Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year
justice.gov
justice.gov
From what I understand the Netherlands copyright law is more lenient than the US law. For instance downloading copyrighted material was legal until very recently. So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there... http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fin...
So you could do something which is legal, or illegal but not criminal offense (civil) in the country where you live, but if it displeases the US, then suddenly they can throw you in jail in a foreign country (the US) where you have no ties.
I break Chinese laws on a daily basis (Tank Man!). Why should I care about US law, since I do not live there, nor am I a citizen? It's not like I can vote for these laws...
There have been cases where it was argued that US electronic law (hacking and piracy cases) is not fair to the accused. This however does not always help.
This will however not help if you refuse a hearing on this. The article states: "Nomm agreed to waive his extradition hearing in the Netherlands"
I think this protection may even go too far, as in the case of Roman Polanski who continues to evade a quite reasonable-looking extradition request on a child rape conviction.
Of course, they won't send in the fleet to come and free you, so their bargaining power is limited but it has had its successes in the past.
It's similar to what was done to witches in medieval times: "Confess, and we will kill you gently, or be sentenced and be burned alive."
But of course it has nothing to do with how dangerous he is in most cases. They're just selectively enforcing vague laws just to pile them up and force him to accept at least some prison time, even if he considers himself innocent.
That should be illegal and considered against human rights, especially since usually I believe the judges have no say in it, as the charges happen before the accused is brought in front of a judge. Without a judge you can't have "justice" either. You just have government bullies using the government's might to put someone - anyone - in prison, even if he's innocent or only guilty of minor offences. This is exactly why such abuses of power should be illegal.
To the prosecutor it is just a day job, whether the guy spends 1 or 10 years in prison won't really change anything to his holiday plans. To the defendant, he is playing with his own life. He will have to be locked in a room with thugs for many years, away from his family or any prospect of a normal life.
So both parties have a very different risk aversion in that game. So the prosecution plays with that.
Now if you inflicted a significant pain (career progression, financial penalty) on the prosecutor every time he sent someone to court that turned out to be judged innocent, then you would even this "game" and would probably end up with a more fair bargain.
As to fairness it’s considered completely reasonable for an innocent person who is a possible flight risk to spend a year in jail awaiting trial.
That being said, prosecutors are humans, and often-times egotistical, political, cynical, and more than occasionally vindictive humans with all that entails. So, it is hardly uncommon to see rules already stacked in the state's favor bent or broken.
Trials are virtually extinct in the USA. With few exceptions, if you find yourself going to trial, you are not in a good place. While good lawyers should be trial lawyers and unafraid of trying any triable case, the vast majority of the time if you are getting off, you are getting off pretrial with a dismissal or deferred prosecution agreement. If you lose on pretrial motions and the state is intent on prosecuting, then most of the time if your attorney can get you a deal and recommends that you take it, then it's a choice between pride/"truth" and rolling dice loaded against you and paying for it big time.
While in principle as a defendant you are not supposed to be punished for taking your right to go to trial, the plea system punishes you heavily, and if you refuse to "take responsibility" by admitting guilty (the earlier the better) and expressing remorse, then you get punished even more post-conviction, with a heavier sentence, and then certainly being denied parole if that is available in the state system.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7t...
PS: Absolute immunity protects from both criminal prosecution and lawsuits, so in general they can at worst be fired possibly disbarred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity
As for the prosecutor themselves, defendants or judges can and do refer misconduct to bar associations which can and do disbar prosecutors. Judges can directly hold prosecutors in contempt and fine or jail them in extreme cases, or refer them for criminal prosecution on charges ranging from perjury, obstruction of justice, official misconduct, and criminal contempt and so on. As with any criminal cases involving criminal justice professionals, this is quite rare, but it does happen, and absolute immunity is no barrier to it.
As such, it was usually only the innocent people that went through the trial-by-god process, and very often the priest conducting the trial rigged the process, and very few people were actually killed in the process.
See how bargaining can make your life a bit easier?
A collusion insinuates secrecy or illegality. There's a plain treaty about extraditions. If you get prosecuted in the US the default mode is that you get extradited.
In practice extraditions are almost never blocked, you would have to be in very special circumstances, like if you'd be at risk of being put to death in the US. Or have some illness that's not treated properly in the US. Maybe a very big public outcry in The Netherlands could work in your favor.
In this case it's very plain. There's no public outcry, he's viewed as a common criminal in The NL. His actions are most likely illegal here as well and it doesn't seem like a very good moment to go discussing the US' extreme penalties for intellectual crime.
His problem wasn't that he wouldn't receive a fair trial, his problem was that the laws themselves are silly (but not obviously immoral or excessive). If he had faced a corporeal punishment (death penalty or mutilation), he might have had a case.
Of course the ideal path would have been facing the hearing and then pleading guilty when he was extradited, but the plea bargain likely required him not to challenging the extradition and his chances for successfully doing so were likely far too low to take the gamble.
That was the saddest display of spinelessness I've ever seen, to be honest. I never felt that ashamed of my country and the EU.
The excuses about him having to be on German soil to request asylum were especially infuriating. Considering the government's reaction thus far, it is painfully obvious Germany would receive and grant an extradition request faster than you can see "Volkssouveränität".
"I wish my neighbors would tell the bully to fuck off when he demands their lunch money"
Here's what happens to countries who tell the USA to fuck off (spoilers: they get economically and militarily invaded):
http://www.amazon.com/Game-As-Old-Empire-Corruption/dp/15767... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
There are situations in which it is right to send people to prison without them posing an active and dangerous threat. Whether this in one of those situations is more arguable.
One undermined the public's confidence in the strength, fairness and security of financial institutions, the other made some rich people not any richer.
There is loads of evidence of the Megaupload team getting a bunch of copyrighted content and putting it up there. The team themselves. Can't really hide behind safe harbor with that.
If I were handing out burned DVDs of movies to people, I'd probably get arrested too (even if selling DVD burning equipment would be fine).
As I see it, employees of Megaupload must have known the risks they were running, so we can't say it's unfair to punish them. We should be actively pushing for legal framework regarding the sharing of copyrighted material, instead of just whining about the punishment meted out to those who took advantage of the current chaos.
Do these situations exist only when we consider punishment a valid reason for imprisonment? Don't get me wrong; Bernie Madoff being free and enjoying life wouldn't sit right with me, but you have to wonder if locking people away as retribution really benefits tax-paying, law-abiding citizens.
Well, we should also consider if it's benefiting or humane to the people we lock away.
It's not like "tax-paying, law-abiding citizens" are more human than those that end up in jail.
If somebody is judged by their peers to have broken the laws approved by their peers, then they receive the punishment deemed suitable by their peers.
As I say, my knowledge of this comes from a brief college-level history about 20 years ago, so may be outdated, naive or just completely wrong.
But I think in the case of Bernie Madoff, incarcerating him was justified to deter similar financial frauds in the future. I suspect (and judging by some of the comments on this page, it might have worked) locking up Andrus Nomm is an attempt to discourage programmers from working for firms like MegaUpload.
But sadly putting people behind bars is considered a solution in itself in the US, rather than a means to an end.
i wonder if the war on drugs is really orchestrated (either with intention, or manipulated by vested individuals) to make drugs more scarce, and more difficult to obtain, to justify their high price. By making it highly illegal, trafficking drugs has never been more profitable (for the drub lords - not for the peddlers nor the mules obviously).
You hardly see the real boss go to prison...
</conspiracy>
If the USG is sending guns to the gangs in Mexico to aid in their survival, why not help them profit by letting their merchandise into the USA?
Then it gives the USG a reason to wage a "war on drugs" and harden the military-industrial complex industry to fight ever growing "threats" of criminal power "at our borders".
The programmer in question wasn't arrested for downloading something from Megaupload, were they?
The other way around though, the US has already indicated that if ever an American citizen (like IDK, Bush or Cheney or whoever) is going to be tried for war crimes in The Hague, they'd send in their military to extract them. WW3 material right there.
As for the copyright laws, it depends. It was never allowed to upload music and the like - i.e. seeding if you talk about torrent clients. IIRC some leaked Megaupload emails / internal communications indicated that some of the staff was uploading material themselves (but I could mis-remember that)
How many tens of millions in legal resources were expended in bringing 'justice' here? And what does the outcome even matter? Good job, tens of millions down the drain for one year of an Estonian's time? The system would surely be better served if they just handed those millions to the actual copyright holders?
The only real victory (if that's what they'd like to call it) is having taken the site down in the first place, not that that did a single thing to kerb 'illegal' filesharing...
The industry has moved on and adapted just fine.
I am occasionally regaled by tales from investigators I have assisted with descriptions of jail sentences handed down to abusers- you would think that would be satisfying. It's not. It's just confirmation by jury and society that they were in fact evil human beings and in a couple of years they'll be back. And that's grim.
Yeah, I get it, you're a dedicated do-gooder and people don't stroke your ego often enough. You're a legend in your own mind.
>I'm not sure why free speech IS file sharing in your argument.
"file sharing" or 'freeloaders watching movies without paying' is a minor consequence of free speech on the internet.
>You're also making assumptions about the law I operate under.
Your rhetoric falls within what I would classify as typical American scaremongering. TBH, if you're going to make these kinds of posts in a thread about the US DOJ's crowing about their success defending private industry's profit goals; I don't think it matters much.
The reason you're not sure file sharing is free speech is because your thinking is still clouded by the notion that there is such a thing as "intellectual property".
Property, that pesky word with a relentlessly concrete meaning, is something in the material world that can be bought, sold, stolen, given, auctioned, and after any or all of those actions, it still exists in the same quantity it existed before. Examples: land, cars, computers.
When a person P steals property from another person Q, then it must be true P now is in possession of the property, and Q is not in possession of the property anymore.
When you say a sentence out loud, I can remember it and say it again to someone else. That does not mean I stole that sentence from you (it may mean I'm unoriginal), because you still have the ability to say it.
Now say you say a sentence so long I want to write it down so I can say it again. I write it down and save it on a file on my computer. I give this file to my friends - that is, I give copies of this file to my friends. Now we all have a file that represents that long sentence you uttered, and yet not my friends nor I have taken that sentence away from you.
A file is a long sentence written down. It is speech. It is not property like cars, land and computers. I hope this helps.
I'm not happy with the approach of prosecuting people for copyright infringement and then claiming they deserve it because of the child abuse material. That's a bait-and-switch.
However, this apparently did not serve as the grounds for punishment, and is not mentioned in statements quoted in the article—the whole deal seems to hinge on copyright infringement allegations.
I reached out to the ncmec people and spent SIX. MONTHS. trying to get access to PhotoDNA, and have got the runaround for six months. They sent me a garbage URL block list (amazingly dumb idea, by the way.. that thing is so fucking dangerous I won't even touch it) and gave me access to their fancy report tool, but no PhotoDNA. I finally just gave up because I don't have time to fight with them, I need access to photodna and if they won't give it to me, fine.
Until you finally provide the technology to detect child pornography in a reasonably accessible way, it is not the host's fault, it's yours. You are fucking up, and you are fucking up bad.
If you actually give a shit about dealing with this problem, go into NCMEC and start throwing bricks, seriously. Until then, expect pretty much every host ever to have child porn on it, because we can't stop it because we're prevented from using the tech by nonprofits that don't function and industry partnerships we can't afford. contact@neocities.org if anyone wants to be a hero and actually cares, I'm not expecting an email.
The police never cared about any potential copyright infringement (which I'm fairly certain must have occurred as well simply because we could not possibly monitor all the uploads manually).
Eventually I clued in to a way to really close the door on the childporn if we could collaborate even more tightly but before this could get off the ground my main contact at the dutch police force died and his replacement did not show much interest (there was a huge flap with child porn made in daycare centers here at the time so I can see why he would have been too busy).
Absent the collaboration I shut the service down, but in principle I think file sharing services have many good aspects, they are just tools and can be used for good and bad alike.
"For the children" is a readily abused argument for about any collateral damage that incurs with about any attempt to filter, block or control aspects of the internet and by extension our free society. But even "for the children" must be balanced against the damage we're doing while rallying under that banner.
Of course, Hollywood really doesn't give a sh*t about CP, and the CP is just a side effect of what they deem to be a massive threat to their antiquated business model.
But keep up the good work, I'm sure it's getting tougher and tougher as this stuff goes more underground. Question: Would you rather the CP stayed a bit more "mainstream" so it was easier to catch people, or overall is "less" damage done if it goes more underground?
Yeh, they should sort the business model. I'm not in favor of actions that perpetuate ignoring the rule of law. If a rule is bad, change it, don't just ignore it being broken. It breeds corruption on both sides. See prostitution and most forms of prohibition
Think about it this way- would you prefer street racers did their thing and broke laws (yes I have a bit of OCD like a lot of folks in tech- mine includes the Criminal Code) in public where the law is..flouted.. or had to go out of their way, to somewhere only those who want to engage in that activity go.
The biggest issue I see is that legitimate tools for protest are being subverted, perhaps by a majority, based on traffic analysis of TOR by Standford.
The "think of the children" argument is tired.
This is not a victory!
From their perspective, if smart people become more frightened to take on projects like this, their money was well spent.
$10M is lunch money here.
But in no way will I cave to this mafia style behavior.
Do I now risk going to jail if any of the people o worked with use my software for something illegal?
Money paid in cash still needs to show up in the books of the company and your tax statement. If it doesn't, you just handed them another opportunity to make you hang - tax fraud is nothing to trifle with.
I don't mind paying tax but I'd rather not get arrested for something a person I do business with did.
This is the chilling effect this kind of behavior by the state has.
It make people less willing to share real information with the government since it could potentially get them arrested just to make an example of them.
It's all about trust and this kind of behavior makes me not trust the government or the law.
And I bet the story behind this is no worse than the plot of House of Cards.
We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no actual harm to anyone all the while people committing actual crimes go unnoticed or repeatedly go in and out of the system. People slinging drugs in the streets probably get lesser sentences than Andrus got for helping develop Megaupload.
"In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. He further acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through their conduct."
Classic entertainment industry mathematics. How can a figure as large as $400 million be accurately proven? Seems like they just spun a massive wheel down at the law firm and chose whatever number sounded large, but not over the top. More specifically, how can a computer programmer who doesn't sound like had any involvement in the business side of things know how much Megaupload supposedly cost the industry?
There are so many things about this story that don't sit right with me. They went after the low hanging fruit. They couldn't touch Kim Dotcom, so they're going for the vulnerable and lesser high profile people involved in hopes of building up a case for bringing down Dotcom. This is what it is all about: sending a message to Dotcom and trying to slowly try anyone even remotely involved in the Megaupload site. They know Kim won't go down without a fight, they'll basically say: Well one of the sites developers admitted there was copyrighted material on the site and he knew about it, he was sent to jail.
As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement.
Neither Google nor Dropbox was set up with the intent of aiding copyright infringement. Neither Google nor Dropbox based their business model on aiding copyright infringement. The comparison is invalid.
> As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement.
He was the head of software development for Megaupload. It is hard to imagine that he did not have full knowledge of what they were doing and was not involved in planning it.
Are my memories flawed and Megaupload ignored the copyright infringement notices, or is Megaupload the fall guy to scare everyone else?
Even making the specific URLs stop working was a sore spot with Dotcom. He sent emails to employees telling them to not even do that when they got a mass report of infringement from an "insignificant source". An "insignificant source" meant anyone other than a major organization in the US (e.g., major Hollywood studios).
As far as explicitly condoning copyright infringement goes, sometimes users would see movie trailers, and ask Mega where they can see the full movie online, and Mega employees would answer by pointing them to third party sites that linked to the full movies on Mega. One Mega email to such a user included the explanation that you cannot find the links by directly searching Mega because "that would cause us a lot of trouble".
Removing just the link to the file seems reasonable to me. How do you choose which country to break the law? Removing just the link seems like the safest bet.
Maybe I should call the copyright owner something else that fits HN, induces more sympathy... Intellectual Property Doyen? Post Marketing Profit Retrieval Specialist? VP of Marketshare and Ongoing Growth? Capital Return Scout? Nah can't keep a straight face, "Dude with the Creatives on a leash"
If you follow takedown notices, there's no issue, DMCA's safe harbor provisions protect you totally. The issue was that Megaupload was participating in the uploading and stuff
(for the record: not condoning the federal gov't's usage of time/money trying to get Dotcom arrested/extradited or whatever)
Does that even matter, given the $175 million number that comes right after? Pretty sure that number can be easily proven from their ledgers.
I don't exactly see how your comment helps any more than mine but that's fine.
Even though my view certainly isn't representative, it seems to me that American culture is far more concerned with punishment or retribution than rehabilitation than we are in Germany. Sure, we have tabloids calling for "severe punishments" as well, but in general the system seems to be far more concerned with protecting the public (and maybe converting the criminal to a law-abiding citizen in the process).
But I must say that in my ear, "Department of Corrections" sounds perhaps even more like propaganda, or doublespeak...
> Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer ... from 2007 until his arrest in January 2012. ... he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites ... which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy” warning.
> Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites.
Replace megaupload with any website or service provider (Youtube, Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook) and it gets scary very quickly.
Poppycock. How is a computer programmer qualified to estimate the pecuniary value of “harm caused” by the shop they're working at? What about the harm caused to Justice by farces and show trials like this?
And of course the "harm caused to copyright holders" is a farcical concept to begin with. You can't just take, say, the total number of downloads and multiply that with some fictitious amount of lost revenue and then claim that as damage, yet that's exactly what the rights utilization industry has been doing for decades.
This concept is based on the idea of physical theft. If I steal a truckload of soap and then sell it myself, the damage I'm doing to the legitimate owner is equivalent to the volume I stole multiplied by the original selling price minus regular shrinkage (e.g. lost sales because of faulty products, damage during regular handling or natural expiry).
Digital goods don't work that way. The "theft" of digital goods does not result in you having less products to sell. Instead it's more similar to the damage done via the "theft" of trade secrets. If I steal the Coca Cola recipe and begin giving away knock-off cola for free, I arguably cause damages due to lost sales, but it'd be ridiculous to assume that every "sale" of my product is equivalent to one lost sale of the Coca Cola company.
In fact, MegaUpload didn't even "steal" anything. If we want to use physical crimes as metaphors, it's simply dealing with stolen goods -- or more precisely: giving stolen goods away for free. And if one million users downloaded the same illegal content, they didn't give one million stolen goods away, they merely gave the same stolen goods away a million times.
It's not that copyright violations can't cause damages, but the current system for valuation of those damages -- especially in the US -- is entirely ridiculous and only continues to exist because the courts are either too apathetic or too ignorant (or sometimes both) to dismiss it.
Are they prosecuting everyone that ever worked for or did business with megaupload now?
Because that seems a bit shady.
"Let's persecute a random programmer that touched thing we really dislike".
He downloaded some illegal files, he was a head of development and not just a developer, he saw some scare banners on content - all that facts help you sell a story to newspaper reader but for court it's all tangential.
Zero Punishment.
I am fairly certain the Dutch court would not have let him be extradited over this bullshit. Case and point, he is the only one to be extradited successfully and only because he went of his own free will.
I'm also fairly certain his lawyer told him that his hearing would be unlikely to result in a rejection and that complying with the US prosecution would be his best chance for the least bad outcome.
And they're trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US as well!
At the time of launch, I thought how cool it'd have been to work on the project, ouch.
The sad thing is, that is hardly an exaggeration.
Supporting a criminal activity makes you an accomplice. If you do so knowingly, you face similar consequences to the direct perpetrators.
Three examples:
Let's say you work for a bank. Your superior is involved in criminal activity using the bank's resources. The bank may profit from that activity. You do not make any attempts to bring attention to the criminal activity (neither internally nor to the police). You're an accomplice and will face legal consequences.
Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, the bank is a money laundry front for a local organized crime group. A federal investigation busts the operation and defines the bank as a criminal organization. You're an accomplice, but having had no reason to suspect the bank is involved in illegal activities, you'll likely not face any consequences.
Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, some members of senior management are engaging in illegal activities. They are caught and put on trial. You are not an accomplice and don't face any consequences.
(IANAL, but that seems to be how it works in most jurisdictions I'm aware of)