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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective.

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.

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One thing you learn over the years is that people make up everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning he could control the situation regardless.

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.

>> probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.

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.

> 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.

Probably the largest source of piracy is the widespread normalization of VPNs. Once upon a time VPNs did not advertise so as to not attract IP enforcement attention. They constantly shifted host locations to stay ahead of blocklists. Now VPNs openly advertise on youtube, touting the ability to "access contend not available in your country". That's piracy 101 stuff, at least it used to be. I just watched a youtube by LLT on how to bypass encryption to rip your own Blu-ray disks and upload the resulting files to your plex server. Even talking about such tech was considered criminal only a few years ago. The laws haven't changed. We just now have a generation of adult decision makers who have grown up with piracy as a norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag

There's way more. I'd risk saying google drive has more pirated content today than MegaUpload and Rapidshare combined ever did, just based on the size of the user base and basic knowledge of long tail distribution. Other than that today you have so much piracy on discord, telegram, p2p communities stay strong, and of course the first rule of usenet is you don't mention it.

P2P is still where you go if you don't want potato quality video.

While having a sabnzbd+*arr setup isn't particularly difficult to a technical person, the general opacity of its underlying workings (NNTP? News articles, providers? Block accounts?) has kept lawyers outside of USENET for decades.

A decade ago, I had a successful book business online, which included used college textbooks. I had IP lawyers (the same that represented the music and movie industries) send me threatening cease and desist letters on at least 2 occasions accusing me of selling counterfeit books.

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.

Wow. And I'm assuming the publishers are now sprinting into the arms of rented, time-limited e-textbooks with DRM, and either eliminating or discouraging the sales of physical books that they can't fully kill resale of.

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.

Colleges and universities started moving towards the book fee instead of buying books years ago. Many institutions already do the folding book costs into tuition.

Matt Levine is great at writing about the difference between laws as written and how they work in practice. He's pretty fascinated by some of the cases where the two diverge sharply.

Do you happen to have a link?

He's at Bloomberg right now[1]. His main output is his 4-times-a-week column Money Stuff, but he also has a podcast and writes in other venues. I love his writing!

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi...

Sometimes this translates even down to the individual level. I've watched a lot of police bodycam videos and it's surprising how many people make their situation worse by being loud obnoxious tightwads when calmly answering questions and handing over your license would have you on your way in 5 minutes.

I get what you're saying, but being an obnoxious tightwad isn't actually against the rules, and it's not OK that there are some societies in the world where being an obnoxious tightwad towards a force ostensibly tasked with PROTECTING their fellow citizens (including the obnoxious one) will take this as a cue to 1) violate your civil liberties/rights, and/or 2) commit bodily harm to your person, and then 3) get away with it primarily without consequence.

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.

>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.

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).

> being an obnoxious tightwad isn't actually against the rules

Growing up or re-evaluating ideas you got when you were 14 is also not against the rules.

> people make their situation worse

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.

This kind of exactly misses the point the comment you're replying to is making. The point isn't that just complying and handing over your info is the ideal goal. The point is that, pragmatically speaking, it's a lot easier to just do that and move on with your life than making a big scene about standing up for your ideals - because A) You're not going to change shit in that situation anyway and B) It's just going to make it harder for you.

> 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.

Most of those aren't defending any ideals, they are making content to put ads around at the expense of tax money in the form of wasted police activity to engage with them.

"Obnoxious tightwad" is in the eyes of the beholder. Asserting your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights won't make you popular with the police, and yet you're far safer asserting those rights than getting overly talkative and compliant with the police. [0]

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

I've heard it articulated as "There are no rules, only consequences." which I take to refer to the Legal Realism idea that the rules are just what we bind each other to. The written rules only matter if some "powerful" entity (like the government, or a mob, or civil court) is committed to holding you to them.

> There are no rules, only consequences

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)

Even then it still hurts the millionaire less than the ordinary person.

At least for Shkreli he wasn't wrong. Massively increasing the price for a drug is legal.

> [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...

Aah yes, the KRS-ONE principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvJ7uMyIGJU

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

Pedantically: MEGA runs today as a Dropbox-alike, and has very little to do with Kim Dotcom beyond his being involved at the very beginning and then departing quickly.

You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different despite the name similarity.

Megaupload Song anybody? https://youtu.be/o0Wvn-9BXVc

I might be misremembering things here but AFAICR, it went something like this:

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.

Meanwhile Mega is actually a really good Dropbox alternative. Stable, fast transfers, desktop sync works very well, lots of sharing options, decent pricing. I've been a happy customer for years instead of Dropbox and iCloud.

> 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

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.

How exactly are rights holders required to inform MegaUpload of content to remove? Every DMCA takedown request I've seen generally has a collection of links. I don't know the letter of the law of the actual process, but the ability of a rights holder to tell MegaUpload to take down all copies of X piece of media seems... Unfair. Not everybody has a hash based system, and even if they did, variance - such as raring, modification times, etc, would make everything mismatch. And, if that is actually the process, why do they bother to include the links at all?

Adding to this there were stories that came out that even beyond knowingly profiting from pirated content people working on the MegaUpload backend would search it directly for warez to share amongst each other.

Thanks, I had no idea that's how it worked. Embedding the key in a part of the URL that's not sent to the server is a stroke of genius.

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.

Legally they can decrypt the content though, they have access to the key, they just need to change a piece of JavaScript so it sends back to the key to their server the next time a page visitor comes.

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.

Hosting pirated content is a liability, and putting it on MEGA helps clear it. Many countries have issues with torrenting such data too, as it's an easy way to get a notice at home from your ISP if you're not on a VPN. I assume many kids in dorms and whatnot may have bittorrent traffic blocked as well.

I dunno if this is unreasonable, but I fear dling Torrents with high number of seeders in case one of them is malicious. With Mega you only had to trust one server.

Torrent files have hash check sums of the fragments. If someone sends you a bad fragment it will be discarded.

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.

Malice in this context could mean that they are concerned about someone tracking the activity.

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/

BitTorrent uses SHA-1, not MD5. It's not ideal, but hardly vulnerable.

SHA-1 has been broken since 2017. It is considerably more expensive to produce a SHA-1 collision than an MD5 collision, but certainly not impossible. However, BitTorrent v2 also came out in 2017 and uses SHA-256, for which no known collisions exist even today.

I FORGOT that movies used to be split into 2+ ~700mb downloads way back when.

Thanks, you’re right — MEGA was the relaunch.

> A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective.

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.

[1]:https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o

It's a mockery of jurisdiction. It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like that.

> It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like that.

DotCom is not a NZ citizen, he's a resident.

Note he's a permanent resident, which is a lot closer to citizen than most other resident class visas in NZ and forbids one from being spied on like the NZ government did.

I mean, fine, but replace one word for the other in my sentence and it makes no difference, really.

It does, inasmuch as your sentenced described the NZ jurisdiction as a mockery on the basis that it "sells out" its citizens.

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.

>It does, inasmuch as your sentenced described the NZ jurisdiction as a mockery on the basis that it "sells out" its citizens.

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?

NZ is a member of 5 eyes IIRC, and so likely have various relations/cooperative agreements in place that make it easy(-ier) for justifying the handing of citizens over to another state.

I wonder if the same would have happened if the roles had been reversed. Somehow I doubt it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn Pretty much.

It's not analogous. The person was being charged of a crime that happened in the UK and fled to the US, then was extradited back to the UK to be tried. In other words how extraditions usually work.

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.

It's a joke that we allowed him to buy residency. I hope it was worth it for him, and only hope similar things happen to Peter Thiel.

>> tried where the offences actually took place

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.

So if someone robs your house while you're out of the country, the crime would have taken place in whatever country you happened to be in at that time, right? That's how that would play out. Because if that's not the case it would imply that the house itself would be the victim.

I also think it's odd to talk about this being the "general rule" when there's plenty of crimes/infractions with no victim.

As for the reason, Mr. Dotcom has claimed to have been a supporter lf WikiLeaks and this was probably not of signifigance, but I would overall bet 10% that his less public involvement with WikiLeaks & WikiLeaks-type activity was part of the analysis that led to him getting targeted.

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.

Why was he a failure politically?

Maybe in reference to his political party which failed to gain any seats in parliament? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand)

I'd consider not getting seats a failure overall, though he managed to get attention and the first elections werent that bad (if I recall correctly).

My favorite part of this was SOPA was being discussed on the same exact day they arrested Kim Dotcom, and they argued they needed SOPA to do what they did to Kim Dotcom. Kind of a useless bill.

I’m not sure I understand the comparison. Megaupload was a file sharing platform that we used to download mostly pirated material and although they had a music platform at some point, that wasn’t the primary method that most people interacted with Megaupload. The illegal equivalent to Spotify was Grooveshark, not Megaupload. The majority of Kim Dotcoms products outside of file sharing came long after Megaupload was attracting scrutiny. He was not a trailblazer, even Megaupload itself was a clone of Rapidshare. I’m sure we all remember the terrible album he used to launch his music platform which came after he was arrested.

> MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify.

Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.

Spotify didn't launch in the US market until 2011.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...

You do know that they pushed it left and right as 'dropbox' share everything platform targeting pirate groups with referral money right?

He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows

Wait until you hear how Crunchyroll got to where they did! Plex is on much the same trajectory. Heck, even Google Play Music used the strategy by letting people upload their pirated music libraries to get users. It's a tried and true strategy.

Kim just didn’t grease the right palm plus he was a singular face and name. Feds are relentless at getting those who the oligopolists have marked for retribution, just like Assange and Snowden

Except when you read the basis for indictment section of megaupload’s Wikipedia page, I think it’s quite clear that the service wasn’t just another YouTube or Crunchyroll that was hosting copyrighted content and not doing a great job at taking it down. They were doing a lot more than that, they were running a file storage service that actively encouraged privacy and wasn’t actually useful for storing personal files.

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.

I'm not sure that one can distinguish between a russian asset and a russian prisoner so easily.

YouTube got big because back in the day you could watch full movies uploaded to it. (pre-Google era)

But was Google actively paying pirates to upload those full movies? That's the allegation against Kim.

Plex and GPM never distributed pirated content, they just allowed users to host or upload their own content.

Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks about that but images online are constantly breaking copyright law.

didn't itunes let people convert their pirated music collections into legit paid ones?

except they did a bad job by replacing tracks that sounded similar and then deleting the original.

Or even YouTube.

There are big differences in the details there. I suggest you go to the Megaupload Wikipedia article and go to the “basis of indictment” section.

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.

> Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.

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.

> Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household

I believe that's incorrect. See Plex Pass, and Plex shares are a common form of sharing pirated content.

Google Play Music let you upload your own music library to your own account. They didn't check or assert where you got your mp3s. Nobody else had access to your collection.

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.

Politicians steal, make horrible decisions, and worst things and nothing happens. But you share movies and go to prison!

If anything, it's a cautionary tale that tech is only one dimension of the question of creating a process, service, or system that will be a net benefit to people (or even allowed).

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.

Megaupload was not deleting content. They only deleted links to the content. So, if you had 10 links to the same video, and a copyright holder contacted them to delete their content under link #1, they would only remove that link but leave the rest (links and content) intact.

Is this proven? Is it possible someone else uploaded the content after it was deleted?

> It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly.

In a way that makes it much easier to argue against the idea that IP protects creators and not their pimps.

> 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.

Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.

> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art

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.

There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.

And software engineers that do it?

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.

How would his career change if AI music become prevalent? He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.

> "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!"

This transaction does not need IP protection at all.

I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a lot of time to learn to make music. If you can’t make it as a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as becoming a football star), you previously still had the option to use your music skills to make money with boring work: music for ads for example.

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.

"either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market"

I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.

I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what the job market seems to value is that you have done the exact same thing as what they are hiring for.

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.

It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find a way to keep artists secure economically while letting as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are anything to go by).

For. The. Love. Of. The. Game.

Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.

>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.

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.

Being "the guy" is the moat in entertainment. The problem is if you remove that, then the throngs of folks can make content to where it becomes "if everyone's special, no one is." I get it, I just wish it wasn't the case.

The ego stuff can be sickening, but it is definitely a draw. Some of the best musicians and artists, ever, have been rather appalling personalities. I won't go into naming names.

If you get used to stepping on the shoulders of others, that cascades to other aspects of your life and sooner-or-later a paparazzi video comes out of you being a dick to wait staff or worse.

The music industry isn’t a “goose that lays golden eggs” for the greater economy. It’s not as democratic or accessible as the tech industry either.

You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.

The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans.

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.

A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies the music industry existing as it does today. That would be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that smoking is banned because I specifically don't like smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is access to technology, not the possibility of getting rich.

This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home.

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.

Well, as a [former] creative, myself, I don't think that I'd consider what I did, "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

Because you’re not the one doing it. It’s the music labels that are doing it. You’d also be lucky to get fair compensation for your work. Even superstars get cheated.

The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry

> 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").

At least the tech industry contributes something, which is more than I can say about music labels.

No we just realized people who pirate likely aren’t going to buy it anyway, you can’t claim lost profits for ~$0.

I wouldn't say that, myself.

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.

Anecdotally, when I was in a grad-level design class as an undergrad, 100% of my classmates first learned to use their tools via a jailbroken copy of professional software. At that level of competition for opportunity, it just wasn't good enough to have waited until you got to college to learn these tools; you needed to have been playing with them in high school to be fluent enough to look good on a college application form (or a grad application form four years later).

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'm probably going to hit 1000 games this year on steam, around 960 currently

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.

Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1.

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.

For myself, I also pay for my creative consumer stuff (streaming and art).

It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.

Who are these developers making reliably good games over 20 years?

Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.

FromSoft, potentially. Even if you only start counting years at Demon's Souls (2009), that still gets them to 15 years.

I...I want to make ego-less music... ._.

You're mixing several valid criticisms of the tech industry with a really invalid critique of Free Culture[0]. If it were true that "taking away the opportunity for individual financial and ego success" meant nobody makes creative works anymore, then we wouldn't have Wikipedia, the SCP Foundation wiki, GNU, or Linux. I also want to point out that it was specifically the Free Software people who fired the first shot against generative AI, because a lot of our licenses are designed to resist enclosure of the commons.

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.

Pagers created a new business model for drug dealers. It didn't change the criminality of drug dealing.

He was not early at all.

this likable/unlikable narrative gives me chills. it’s just like with assange—(il)legal imperialism at play - basically a rogue country playing the world police for the capitalist class, yet we’re fixated on personalities. it's like mistaking the finger for the moon.

The government enforcing IP laws is certainly not a public good, in my book.

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.

Yeah it's totally fine. No uncomfortable thoughts bubbling below the surface here.

Do you think UK will sign an extradition order for JK Rowling to go to France over a olympic harrassment lawsuit? Or USA will sign an extradition order for Elon Musk if France asks in that same lawsuit, or if UK demands he be extradited for participating in incitement from abroad?

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!”

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