Kim Dotcom: “I'm broke” (german article)
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It's absurd that his file sharing service (which functionally is no different than Dropbox or Google Drive) gets shut down, but start-ups like Uber and AirBnb - which actually endanger people's lives and cause very real damage to property, are allowed to continue operating because their VCs are politically connected.
I used to be in the restaurant/hospitality business - you know how awesome it would be if I could just set up a restaurant, hotel or yes BnB in my house without going through the proper permits? In the part of Canada I live in, a BnB requires no fewer than 7 permits (3 municipal, 3 provincial, and 1 federal).
Edit - if you're in Canada, here's a useful tool to search for some of the permits and licenses your future business will require: http://www.canadabusiness.ca/eng/search/stp1
Here you have 2 US-based businesses thumbing their nose at local laws, as well as the laws of other countries, however because they're connected (and there's a lot of money invested) they get away with it (in the US anyway, and they try their luck elsewhere).
To say the Kim Dotcom debacle is anything but political is absurd...
I think the comparison at least has some merits.
Note: They currently remove specific content when requested and even automate the process. But, you can still find plenty of 'pirated' content where the owner has yet to complain.
When, like Dotcom, you instead actively solicit pirated material, optimize the pirated material on your site for quality, and pay users to put more pirated material on your site using a sliding scale based essentially on how pirated the material is, the DOJ reasonably concludes that you are not a public video site like Youtube, but rather a criminal conspiracy.
Dotcom appeared to have been operating under the misconception that a "notice and takedown" system insulated him from that charge. Dotcom didn't actually read the DMCA, because notice and takedown is only ~half of the responsibility of an online service. The other half, written right into the DMCA, is operating without red flag knowledge of pirated content.
... Or because the Copyright cartels bribed the NZ gov't to roll over.
We'll never know.
Basically, unless you complain we are going to pirate the hell out of your content.
As I read it, the only additional "protection" that Google was required to implement was to have a policy of banning "repeat infringers." There is some additional statutory language about accommodating "standard technical measures" that are "used by copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works," but as far as I can tell no such measures were identified so that didn't constrain Google in any way.
[1] District Court: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1830782936500485... Appeal: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1364457904897559...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNd1l7LsxvU
This person covered the entire youtube screen in popups to his other stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDcrGq_fyoE&src_vid=hhHPnT_h...
copyrighted means that the owner of the copyright is the only one with the right to decide when/where/how it gets shown. But if that owner is cool with it being on Youtube, there's no reason for it to be taken down.
Around here to run a taxi you need several things. One is a commercial vehicle driver's license, which requires training above and beyond the normal license. You also need commercial insurance, to protect yourself, your passengers, and the insurance company (else they would have to raise premiums for everyone to accommodate risky, illicit behaviour). Taxis are required to have cameras, to protect the drivers and passengers. From what I've seen of UberX's 'requirements', they violate in nearly every way, and I don't think I need a 'source' to state why a lack of training, insurance, and safety measures could harm people.
As for AirBnB, imagine you own a condo and someone across from you is running an illicit hotel. These kinds of things affect safety (random people who don't live there constantly coming and going), property value, and hurts legitimate businesses that actually employ people (say, the real BnB or Hotel nearby that follows all the regulations and thus has to pay higher costs). And of course, if you own a condo, are renting is, and your tenants are illegally subletting, the damage is more direct.
- After riding with Uber you get a map sent to you, this could help in proving that a taxi driver tried to rape a woman customer in a dark ally. (this has happened, driver got fired and charged) With a regular taxi it's your word against theirs.
- With Uber you are 100% sure the driver is working for Uber, since you ordered it through the app and the app shows you the license plate. With regular taxis you have to trust that the taxi license is real if you hail a cab on the street.
- With Uber you rate the driver after the ride, which makes sure that bad drivers get detected very quickly. With regular taxis you have to file a complaint, which most people don't because it's too much of a bother.
- With Uber you don't need to have anything representing money on you to get a ride. With regular taxis you need either cash or a credit card on you to pay for the ride, which is a safety issue before, during and after the ride.
I agree with you that there are some issues with a company like Uber just doing whatever they want. However, there are some pretty big issues with the current taxi industry and Uber is doing a prety good job at highlighting them and providing alternatives.
stop hailing strange taxis. Call a dispatch. Boom, accountability.
>With Uber you are 100% sure the driver is working for Uber, since you ordered it through the app and the app shows you the license plate. With regular taxis you have to trust that the taxi license is real if you hail a cab on the street.
that's unfair as the comparison is simply outside the scope of what Uber offers. One could also argue that Uber drivers cannot pickup a person hailing them; but no one should make that argument, because Uber does not try to emulate that particular function of the taxi service.
> With Uber you don't need to have anything representing money on you to get a ride. With regular taxis you need either cash or a credit card on you to pay for the ride, which is a safety issue before, during and after the ride.
how is a credit card a risk? Give it to the perpetrator , ensure your safety, claim the losses. If you're talking about material worth, I hope you don't carry any devices with you.
>I agree with you that there are some issues with a company like Uber just doing whatever they want. However, there are some pretty big issues with the current taxi industry and Uber is doing a prety good job at highlighting them and providing alternatives.
A third party hopping and skipping over established transportation safety regulation is not doing a good job at providing alternatives; it's simply trying to make money before government regulation radically changes the market or the IPO occurs (which will in turn cause a sudden relaxation of 'boundary-pushing' on Uber's part, relaxing government legal worries and providing customers with a worse product after brand establishment and customers begin to rely on earlier iterations)
Doesn't that require a photo of the driver?
For instance: cameras might not have nearly as good of a value proposition in a situation where the identity of the passenger is recorded up front. Extra training might not be necessary if customers have a functioning mechanism to share their intuitive judgements about dangerous drivers.
They do not and should not operate under the same rules as taxis. They are much more like the airport shuttle services that have been operating without taxi licenses or medallions for decades. They simply have a novel way to summon the vehicle that does not involve placing a voice call to the company's scheduler and dispatcher.
There are more types of vehicle-for-hire services than just taxicabs, and they don't need to follow the same regulations.
Just like if I have a Barbeque at home and invite my friends it's a different scenario than selling Barbeque and beer out of my backyard...
My opinion of Uber was something like "great for competition". But of course they can only compete because they're doing so not quite legally, and to great benefits compared to normal taxi drivers.
A normal taxi company might've gotten this large by releasing a good app with some funding, but I doubt it because of the huge advantage Uber has compared to everyone else.
This case had nothing to do with MU hosting other people's work and content, tricking the general public into signing up to a paid account to download it, and generating 400MM of revenue from it at the same time.
It had everything to do with the horse carriage industry trying to stop the automobile.
Of course copyright is not actually licensed as FRAND like in the case of a patent accepted by some standards body, but I'm not sure why it shouldn't be when the alternative seems to be violent state-sponsored actions against foreign nationals like Kim Dotcom, protecting interests of incumbent super-companies and using various kinds of taxpayer dollars to invoke the police and para-military in the process.
Like, if you are selling access to content, the producers are reasonably entitled to a share of your revenue. But if the producers sign their rights away (granting "entity" an exclusive license to sell reproductions) they are entitled to whatever you signed to pay at the dotted line, only. That's how the content industry was run since forever.
When those licenses are written as non-exclusive, you might have a gnarly mess of Guitarist and Singer authorize Band authorizes Agent authorizes Advertising Partner authorizes Radio Station authorizes Distribution Company authorizes Pandora/Netflix authorizes Partner, and Friends. If one of those contracts goes south (non-payment or expiration), are all of the subcontracting child parties suddenly violating criminal law and liable for jail time because they're now distributing copyrighted works without authorization?
Of course not, they are in breach of contract, or in a contract dispute, or a failure to achieve a meeting of the minds, or whatever. You don't go to jail. Not in any reasonable society, at least I would argue. Not before one of the entitled parties says "cease and desist," and after you fail to comply within a reasonable period of time, and even then certainly not before a judge says so.
So, like Spotify?
A better example of make available for download and ask permission later, which in contrast to MU, was not shutdown by the courts, might be grooveshark.
My experience with Uber was that it's merely a way for those who want to be cab drivers to bypass the legal requirements to do so, while Uber turns a blind eye to who is really driving their cars.
>I guess I'm going back to court soon to get some of my assets unfrozen for legal fees and living expenses. To be continued...
He still have a bunch of assets that are outside his control.
He also tweeted that his rent is paid until halfway to next year.
His wife is suing him for 20+ million.
Dude still has money, he just can't get access to large amounts of it to stir stuff up.
Also, I imagine there is quite a bit this guy can do once he is able to move his focus away from fighting huge organizations (including the U.S. gov) to stay out of jail.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
Silicon Valley is the strongest lobby for novelty and innovation. Even it struggles sometimes against the established laws and businesses.
1. John uploads a file and distributes the link. 2. Jane wants to download the file. She can do it freely (low speed, daily limits) or for a little fee (fast download, no limits). 3. Jane wants to download many files, so she signs up for a premium account. 4. John gets a comission from MegaUpload.
What happens if John uploads copyrighted material and drives sales for MegaUpload using pirated software and movies? Well...the file gets removed, but nothing else. He can continue doing it again and again, even uploading the same file again.
And this was going on on a massive scale, hundreds of people were earning several thousand dollars per month from this and -- according to court documents -- Kim was very much aware of this and even actively encouraged uploaders to supply copyrighted material to the system.
I think a lot less people have much of an opinion on unlicensed cabbies existing. AirBnB is a bit more controversial (anti-subletting clauses are there for neighbors more than for landlords, and NIMBY plays a role), but some people are cool with that so long as they trust their neighbor's judgement.
I do agree that the SV-ness of these two companies has helped immensely.
Kim's downfall is likely twofold:
1. Lack of Valley VCs with money saying what he's doing is good for the world.
2. The entertainment money lobby is very strong. I don't think there are taxi or anti-subletting lobbies of similar weight.
No, it's just that the taxi lobby is less powerful than Hollywood, and is less used to spreading mass-propaganda. Have you ever seen ads shouting "Driving an unlicensed cab is A FELONY!" before every piece of entertainment you consume? That's why you think "most people feel" this or that about copyright infringement. It has nothing to do with the actual matter or the intensity of "natural feelings" of Joe Average about this or that topic. After all, before Napster was sued, the overwhelming majority of any population had no qualms whatsoever about copying anything digital (computer programs etc), not unlike we all had no qualms about using Uber until cabbies revolted.
Napster/Mega/Uber/AirBnB all shared the commonality of enabling illegal practices on a scale previously deemed impossible. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it depends on individual categories, but there is no denying that they all share a fundamental challenge/disobedience of established laws.
We weren't born with an innate sense that is wrong to pay for certain types of digital copies; our rational economic instinct is to try and get the best bang for our buck, not to investigate whether the seller is actually allowed to sell us that particular bang. That is why contraband is as old as the world.
It was a constant stream of threats and propaganda from established interests that taught us that there is a "good copy" and a "bad copy" and people selling "bad copies" are unworthy of getting our money. Now it's natural to think that there is a line to draw, regardless of where you actually draw it. That line wasn't there before "they" told us to look for it.
For taxis and hospitality, this process of education/indoctrination has not happened, because there was no real need -- these matters were settled in law decades ago through the (mostly democratic) process, and that was it. Established interests could draw the line at any time with a couple of phone calls, because you can't hide a hotel or a cab for long; there was no need to involve the public, no need to divulge the finer points of hospitality law or to develop in their customers a critical approach to doing business in these markets like the entertainment industry was doing.
Now Uber and AirBnB are simply bypassing these established systems by using scale. They make infringers small enough and numerous enough to make enforcement unpractical on the ground, and use that as a lever to remove established systems of control. Incumbents are forced to ask the public to do the enforcement themselves, like the entertainment industry started doing so many years ago. So now more and more people know that there is a line to draw in those industries as well, but in numbers nowhere near what the entertainment industry amassed in almost 50 years of continuous advertisement of "bad practices". That doesn't mean that they don't have the exact same reasons of the entertainment industry: "the law says X and these people are doing Y, please make them stop". (In fact, they probably have even more reasons, since regulation of these industries has some foundation in actual threats to the public -- hotels with no emergency exit, drunk unlicensed drivers etc. -- whereas nobody ever died because of an unlicensed tape.)
If the copyright-topic wasn't an issue, this would be quite a nice business model (at least a kind of fair one).
But this revenuesharing thing encourages people to upload files for a mass audience, and that's the reason why this doesn't work.
Dropbox doesn't deserve the comparison, dropbox restrict sharing to make themselves unattractive for piracy. The similarities stop with "storing heaps of files".
[1] e.g. on the streaming video side megavideo they had a 72 minute per day limit on watching videos. On the download site you were throttled and made to jump through a bunch of hoops to download one file at a time for free. These were not nice sites.
What US competitors are safe? You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.
I'm hoping the founders of Napster get early release from jail. They've done their time, surely.
Have you ever seen Kim engage in talks for a settlement? Would it even make sense for the industry to settle at this point? You think Sean Parker would still be a free man if he would just continued running Napster as it was?
(The Dread Pirate Roberts was also running an innovative business where users could exchange government restricted goods through a P2P system with a centralized registry, look where that got him)
Actually, this is very common. It works in exactly the same way as MegaUpload did - Señora Pirata uploads her ripped movies to Dropbox, and distributes the public link to strangers.
[0]http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-your...
A closer example is to compare it to youtube
Youtube, who spent millions developing a state-of-the-art image and sound recognition system (ContentID) so that copyrighted content could be detected and blocked by its holders?
DMCA Safe Harbor doesn't apply if you're complicit, IIRC.
There is a whole group of people sharing copyrighted movies via Google Drive, it happens all the time.
Some of the movies were accessed hundredthousands of times, and are still online after over a year.
Journalists' dream come true. They/we can project upon him and his actions whatever fits their/our agenda.
There will eventually be a movie about him.
I was honestly more amazed by Kim's online persona, because I never had any idea what he did. To be honest, I just saw awesome websites and a guy that looked like he was having fun being a software engineer/hacker. Then he launched the Ultimate Rally, a competitor to the Gumball 3000 race, which was all about fast cars driving across different countries in the world (Another awesome website). I think that was in the early 2000's and after that I've been watching him. Since the internet was largely anonymous, I never knew who he was or that he was falsifying his lifestyle.
His websites have long since been taken down, but they are still vivid in my mind.
But in any case, I think moral ambiguity is in the zeitgeist. Steve jobs, Walter White, Game of Thrones...
he's only really clever at self-promotion and this is just the latest chapter, either to hide money from governments/plaintiffs, his ex-wife or swindle some of his followers out of theirs.
can we not just ignore this guy finally; he's not some kind of internet robin hood / freedom fighter.
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/kim-dotcom-s-wife-left-compa...