rather a “civil matter” for China.
> On Wednesday Keating said China “is not the Soviet Union” because it is involved in international institutions and would “fall over themselves to have a proper relationship” with Australia, except that Australia has “manufactured a problem” through its increasing alignment with US.
> Keating said the “great sin” China had committed in the eyes of the west was developing its economy to equal the size of the US
Yikes.
The need to act as world police (re uyghurs, taiwan) can be a game for the major powers.
> Keating said the “great sin” China had committed in the eyes of the west was developing its economy to equal the size of the US
This is somewhat supported by some of the wikileaks releases, but it's a little hard to disentangle if the economy is the sin or just an intensifier.
> At the lunch, Mrs Clinton confided in Mr Rudd about America's fears about China's rapid economic rise and Beijing's multibillion-dollar store of US debt, asking Mr Rudd: ''How do you deal toughly with your banker?''
https://www.smh.com.au/national/explosive-wiki-rudd-cable-20...
The AUKUS submarines are conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines.
ICBM's don't come into this.
They're a symptom of the former governments attraction to big (albeit stupid) grand actions and excessive sucking up to the US | UK at the expense of Australian taxpayers for no real specific local benefit.
I’d sat it’s too good
Effectively trading the last of our sovereignty for overkill submarines
The threat of China exists yes but I think the French subs we had lined up would have been adequate
Especially as the US will likely send their nuclear subs our way when/if Sino-American tensions escalate again
I mean we’re effectively already an American outpost with many permanent US bases/facilities
Not an expert, but my guess is that there is (probably valid) concern about China. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.
AUKUS is one of these huge deals with the results coming many years after huge investments creating great uncertainty. That makes it easy to attack politically.
EDIT: What's missed by the original commenter is that Australia was already investing in submarines from France. If delivered, there would be similar outcomes. The project had just as much uncertainty around it and was off-track when AUKUS was announced.
- 80%+ said close ties with the US was important to AU security
- 70%+ named China as a security threat to AU
- 55%+ stated confidence in the US acting responsibly in the world
But that's the majority of dumb Australians, much like the majority of dumb Americans. Our two sets of dumbs have a lot of similarity.
Australia's identity has been lost in the last thirty years up it's own anus of mineral riches and the feeling of lifestyle entitlement that came with it. The USs 51st state. Yeehaaw...
Australia and New Zealand have extradition treaties with dozens of countries, it's not just a US thing.
You got our attention by filling all our streaming channels with your shows.
As is common in the international film and television sector, a key driver of Australia’s ongoing production upswing came from an enhancement to its incentive schemes.
In July, the country’s national government increased the location offset program in its annual budget from 16.5 percent to 30 percent. Thanks to those changes, films spending at least A$20 million dollars (about $13 million U.S. dollars) in the country can claim back 30 percent of all expenditures on goods and services upon completion of the project.
Previously, it often was [already] possible for especially savvy producers to add to the guaranteed 16.5 percent offset and bring total support to 30 percent by cobbling together prior grant schemes — but the increases introduced last year provided global producers with a much-needed sense of ease and surety.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/planet-o...
Fox News is an Australian product built to flood the US with far-right, pro-business outrage. We'll get out of your lane once you get out of ours.
All kidding aside, describing these sorts of things in terms of national influence is extremely unproductive. New Zealand wouldn't be turning itself into a pro-commercial-pirate haven or anticopyright haven but for the influence of the US[1]. The question regarding extradition is not "should we consider what Kim Dotcom did to be a crime[0]" but "do we abduct him to another jurisdiction to face trial." It's bikeshedding over the color of the wood on the electric chair.
[0] In general, extradition treaties only apply for acts that are crimes in both jurisdictions.
[1] Even China's pro-copyright, they just don't want to pay America for any of it. If they were anti-copyright they'd be freely sharing all the "IP" they keep stealing.
lol, no it isn't. Don't try and pass the buck.
Murdoch is a US citizen and has been since the 80s. Fox news is purely and always has been an AMERICAN product, regardless of the birth citizenship of the CEO of News corp.
No you’re not. You’re seeing more TikTok influence but not US influence.
Look at Sky News Australia, literally all they talk about is US politics.
My theory is that as US focus shifts to East Asia, Australia is being groomed as a proxy state. Not as a deliberate effort, just as a consequence of a lot of different things coalescing.
It's kind of interesting to see.
Some of the misconduct in this case includes but is not limited to:
- Abusing the power of a national security agency to illegally spy on him, which lead to the Prime Minister being forced to publicly apologizing due to the political fallout.
- Attempting to freeze his defense funds
- Performing a no knock raid utilizing a heavily armed anti-terrorism task force for a non-violent crime, which lead to the department being successfully sued by all parties for excessive force.
- Performing an illegal search by intentionally and knowingly filling out an improper warrant, and having had the crown admit this.
- Sending the evidence ruled to be illegally obtained to the FBI regardless
- Allowing a foreign government to maliciously apply to revoke someone's bail the day they can no longer afford their lawyer
- Already ruling that under New Zealand law you cannot be extradited for copyright infringement, but proceeding with the case regardless for the more flimsy fraud charges.
Kim is a bad person who very likely is guilty, but at what point do we draw a line and say the abuse of process has been so great it harms the reputation of the legal system to proceed? Cases are routinely completely thrown out for much less. It's frankly a travesty towards the legal system that this case has been allowed to continue, especially given the charges.
Additionally he's now a conspiracy theorist and Russian shill. He just spouts incorrect stuff on his Twitter every day.
Orders of magnitude are a thing.
That they were purposefully delaying the extradition process to get money out of him.
Like Reddit, HN has a crowd of anti-US folks with terrible sentiment until, you know, when they need the US or need a job in the U.S. The hypocrisy is astounding.
This bit is standard, trope-style make-believe.
However:
> ... paying users [...], which generated more than $175 million in revenue for the [Kim Dotcom's Megaupload] website.
.. if they can prove that bit, it's a much more damning case.
Not the usual hand-wavey 'We were banking on several thousand dollars of revenue from each of the 12yo's we're going after' claims, but actual, demonstrable, revenue that was misdirected.
I wish the 6th amendment meant more.
"Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the realm of dictators and drug lords.
Not that that justifies anything, people should be free to keep as much physical cash as they want.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for things they did while physically outside the US. Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes to its citizens.
In general "That's really unusual behavior" shouldn't be enough to forfeit a fortune.
Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of money.
I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest. Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
Bezos and Musk provided more value to society than one of their employees.
The convenience of Amazon wouldn't exist and it saved normal people a ridiculous amount of man-hours.
If you contributed something more valuable to the world you could also get more than $1M for your lifetime.
That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101 isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than some average shlob.
> it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's savings. He had a service that other people wanted to use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the US government, claiming they seized his own personal documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would consider legitimate.
> I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits,
Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is what happens when your economics education consisted of a dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth of many billions depending on share price on any given day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a bit less).
The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.
Definitely not "small folk like us".
If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely connected to malicious security services he would have been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
How do you explain this part then:
> Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide
Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal case being prosecuted? If there was something there wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years ago?
I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where you just assert that it was perfect in line with is character to have ALL is money in cash while literally the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all over the globe.
Feels like we are being a bit pedantic.
This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
"At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a single hit.
Gold bricks are here https://youtu.be/A4TXAaqmj0E?t=365
I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing. Anything under about 100” is going to cost more to seize than it’s worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do they seize the cookware?
Feds seem to be a bit more discriminating, tending towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and real estate. But I've seen more than a few news articles over the years where they seized property you might call petty.
I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?
> I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US.
Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would point you at the many mainstream news articles of places that make road trips through where the local police shake people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the holding cell?
I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".
In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
This is not about justice, this is about power.
"Long time" is subjective.
> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that
New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software
But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.
Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.
I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?
Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.
He created a site where you can upload anything with complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh, too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ to build a case around so that they could get discovery and find out what they were really trying to get access to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes, the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy agreement/etc)" types.
Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it is in the public interest for him to be held accountable against his will.
I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate human trafficking?
Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested, completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of data.
MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony
Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
...that is a summary of Kim's trial. Movie companies own the government.
This same foreign country who passed laws for invading the hague if they came under trial for crimes in the ICC.
[1]: See assange's bid for first amendment's guarantees when the same foreign country was trying to extradite and "trial" him
IP holder damages should take in consideration what the actual buying power of pirates is, not just multiply downloads by dvd costs, and copyright laws need a huge reform.
He's a modern day robin hood, people would prefer him to win over eg. disney... and disney is not doing itself a favour these days :)
>He's a modern day robin hood
He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for the better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on his fanbase.
We're talking about software and (well, mostly) media piracy, movies and music here.
I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
Yep, especially compared to other people, who did worse (pedophillia-wise), like Polansky, etc.
Yeah and there is Logan Paul living in US running pump and dumps, scams and other things. But he look nice and popular so he'll continue to do it without any prosecution. As well as many other YouTube personalities. After all they pay taxes to US so they can do it freely.
Again, not protecting Dotcom or like him as person, but he is not some war criminal to justify this kind of effort US put into trying to get him.
Depending on the content, it is.
> He's a modern day robin hood
Robin Hood didn't enrich himself with the stolen goods.
Do you mean "would be paid"? But why would anyone pay the users? The uploaders were paid.
> The "theft" is propaganda.
No, it's juridical fact.
> In fact from the article itself it even says Mega had a notice and takedown system available to the rights holders.
Where does it say this? Anyway, this system was bullocks. It was just a poor lip service which they stalled and ignored the whole time.
"copyright holders, industry representatives, and legislators have long characterized copyright infringement as piracy or theft – language which some U.S. courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise contentious."
And also I'm unsure there is evedence it was ignored, it just seems like you are spewing more copyright propaganda. Might I dare to say they might be in fact lying?
I mean she doing gods work on making science more open to everyone, but if she were living in New Zealand she would land in US prison for 10+ years long ago.
Is everyone you don't like a Russian spy?
I weep for this world.
Kim Dotcom, the Critical Thinker, does. But he curiously suspends critical thinking when pandering idiotic conspiracy theories about biolabs weaponizing birds. Gotta love these selective critical thinkers.
As other comments noted, the man literally made millions distributing copyrighted material, while completely aware of what he was doing.
"What is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?" is not such a question. Having been in such conversations before, if I responded with an honest answer like "I generally think the US is a pretty good country" or "I feel that it's important for criminals to be caught and punished", I'm quite confident that the original commenter would respond with personal insults and invective.
Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all things!
Kim is a modern day robin hood. Illegal, criminal, yada yada? Sure. Is he "bad" for the people? Well... that's very debatable.
And BTW since when has Kim any legit political stance? It has always been about money and fame for Kim. Political topics were never a serious part of him.
how come musk did it with 80% people fired why wasnt it adressed before? would you send the previous twitter ceo to jail?
No, they did not. User abused the platform, and the companies removed it when notified. Kim didn't do that, instead he even made a business of it. Youtube especially had a historical case about this, when they were sued by Viacom(?) for not removing content well enough, which then resulted in the creation of the contentId-system. This was BTW around 5 years before MegaUpload and Kim were raided.
And as you mentioned ChatGPT, AI and content-usage is a completely different story, and a recent problem around loopholes in the existing laws. Maybe the companies will also be sued for this, maybe not, we will see..
I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it? Why would normal people throw baseless accusations like this? What is your motivation? What skin do you have in this game? Is your argument really "Kim Dotcom is an agent because he is opposing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and he is against a forever war in Ukraine"?
He is presumably some guy that youve never met that happens to be fighting against the US government and its copyright laws so why are you making these comments? Are you so passionate about copyrights because you are an artist that has lost money because of mega? What motivates you?
Thanks for articulating this, similar idea behind my sibling comment. Sadly i think the conclusion is that the vast majority of people are small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative the empire feeds them. Wish it wasn't like this
I just seriously doubt that likes of Dotcom, Musk or Trump need to be on Putin payroll. They just all have their own agenda to sell "strong russia, good putin" narrative.
Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll - just ignorant beyond measure.
Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now and I for one am happy that in my country it was the post-communists out of everyone who spearheaded the effort to have a deterrent in the form of NATO membership.
Finland and Sweden appear to agree, considering how they joined the alliance.
If anything, NATO is now more relevant than ever.
I don’t expect them to stop fighting invaders. But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity. They didn’t. Why I wonder?
This is a lot like asking, in regard to events of August 1939 -- "Do you deny that Poland has ethnic Germans in it territory"?
Of course it did, and in fact (though this is largely forgotten) Poland was abusing its German population somewhat (far more than anything Ukraine has ever done to its Russian-speaking population). But Hitler's claims of the extent of such abuses were wildly exaggerated and overdrawn. Just as the depiction above of Ukraine "crushing those Russians because of their dissent" (without providing specifics) is wildly out of touch with reality.
And his stated rationale of the need to to start a full-scale war in order "protect" this population was a big lie of course, created specifically to appeal to people gullible enough to believe such things. Putin's claims of the need to "protect" the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are equally baseless, and are designed with a similar intent in mind.
But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity.
Ukraine did engage with Russia on the issues -- they just weren't willing to bend over and give Putin everything he wanted. More specifically it definitely sounds like you were expecting the Ukrainians to agree to permanent large-scale territorial concessions. Because since 2014, that's been the bare minimum of Russia's terms for "avoiding war".
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
All I can say is we had similar situations in the past and decades after the fact we realized we were lied to. Too bad millions died I guess?
If you listen to Russians, then you're left with an impression that they are being surrounded by US weapons on their borders. If you look at the numbers, then that turns out to be a blatant misrepresentation of truth. For example, the US fielded ~5000 main battle tanks in Europe at the end of the Cold War. In 2013, the last 10 were removed. The opposite is true: post-Cold War era has brought rapid disarmament to Europe, which has emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, because disarmament has limited how much and how quickly allies could help Ukraine.
> But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
Ironically, this is "obvious" only if you accept the premise that Russia is determined to violate the security of its neighbors.
But to address one aspect of what you're saying now:
I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
This is broadly correct, and perfectly understandable.
However the war was never really about NATO expansion in the first place. And even if it were -- it definitely wasn't a rational response to that concern. And it certainly wasn't a response that the regime was "pushed" into taking.
The war was entirely optional for them - a failed gambit for enhanced "stature" and prestige on the global stage, basically[0]. Very much analogous to, and exactly as evil and stupid as the 2003 Iraq invasion, and supported by lies equally obvious and stupid. That unfortunately far too many otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent people were far to eager to believe.
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
I see plenty of room for debate on alternatives to the idea that Ukraine must keep fighting at the current pace until an unequivocal withdrawal (if that's what you mean by "supporting it endlessly"), and if you talk to Ukrainians directly you will very quickly find that they do as well.
However in order to even get there we first need to free ourselves of broken narratives in terms of what's actually been happening on the ground, and stop assuming that what the current regime says is interchangeable with what Russians in general say or think.
It would also be helpful to just completely forget about "mainstream media narratives", whatever those even supposedly are. When instead you can build your own far more reliable narratives from first principles (studying history, talking with people from there, or actually visiting the safer parts of the country if you like).
--
[0] Along with a desire on the part of the regime to promote and secure its longevity by keeping Ukraine out of Western economic and cultural influence, which it felt deeply threatened by, which is where the analogy breaks down somewhat (the US never had any specific obsession with Iraq in the way Putin has with Ukraine). And now that the initial gambit has clearly failed -- the war isn't about any of these initial motives; but rather a simple and desperate desire to save face, so that the regime can survive for a few more bloody years.
The main point being (as with the US in Iraq) its true aims were/are entirely different from its outwardly stated aims.
Unfortunately EU and US governments are not much better since they all put dumb limits on weapons usage and never supplied Ukraine enough weapons to actually get any superiority.
And "because he tweeted on X"?
I think you're going to need something a bit more substantive than that.
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
Its like Americans complaining about how Chinese or Indian hit movies are covertly pro-Chinese or pro-Indian propaganda pieces. Ever heard of Hollywood?
Intelligence operative or peasant. Pick one.
It appears very similar to the treatment of Ross Ulbricht, Assange, maybe even Snowden?
These are the equivalent of white collar crimes (typical massive frauds from the finance sector, etc) but they are getting a blue collar punishment of decades in jail that a successful and persistent street drug dealer could receive, NOT the few years in comfort camp prison that white collar frauds usually get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-hire_...
Same here. Murder for hire is bad, but his prosecution was about just as bad[1] and one could argue that (edit) by using warrantless spying without any probable cause undermined US constitutional rights. In a grand scheme of things, it is better to have one criminal get away than trample on everyone's rights.
What they do have in common, however, is an inordinate amount of resources expended to punish them by the state..
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-hire_...
Their involvement and indictment was withheld during the Ross trial and they went to prison for that
Ross was not charged for these scenes, the other district court is saving face by calling it redundant and dropping it but it’s really a shaky case
It shouldn’t have been brought up in sentencing, but there is no accountability in a judge doing so
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/cyber-vault/2019-12-13/silk-r...
Just because something doesn't rise to the level of provability of getting charged and sentenced for it doesn't mean that you can't say with a high level of confidence it happened.
Corrupt, convicted ex government agents staged the murders, there is video evidence of some of them that they made for Ross to pay them. Which got them convicted.
Ross was not charged with that, wasnt charged with conspiracy to do that, wasnt put in front of a jury for that. Because the government would lose that case because of their corrupt agents and agencies (Baltimore FBI which hosted the skit) messing up the case.
This doesnt warrant a double life sentence for the crimes he was convicted of.
1 presidential candidate will commute (basically saying ~9 years is enough, ending this debate), 1 presidential candidate will pardon completely, 1 will likely do neither until the FreeRoss campaign learns how to do campaign contributions. Its only a matter of time as crypto savants gain position
Why would I swallow any childish stories that the US attorney made up?
Assange and Snowden especially, who revealed to the public crimes perpetrated by agents of the US federal govt.
Street dealers as well: not belong to "them".
See how Epstein was punished in 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Legal_proceedi...
"On June 30, 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. While most convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison, Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade and [...] allowed to leave the jail on "work release" for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week."
That's for a horrible crime. Not for allowing people to copy some audio and video files for entertainment purpose.
He was one of "them".
It's been profitable for the US agencies that stole millions for KDC
https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/27/how-us-government-legall...
You can be a drug dealer that doesn’t hurt anybody.
People can buy very addictive drugs from pharmacists (legal drugs are a huge contributor to the opioid epidemic), and there were doctors in some areas that were known for being extremely lax about that sort of thing.
Lots of the illegal drug dealers do sell really harmful stuff. But before it was legalized they sold weed…
We should not pretend our laws are perfect, they are always undergoing refinement.
Defrauded people out of 10M? That's about as much or more than 1000 home thefts, which would probably land you in prison for life.
Through the 2000s and 2010s, legislators (and by extension LEO agencies) were extremely responsive to whims of copyright lobbyists. ex: ICE agents patrolling events for locals selling knock-off goods.
It was so pervasive, news orgs noticed it - and even covered some non-sensational incidents. Though I don't recall journalists ever following the money.
Seems to be pretty much how the US government operates on these high profile tech cases. They are going to turn you into a martyr.
Ross is a great example of this. He received a double life sentence + 40 years + no chance of parole. By comparison, El Chapo, a dude who most certainly ordered the deaths of many and imported billions of dollars of drugs, only got a SINGLE life sentence + no chance of parole.
That is not justice, its a message.
Illegally, extra-judicially. Although it was mainly NZ authorities who overstepped their bounds by allowing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
To this day, rights-holders don't even have to take legal action or issue a formal DMCA takedown to have videos taken down or siphon off the profits of those who use their content. It is even automated.
The indictment explicitly answers your questions about why Megaupload was different from other file sharing services.
Compliance is a critical part of the DMCA. Once a site knows about infringing content, they lose safe harbor provisions.
Also, how do you think lobbying Congress would even hypothetically help YouTube in court? The DMCA doesn't have any different provisions for YouTube than it does for Megaupload.
With regard to Megaupload, this much is simple. The Justice Department can freeze an investigation under pressure from Congress. Whether an investigation comes to its conclusion or not is strongly under the influence of Congress.
> “[T]he obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited, and what copyright holders were able to remove with direct delete access instantly and without question.”
They did have an "Abuse Tool" available. The problem was, it was intentionally flawed. It was a sham, intended to make it appear like they were compliant, when they were not. It didn't remove infringing content. It just removed the link. Also, Kim intentionally limited content holders in the number of requests they could send. So, pirates using the system just created more links to the same infringing content.
Can you elaborate? Is there concrete evidence of this or just a general feeling that it must have happened?
If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
The problem with that is the lobbyist has a voice proportional to the money spent by the lobbyist's client. If, for example, I wanted to ban electric cars, I wouldn't even be able to get an appointment anywhere near Capitol Hill. Or if I did, nobody would listen. Just a pat on the head and perhaps some gallery passes to watch the legislature. If 1,000,000 of us across the US wanted that, we wouldn't get on Capitol Hill either. But if a car company or $special_interest_lobby wants a meeting -- they get it because those people are contributing millions to campaigns and PACs. Lobbyists even write many bills for congressmen.
If there was consideration on a federal ban for electric cars (or whatever,) then Tesla and the other car companies can write a letter to their congressman and have it ignored like the rest of us. And if they don't like it, then they can vote like the rest of us. They can even run advertisements trying to convince people to agree with them.
Money and lobbyists should not be able to amplify the importance of a particular viewpoint.
Paid lobbying should be illegal. It's one half step away from outright bribery. The other side of that coin is the administrative state official who makes rules favorable to a particular company, then "retire" from public service to take a highly paid, "consultant" role at the very company they helped. Or in Pharma especially, the so-called "Iron Triangle" -- https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3519281-is-there-an-i...
https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the_return_of_the_...
I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.
I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).
I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?
I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.
I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.
So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?
It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.
> I want to convert those people, not push them away.
On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.
> So by some odd alchemy
There is something about treating the RIAA as the scary internet boggy man in 2024 that just seems so quaint.
but if you understand that you also understand what his point was even if clumping it wrongly under the misdirection of blaming riaa.
Hacker News of all places! Never would have expected a website created by a billionaire venture capitalist to lean into intellectual property absolutism. Completely out of character for venture capitalist community to bend the knee to industry associations.
But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.
That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.
The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).
I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.
The real trend on HN is low-effort comments like this that generalize about HN. How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?
> Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits" ... Shame.
But ... what happens to your point when your comment becomes top-voted like it is now? Is HN redeemed because apparently everybody on HN agrees with you that HN is terrible?
> US Industrial Complex
At this point I wish Eisenhower hadn't coined the famous phrase. Everything gets called some variation of Foo/Bar Industrial Complex which sounds smart and describes nothing.
> How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?
Nothing wrong with that, and you should share your viewpoints freely. But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Blaming AI seems like using it as a balm for your cognitive dissonance.
And this isn't even something that's in contention, both of America's major political parties have accused the other of doing it.
> But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Okay sure man, I guess we'll just take your opinion as representing "the vast majority of Americans" and go carry on from there.
Lately, as other pointed out, he's been a ccp/russian/who knows shill.
He did some interesting things, some not legal - others served their time he wandered off rather than trial.
I am reminded of Eban Moglen's "dot-communist manifesto" of 2003, worth a read:
https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html
There's also the matter of the USA being able to enforce its legal norms on people living in other countries, via instruments like extradition but also sanctions for less-friendly world states.
Basically, this is a win for big money interests and the powerful in the US. It was only a matter of time before New Zealand caved. Meanwhile the US has become a banana republic as demonstrated by the lawfare being waged against the Republican party and it's leading candidate for the presidential election.
For those supporting this change in position by New Zealand, when this erosion of rights used against you remember that you reap what you sow.