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Comment by KhalPanda | Hacker News Reader

This just seems ridiculous to me. I may well get downvoted, but it needs saying. Why do 99% of the world's governments seem completely retarded when it comes to copyright laws?

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.

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I work in Law Enforcement, so feel to disregard my opinion as biased , however, 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down. I used to find computers with lists and lists of megaupload urls. When that method died out a little beacon of happy shone for me. Now I understand that free movies trumps removing abusive material, and as rapidshare and others took a more reasoned approach the child abuse material slipped into TOR and then i2p (after we brought the house down repeatedly on lolitacity and similar places in TOR). So it was more of a temporary reprieve. But those still at it have to work a bit harder and I'm happy about that. It's all about the free movies right? Well if that's your world, you're lucky.

If people are involved in the transmission of child abuse, I'm happy for them to be prosecuted for that.

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.

> 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down.

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.

Yep, lets arrest everyone.. FOR THE CHILDREN! Everytime a case comes up you law enforcement bring up the same big scarry bad men.. Drugs, Pedophiles, and Terrorists.. GET LOST

I don't understand. They were using a service were everyone's IPs and other data were logged and could be subpoenaed, now they're using services that add many more barriers to discovering their identity, and you consider that an improvement? What am I missing?

The aim isn't just prosecution, deterrence and reducing ease of use is an aim. And self selecting by choosing a service that only hosts CP makes it like shooting fish in a barrel when you do roll the admin/server. Ask "freedom hosting" and some Tormail folks about that. I was actually really surprised at the time to see the site that hosted my favorite OCR tech pdfs- yes, mega, was pretty obviously allowing forums to flourish under it's nose. Maybe there was too much content for them to check or maybe they didn't care. Yes, the investigator's job get's harder but not having this material turn up in effectively mainstream environments is a good thing. I'm technical rather than investigative but good investigation + sloppy OpSec breaks the veil of anonymity, technical brilliance rarely does. Those barriers you are thinking of- they have always existed in meatspace. Digital space is a cornucopia of evidence in comparison.

I can understand your joy. However, the valid question is not "How much of the available CP material is on X" but rather "How much of the total available material on X is CP" because I can tell you with certainty, that all of the available CP material on the internet will go away if we just turn off the internet.

"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.

This. Statistics can be used to show things in totally different light.

Of course you can make a much stronger case against MU for hosting child abuse material, this isn't a copyright issue.

That's a petty strawman. I think most people around here care more about the Android ecosystem of builds centered around those file sharing sites. Or the vast amounts of technical documentation. If there were abuse material there too, not a single soul wouldn't want that removed, but that's an unrelated problem. You don't need to remove the former material just to remove the latter.

I ran a file sharing site for a while (it started out as a way to get around email file attachment limits). Sure enough the child pornographers found out about it and started using it but close collaboration between the dutch child porn taskforce and myself meant that using the service for child pornography was a huge risk to the uploaders and downloaders alike.

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.

I wish people were more considered, less cavalier, when providing services. You obviously thought about it. That's important and some people appreciate it. I don't buy the "I just do X, what happens next is not my fault". It doesn't wash in commerce, it's equally invalid in ethics.

When you buy lunch, whatever that seller does with your money is not your fault. Even if that is commit a violent crime.

Whilst CP is a horrible thing, and we all thank you for the amazing work you are doing (genuinely, no sarcasm intended), your view does seem extremely biased. If the intention was to go after CP then if that was stated as the reason for closing MU then no one would have batted an eyed and everyone would have got a pat on the back.

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?

I know the intention was not to go for CEM. If it was they wouldn't have told anyone, they would have just snaffled the servers and brought the hammer down on the admin and slurped IP/user details for a couple of days. For examples see darknet sites that have been put in the hands of law enforcement recently.

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.

Your gross simplification of the issue to "free movies vs raping children" is a straw-man. That kind of patronizing condescension may work on morons, but there are those who have given careful consideration to the issue and decided that despite the negative aspects of free speech and the rule of law, that free speech is in fact more important than catching file-sharers of any kind, and that your ends-justifies-the-means philosophy is absolutely the wrong way for police to operate in a "free country". I'm glad you realize that you're playing wack-a-mole, while perverts film themselves raping children and then sell that. Hopefully one day you'll graduate to actually stopping child abuse at the source, but hey, feeling good about yourself in this moment is more important than actually doing good, right?

The depressing reality is that I'm confronting the reality of the hands on abuse on a day to day basis. That's my world. If your's doesn't have that, lucky you. I don't feel good about it in the slightest. But thanks for letting me vent that :) I'm not sure why free speech IS file sharing in your argument. Maybe freedom of intellectual property? You're also making assumptions about the law I operate under. I'm not in the US or NZ. So I couldn't have any impact on the mega situation. I too am amazed by the extra-territorial nature of the proceedings. I think it's bad law. I mean, WETA is in NZ, some of their movies would have been on mega, it could have been done by New Zealand police and courts. Why not?

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.

>The depressing reality is that I'm confronting the reality of the hands on abuse on a day to day basis. That's my world. If your's doesn't have that, lucky you.

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.

> I'm not sure why free speech IS file sharing in your argument. Maybe freedom of intellectual property?

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.

Maybe if the USA hunted child-abusers like they hunt "terrorists" then the abuse material would stop being produced.

Equating "piracy", which is nothing more than enjoying the fruits of somebody else's labor without paying them, with "free speech"? Yeah, that sounds closer to the "moron" category than the "careful consideration" category.

We all enjoy the fruits of other's labor without paying them; life would be impossible otherwise.

As the host of free web hosting services, I can't begin to describe how terrifying it is to read this.

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.

I wish LE spent more resources on hunting the producers of child abuse material, instead of just attacking those who hosts. It seems like you play whack-a-mole and cite a victory because "megaupload went down" but guess what, the uploaders are still at large.

This is not a victory!

I think you kind of solidified the point though. You removed one source, it simply came back somewhere else. While I don't think we should by any means allow hosting providers to host abusive material without recourse, completely removing a hosting provider from the web simply causes the predators to move somewhere else. You WILL NOT stop it from occurring, and hurting millions of innocent people in the process is stupid.

The "think of the children" argument is tired.

My guess is that their strategy is to create a chilling effect by making an example of this guy.

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.

It seems to infuriate me and make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law.

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?

>It seems to [...] make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law.

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.

It will be on the books but maybe as something else.

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.

If it's on the books then it's on the books as "y did work for x" which is about as much as they need.

This is the most logical explanation that I know of, also considering what happened to PopcornTime.

Reference please, I missed the PopcornTime drama.

[Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.] https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app

it's like arresting the knife maker for a crime committed by a murderer.

Only somewhat. I don't agree with the sentence here, but a full analogy would be a knife-maker who made a custom knife to order for a person who they knew intended to market it as a murder weapon.

US are selling a shitload of automatic weapons and nobody bats an eye about it..

Well, the idea of criminal justice, besides "fairness"/"retribution" (which I think is barbaric), is that it discourages future criminal action by others, who have more reason to believe they would be similarly punished if caught.

They are not retarded. They are just money driven IMHO.

And I bet the story behind this is no worse than the plot of House of Cards.

Some people buy a car to do whatever the hell they want with it. Others buy chunk of a nuclear superpower's government to do whatever the hell they want with it.

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