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Comment by wepple | Hacker News Reader

I do not categorize him as “small folk like us”

Agree.

"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.

how old are you? did you live through the megaupload era? for a few years it was ubiquitous and def a cashcow machine

Yes, but converting that cashcow to a hundred million dollars in actual bills, is something special.

If someone's a weirdo and wants to stuff their millions into a mattress, that by itself should not be sufficient to presume them guilty of any illegal activity, or justify seizing their money.

Wait til you hear about this new startup called Google. They are going to launch yet another search engine. I doubt there's much money in it, though. They'll be lucky to make a few million.

How much physical cash (actual notes/bills) do you think Google founders have in their home? Close to $175 million?

Not that that justifies anything, people should be free to keep as much physical cash as they want.

Are you missing the point on purpose? The suspicious thing isn’t that he has money, it’s that he’s storing the money physically as cash in his home. You think Google has a safe at the HQ filled with dollar notes?

Sounds pretty logical in a world where banking secrecy doesn't exist and most banks are compliant with a single jurisdiction which doesn't respects other ones.

Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.

I’m not even necessarily agreeing that it’s suspicious (ok, it is a bit suspicious but not so weird that I would immediately proclaim that he’s guilty), I just don’t think it’s productive to post sarcastic comments rebutting strawman arguments. If the commenter wanted to say that having a lot of cash isn’t suspicious, they should have just said that instead of making a point about google making a lot of money, too.

he got banned from banks before and he doesnt want his money seized. anyone with the slightest understand of how us government operates would understand why hes storing the money physically.. Even bitcoiners do it....

He's an example to be made of by rights-holders. People smarter than him decided to quit the business or go into becoming IP owners themselves: see Manwin -> MindGeek -> Aylo. It was a calculated risk.

it was. he chose freedom and trusting people. if you go to jail for that you can be sure that it already created a precedent that put into jail a lot of innocent people

Since when is file hosting a cash cow?

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.

If that logic sounds sketch when the police take $10K from a man going to buy a car, it should also be sketch when you add zeros somewhere else.

In general "That's really unusual behavior" shouldn't be enough to forfeit a fortune.

He hasn't been sentenced, let alone seen court yet. You don't have a right to flee a warrant for your arrest?

I don’t think the money in question was forfeited in the sense that the US uses, only seized pending an investigation. The lack of a corrupting incentive alone makes the seizure less suspicious in my eyes.

I don't know about you, but where I come from this looks like punishment through process. Not even trying to defend this Kim dude, just pointing out just because the process is "fair" doesn't mean its fair. Yes that is not a very well articulated point, but this is something which many people should have a feeling for in their bones.

I agree that process can be used as punishment. But I don't see any evidence that Dotcom has been uniquely or unfaithfully subjected to processes, or that his treatment is unusual given the charges he's facing.

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.

A man's labor and intelligence can eventually earn him $10k to buy a car. Over a long career, one might eventually amass a fortune on the order of $1M. Kim might (hypothetically) have an IQ of 150 and be willing to work punishingly long hours where our analogous car buyer went home to be with his family. But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter or harder-working than a baseline human, that's absurd - 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. And that's ignoring that it was $175M in cash, as if it was pocket change to him; there's no good explanation for him to have that much in investments much less in physical money lying around.

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.

Sounds like you rediscovered Marxism?

Your accusative tone implies that's a bad thing, is that the case?

According to the last 107 years of history, yes.

No. I don’t mean to imply it’s bad or any accusations. Just trying to point out some fact.

I have no sympathy for Kim Dotcom, but he is not proven to be some drug cartel boss or criminal overlord. Reason he had so much cash is obvious - because back in 2012 crypto wasn't yet so successful. And the guy was US government target for a long time before arrest so he had good reason not to keep money in banks where it's easy to arrest them.

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.

That's non-sensical.

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.

> But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter

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).

That's not how it works. The majority of their wealth is in the stock of their companies. They don't earn anything until they sell their shares, and then the money comes from whoever wants to own the shares.

The guy has a lot of money, so therefore he is more guilty than normal men?

The guy has a lot of money, so therefore it’s very tedious when people characterize him as a smol bean who just wanted to help people share their data. It’s a smokescreen for the real position (which I recognize some people do legitimately hold) that copying and selling movies without compensating the people who made them is a legitimate business model and it’s OK to make lots of money doing it.

I think they were just backing up the "he's not small folk like us" statement.

The thing about that word "smallfolk", is that there is a very heavy connotation that someone remains smallfolk no matter how positively fortune smiles upon them. No matter how wealthy they might become, not even if they can ride a dragon, do they suddenly become nobles.

The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.

Assuming $100 bills, that's nearly two tons of cash. (3800 pounds.)

Definitely not "small folk like us".

Please. It fits his personality perfectly to do something like keep all his money in cash.

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.

> It fits his personality perfectly to do something like keep all his money in cash

How do you explain this part then:

> Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide

Why is it so odd that an anti authoritarian individual would keep large sums of money in cash and distribute whatever cash he does keep in as many bank accounts as possible?

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’m not interested in arguing for or against him because I don’t care about him or this case.

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.

I’m just saying that this guy distrusts authority so it’s not surprising that he was caught with a lot of cash or that he has a web of accounts. My larger point is about the fact that these insinuations should be dismissed because it’s reasonable to assume that if there was major wrong doing in his finances (eg drug lord) they would have included the evidence in the extradition request.

Feels like we are being a bit pedantic.

I guess we can wait and see what the outcome of the eventual trial is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4TXAaqmj0E

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")....

I feel like I'm watching satire of what a 2000s mega rich nerd would be like but it's really him. He even has a basket/hanger on the wall for all of his ... canes. Didn't see the fedoras nearby, though.

"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 think it's purposely meant to be camp.

Absolutely.

Large TVs?

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?

At least with local departments, yes police will seize kitchen appliances if they are high dollar. Then it all goes up for auction. Maybe a cop likes the look of it, picks it up for pennies on the dollar at the auction. Maybe no one bids and it all gets junked. While the primary purpose of civil forfeiture is to seize valuables, there are sometimes secondary concerns... the cops like to fuck with certain people, and if they can just make them paupers by taking their belongings then that alone can be enough motivation. Paperwork's pretty light because jewelry or cash never has lawyers to defend itself.

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.

These are the New Zealand police, 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. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?

They are. I suppose. I guess to know which police they are, one might have to see who they get their marching orders from. TVs were seized of course, and while an extraditing authority might request/demand evidence to be seized too, what were they hoping to find in the televisions do you think?

> 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?

$175M quickly becomes meaningless in this context, believe me. It's already much more than you need.

It's still a human. He just shared songs on the the internet. He's treated like a war criminal.

Maybe I don't know the full story, but as far as I understand, it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time, was aware there was a ton of piracy on the site and didn't give any indication whatsoever that they were even trying to react to it by banning accounts that were uploading infringing content.

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".

He shared a lot of them. Still absolutely not something that should lead to this multiple-state sanctioned response.

Agree, disproportionate response for sure. Still, flagrantly ignoring the law will get you in trouble.

Getting in the way of powerful people getting more power is always punished more harshly than anything else, including murder.

In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.

Your comment appears to have been downvoted for being inconvenient, despite its truth.

I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says, his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively, which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded directly, but in my experience commenters who start talking about things like "powerful people getting more power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about whether the claims they make are true.)

Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and legal arm wrestling.

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.

As far as I remember, not only aware, but activly uploading warez themself (not officially).

So? If that's a crime under NZ law he can be prosecuted there. If it isn't then too bad for the US.

> it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time,

"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.

Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?

Megaupload had lots of grey/dark patterns, namely people could upload whatever but downloading anything big, each Downloader had to buy credits.

Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software

Nah, he built a file sharing service and people paid for that.

MegaUpload was primarily funded by ads displayed on download pages, not the small number of people paying for storage.

Can you provide some source for the claim about the volume of sales MU had?

The original indictment put it at $25mm from ads and $150mm from subs, so my original statement is wrong.

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?

Sounds exactly like a file sharing service. My Google documents are also downloaded much more than uploaded, very often by people who don't upload anything at all.

Why does it matter?

> Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?

Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.

He didn't "share songs on the internet".

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.

This is the clear-headed take. As a point of clarification, I don't believe Dotcom has anything to do with Mega anymore, and the service Mega has gone legit and provides quite a nice a service similar to Tresorit -- end-to-end encrypted cloud storage.

> But I'll never defend a human trafficker either

Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate human trafficking?

he did not and at least there is no written evidence that he did. something that OP could look up tho is the stats of the giant reduction of child trafficking/child abuse content posted on X since Musk took it under his wing. Why wasnt it adressed before? this could be a much bigger story but one OP will never address

I'm not in a position to disclose anything, but there is plenty of information out there about who was storing data in what repositories and what those people were using other, less-protected, repositories for.

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.

> And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts.

MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony

"needing to be saved from" is a far cry from the 'used as an excuse for disclosure' that I accused them of. But I do appreciate the irony in conspiracists accusing others of racketeering (or otherwise unduly influencing markets).

He kept breaking laws with large penalties (or provided others a platform to do so, depending on your point of view) knowingly and repeatedly on a massive scale for many years.

Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.

I am not saying that's wrong. What's wrong is the way it's done. Especially the part where another country raids his residence, and has him shipped to said another country he's not even a citizen of, to be judged based on their law.

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