>Fitzgerald said that while the victims of Megaupload included wealthy multinational film and music companies, they also included small companies like a New Zealand software firm, Stuff reported.
Given how long this has dragged on for the real victims are the New Zealand taxpayer.
But good job standing for honest small NZ software businesses! I mean, no way it was done just to protect the interests of those wealthy multinationals right? /s
Disclaimer: actually I do think NZ fares better than many countries on this so let me know if my cynicism is misplaced.
This made me think—what if we postulated that companies cannot be victims of a crime. Only physical persons can. So if all you do is harm to a company, it cannot be a crime by definition, the act can only be treated as a company doing harm to another company, and as a company you cannot go to prison
Well, if you run a tailor shop in downtown Los Angeles and you decide to burn your rival's tailor shop down, the only victim there is the other company. So I suppose you couldn't be charged with arson in this framework.
By doing harm to a company you can still do harm to the owners, employees and clients of that company. You'd only be changing the entities involved in the process, not the outcome.
True. But then why do we almost never hold persons criminally accountable when they do harm through a company they control. Shouldn’t this be reciprocal?
A company can go to prison. Otherwise you'd just make a company and then go around stabbing people. If you made Stabbing Inc then all the employees would be imprisoned for the stabbing because they're part of the organisation and acting as the organisation.
At this point he just gives New Zealand a bad name. With all the propaganda he pushes. So he’s cost every NZ citizen paying taxes in NZ and made the country look bad with his public peddling of propaganda for Putin and the CCP.
The bad look from Dotcom pushing Russian empire propaganda is dwarfed by the bad look from the authoritarian corporate copyright maximalism persecuting him in the first place. The Russian shilling is patently false and outright cringey, but going down such a rabbit hole is understandable when one is under direct attack from the US economic empire.
understandable? i have lost any ounce of compassion when dotcom, greenwald, snowden and others have went full-bore pro-kremlin.
the us and copyright bs is an iconic duo which i hate, but going after piracy is whatever compared to destroying democracy and freedom and pushing people to support legitimately evil empires
Snowden and Greenwald haven't gone "full bore pro-kremlin". You have not read a single word either have said and have constructed an image of them based on propaganda and lies.
The US economic empire is/was directly attacking these people. The Kremlin / Russian empire is not. Are you not able understand that when something is directly and personally attacking you, you're heavily inclined to not buy arguments that it could be a force for good in other ways?
I'm not saying their arguments have merit, or that people should listen to what they say (actually the opposite, which is incredibly tragic with Snowden). Just that their downward spirals are understandable.
Is that the same as speaking pro-Kremlin messages?
At the time he was fleeing the US and Russia thought they could stick it to the yanks. Believing Snowden is pro an even more authoritarian government means you have no idea what the guy stands for.
"After their 2012 arrest, Dotcom and the other two men set up a legitimate cloud-storage website called Mega."
Maybe I'm a little bit soft on the whole copyright infringement thing, and maybe time has blurred my memory, but I don't really separate Megaupload and Mega. I thought they were both just online storage lockers.
The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega.
I also think Kim Dotcom isn't exactly the kind of person we'd encourage our kids to grow into, but what the US and NZ authorities did to him, raiding his home, where there were children present, with semi-automatic weapons out, is a far worse criminal act than any scale of copyright infringement.
KDC isn't someone I would ever want to feel sympathy for, but the US authorities made it happen.
Mega was a re-thinked Megaupload trying to accomplish the same thing but they are very different as Mega is built with a different tech/business architecture to try avoid crossing the lines into illegality that Megaupload crossed.
The original Megaupload was built to take advantage of the market opportunity existing in the grey area between copyright infringement and personal sharing. They were not trying to make something illegal, instead they were trying to make something as close as possible to illegal while still being able to argue that they are technically legal, which they failed, as the powers-that-be decided that they crossed the line into illegality and persecuted them. After the failure of Megaupload they tried to do the same thing again with Mega, but armed with the new knowledge of what is now considered clearly illegal, what will get the persecutors knowing on your door, they redesigned the new product to not cross those new lines.
More specifically, Megaupload fell because it was provable that they knew about the individual instances of piracy, so they designed Mega around end-to-end encription, so Mega users can still pirate things but Mega can always claim ignorance as a defense. There was/is no difference in persecutor priority in regards to copyright (copyright infringement is still a top priority evil today), just a difference in what they can prove against those two different companies.
The main argument was that megaupload wasn't providing personal storage because seldomly downloaded files would be automatically deleted, and all the incentives were geared towards maximizing downloads where they would get ad revenue. Therefore their system was not a storage system, but a download system, and a download system that incentivized illegal downloads by making zero efforts into trying to curb piracy.
They had advanced and aggressive systems in place to remove CP that they could have used to curb piracy and they obviously didn't decide to use that technology.
It's a pretty weak case with _horrible_ execution, but given the magnitude and size of mega/rapidshare at the time, something had to be done because it was getting out of hand.
It wasn't that they knew about individual instances of piracy (otherwise, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft's execs would be sitting in the same jail cell, since they all run similar file sharing services, and all those services have been used for piracy at scale).
The legal problem was that the prosecutors had proof that Megaupload employees were encouraging piracy. If Megaupload were in the US, they'd probably also be in trouble for violating the DMCA takedown process rules, but that law doesn't apply in NZ.
It happened to my buddy as well, but it turned out that they had the wrong apartment (same number, except the first one that indicated the floor). But that didn't stop them from charging him for possessing a few joints worth of weed. And as a bonus, he had to pay for the damage to the door frame.
I have also had this experience. It wasn't even about a crime, it was a "wellness check" because I had fallen asleep after work and my long distance partner at the time couldn't get ahold of me.
>The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega.
It also had to do with popularity, I recall reading back then that MU was like a two-digit% of internet traffic, it was BIG. I don't know about other countries but in Mexico everybody was downloading stuff from there, some (pirate obv.) movie websites were nothing more that a shitty frontend that streamed content right from MU. When the US (RIAA and whatnot) shut down MU it was a huge blow against piracy.
Mega(.co.nz) could have been an exact clone of MU including the content and still no one really cared to move there, so the copyright mafia didn't even bothered.
Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega. Its loss is a terrible shame; it served as an archive site for loads of material that existed nowhere else. Webcomics, music, videos from dead sites. Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then.
> Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then.
I'm still amazed the IA is getting away with hosting some of the stuff it is right now, honestly. I love it, but I am mentally preparing myself for it changing substantially eventually. All it's going to take is probably something like the wrong Nintendo IP appearing in the site for a while and the scent attracting Nintendo's lawyers, or similar. If there's content you want, I'd download it while you still can.
Longer term, I'd love for the IA to get recognized in US law and some rules to make it easier to archive/share certain types of older software/digital IP without the worries we have today, but probably a pipe dream.
I think what the GP means is that "megaupload" is easier to search in a search engine than "mega", with the latter being more likely to return irrelevant results first.
As far as I understood Megaupload's business plan was selling "fast" download access to pirated material. I don't care much about piracy, but intentionally making money on it seems somewhat disgusting to me.
I consider Mega a legitimate cloud storage service. Nevermind what I think about the fiunder, I find it to be one of the most privacy minded services, so I support it and wish it well.
I think you're correct in that it was captured communications between the Megaupload creators along these lines that really sealed their fate.
However, what formerly_proven says is correct for the public face of Megaupload.
The interesting case study would be whether, if the public facing business plan wasn't corrupted by private communications indicating the encouragement of privacy, would Megaupload have been a successful, profitable, and lawful enterprise?
Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study?
If yes, then is the only difference that the founders learned their opsec lessons?
(This is kinda where I struggle to separate the two)
>Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study?
The infrastructure might be similar, but the packaged product is different.
"Pay us and you can upload your files and access them anywhere / share them" vs. "Upload files that other strangers will be interested in so much that they will pay for access".
Also, unless I'm wrong Megaupload was indexed and searchable. While to access a Mega file one needs a direct link and these are usually not posted around on the public web. At least I don't see them that much.
Although I believe you that a record of communication proving intent is the most damning part in the eye of the law.
In the court cases, there was communication between Dotcom and van der Kolk that essentially said (paraphrasing here) 'hey, downloads are going down, we should add movie x or album y somehow, people search for those a lot'. There was a lot of evidence (in the form of emails and chat logs) that showed that their 'file sharing' angle was just a front to their actual business which was distributing copyrighted material.
It was very obviously for piracy and copyright infringement. The Mega*.com indictment [0] even reported that one of Kim's wishes was to make a 1-to-1 copy of youtube and were in the process of scraping videos from youtube to megavideo so as to make people assume megavideo was a user generated content website and not video storage for pirated/copyrighted content.
Yes. The prosecution was able to present conversations between the owners of the site talking about how piracy was the goal of the site. It was basically Netflix, without the pesky IP licensing.
I do find it frustrating how news articles will often describe a complex case and refer to the "victims" of the guilty party, while omitting any discussion of who those victims were, and (sometimes maliciously) leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.
For example, if all you knew about Theranos was that Elizabeth Holmes was an archetypical sociopath CEO who ran a fraudulent blood testing company, then an uncritical reading of a headline like "Elizabeth Holmes appeals compensation payments to Theranos victims" might pull on your heartstrings - that damn sociopath sold fraudulent blood tests to cancer patients and now she's stiffing them for the compensation she owes them! But if you have a bit more context on the case, then you know that her "victims" were actually some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, like venture capitalists with billions of dollars under management, and war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former members of the Intelligence Community. They failed to do any due diligence, and were duped into investing other people's money into a founder selling vaporware. Instead of cutting their losses, they leveraged their power to weaponize the media and justice system to enact their retribution on her.
The same applies here. The only "victims" of Megaupload are massive corporations with teams of lobbyists who have spent decades capturing politicians to protect their monopolies by legislating barriers to entry and criminalizing threats to their otherwise fragile business models.
Meanwhile the users of Megaupload just want to watch some movies, but the corporations can't figure out how to distribute their content in any reasonably usable or affordable way. So instead of fixing their business model, they deputize their pocket politicians to prosecute the only people who managed to provide what the users actually wanted.
So yes indeed, it's hard to muster much sympathy for the "victims" of Megaupload, aside from the innocent users of the service who just want to pay some reasonable amount of money to watch movies and TV shows.
The big mistake Megaupload made was charging copyright holders a fee to delete a link to their copyrighted content, but not deleting the content on the backend.
This was what allowed the prosecutors to bring out racketeering charges, bring the full RICO act to bear, etc.
New Zealand chose their bed. They could have been like France and placed more emphasis on diversification and independence (the French does not extradite their own people), or be like Switzerland and accumulate high technology and dominate finance. Instead they let themselves become yet another junior partner in the anglosphere. Their only export of value is their real estate which provides excellent sanctuary for billionaires seeking refuge from geopolitical uncertainties. They could also have been like India and remain non-aligned, or been like Israel and have lobbyists that punch above their weight. Instead they chose to let themselves to be walked over, and let their citizens be extradited at the behest of foreign powers. The country places more emphasis on liberal popularism than effective governance. Clearly giving hugs on camera and issuing mask mandates is more important than solving the real estate crisis.
Dotcom was at worst a white collar criminal. He wasn't a drug trafficker or anything of that nature. There was no reason to expect violent resistance to an arrest. Two or three uniformed officers would have been enough to make him go quietly.
I don't think they did it due to risk of violence, but because he'd hit a dead man's switch and destroy evidence if they didn't shock-and-awe him in the arrest.
I dont know, seems kind of silly. Surely people implementing a dead mans switch would do something along the lines of "if i dont ssh into this box every 12 hours" or something.
Destroying evidence is a crime, so they can always just arrest people who do that for that.
How is this different from a corporate email retention policy that auto-deletes emails older than 6 months?
I mean, sure, you can be required to override the policy under certain circumstances (e.g. when notified of an upcoming lawsuit), but what if the only person capable of doing that is being held under arrest? (Or just cannot be contacted)
My intuition is that, in the United States, it would be a 5th amendment violation to require an arrestee proactively disclose the existence of such a kill switch.
KDC claimed in a Twitter audio room that he was one of the biggest funders of WikiLeaks and the whole copyright shit was not actually about copyright but US going after WikiLeaks.
I wouldn't believe a word he speaks or writes. Following his twitter thread the past 10 years is really sad. Not sure if it's some sort of mental illness or if he does it on purpose but he seems to have developed some sort of hate for the United States. It's clear that the way they raided him was not fair but the things he writes and the conspiracies he spreads are disgusting.
I wouldn't believe him either, but this isn't mental illness. This is someone trying to beat a propaganda machine at its own game (the government doesn't sue for defamation).
Say enough random shit over time (pretexting) and some of it will resonate with the crazies and the ignorant.
The truth doesn't even matter these days; it's entirely about influencing public perception.
He bullshits constantly and expands his legend to well beyond what it actually is. It's entirely in character for the US to do this. They've demanded the extradition of children over LulzSec script kiddying before.
>Fitzgerald said that while the victims of Megaupload included wealthy multinational film and music companies, they also included small companies like a New Zealand software firm, Stuff reported.
Is it the same kind of victim as in this study of the EU?
If they can argue that because mega upload can be used for copyright infringement so people need to go to jail then so do the devs of ytdl, WeTransfer, YouTube, Google drive/chrome, etc. etc. etc.
I don't think so. I remember, Megaupload allowed to view movies, which you could even watch online. After a few minutes the movies stopped and asked you to pay if you wanted to continue. Everyone knew it was a database of pirated movies. Saying they are equal to youtube etc. is just an insult to people who used the site. At that point, everyone you asked would have told you it's a pirate site.
My point is to say where does it end? What about the devs of BitTorrent/uTorrent? "Everybody knows that these two programs are mostly used for piracy". How about the whole p2p concept? "Everybody knows p2p means pirate 2 pirate".
People are dumping whole movies on Twitter right now. So Twitter staff should go to jail?
I'm in general no big fan of locking people away so I agree with your statements in regards to piracy and jail. But the punishment needs to be higher than the benefit is for its users.
You compare Megaupload with p2p architectures. Of course torrents are used for criminal activities but they can't be stopped. You wouldn't compare twitter with Megaupload if you had seen Megaupload. The site was essentially like Netflix but for all movies in existence. Saying now that it's only the fault of its users if the site was designed for piracy in mind, is ridiculous.
> "The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering."
11 years, how exhausting. I can't imagine. Both were sentenced to a little over 2 years, I wonder how their sentencing would have changed if they would have been extradited?
IANAL, but they weren't convicted of crimes against US companies but NZ ones. If the US got them they could theoretically be charged with "different offenses" than the ones they were charged with in NZ.
No. For the same reason, you can prosecute a separate federal crime based on the same conduct even if a particular State has prosecuted that conduct under its own statutes. This is called the "separate sovereigns" doctrine. Keep in mind that at the time the Constitution was written--and for a long time thereafter--there were almost no federal crimes (counterfeiting, piracy and customs offenses come to mind) so that crime was a State matter.
I'm aware of the fed/state split, but my understanding was that they are usually very careful to avoid doing that so as to avoid SCOTUS getting ahold of it and making a ruling?
There are rare exceptions, like with the Rodney King cops (prosecuted federally as civil rights violations instead of aggravated assault, etc. so as also to deny SCOTUS any opportunity for review on double jeopardy grounds).
Overlapping state and federal prosecutions aren't ultra-rare... the killers of Ahmaud Arbery come to mind: state court convicted them of murder, the feds for hate crimes and gun crimes. That kind of split where the federal charges don't sort of squarely address the core content is common, because something like murder in a general sense isn't a federal crime.
As for avoiding the Supreme Court, the case of really tightly matching prosecutions and whether that violates double jeopardy has already happened: the court upheld "separate sovereigns" in Gamble v. US in 2019, a case where both the state and federal government charged someone with illegally possessing a gun as a felon, based on a single traffic stop.
I'm confused why people hold him in any esteem. Is it just because he's a maverick? Cause you can find better ones. It's like when people mourned John McAfee like he was some great martyr; there are better rebels to attach your affection to.
He was a cowboy and a bit of a crook, but he’s in prison because he made enemies of powerful people not because he hurt society with his actions. His enemies have themselves committed many crimes but they will never see the inside of a cell.
there are countless people in prison who arguably didn't hurt society with their actions (drug crimes for example), did Kim do anything particularly good for society to warrant being held in higher esteem than them?
People rally for individuals being targeted. If governments or shills don't want normal people to rally for individuals like KDC/Assange/Snowden/Winner/Manning then don't go after them.
I remember when he used to live in Auckland (he lives in Queenstown now in some mansion) he could not parallel park to save his life. Used to see his car alot around my old office.
I know you shouldn't throw people in jail even in part because of bad opinions... but Jesus Christ, listen to him talk about Putin, Russia and NATO, and try to be the impartial hand of justice.
It certainly doesn't excuse it, but it's hardly surprising. I'm not sure how principled I could be if I'd been through the same ordeal. But hey, two wrongs don't make a right.
Google drive engineers do not run a side-business of actively selling access to drives with copyright infringed content, as far as we know. And there are many similar storage-services without those problems. MegaUpload and others got into those trouble for very obvious reasons, which others in the same business could avoid.
Yes, but the google engineers are not encouraging and supporting them with this, unlike MegaUpload. They are also doing their best in preventing it (as I heard), unlike MegaUpload.
their ideas about what they are doing (their ideology) being at problem rather than the their actual actions is precisely what makes this a political crime rather than a technical one.
The business model is completely different. Megaupload paid uploaders and charged money from downloaders. So there was incentive to upload popular pirated content to earn money.
Google doesn't do this. It charges money for storage space and doesn't pay anything to google drive users. There's zero incentive to share pirated content through google drive.
Open season on people _who commit crimes_ with X amount of money, FTFY.
If you have a problem with this, try committing fewer crimes. If you don't commit wage theft, you should have no problem with increased enforcement of it, for example.
If you're factoring on income then the person is not rich. Rich people make their money on capital gains. Laws like that would just make the world eggshells for the rest of us and the people who can afford Ferraris wouldn't be bothered.
Defining "the rich" would help. Arguably someone making their money on income is not "rich", they're still moving up the economic ladder. Someone making capital gains, especially exclusively or in majority, is definitely rich.
There's also wealth taxes. Currently a lot of places implement income taxes which actually slows down or halts economic fluidity.
Yes, at max 20%. Yet, the majority of jurisdictions keep taxing income at a much higher rate. As a general rule people working on income are still making their way up the economic ladder while people on capital gain, especially exclusively or in majority, are not.
I'd assume not - the rich anyways hardly get large salaries (I'm sure they do, but the majority of the money they make is probably borrowing on equity).
Your eyes see "the government should help regular people", but you chose to interpret this as "this guy thinks the government should harm the rich!". What is causing this disconnect for you? My guess is too much consumption of corporate media.
Nah, you're making weird rhetorical question strawman arguments.
No, holding people accountable for stealing money is attacking the wealthy only if you believe all wealthy people are literally stealing money for some reason.
No, stealing money from people is not the same as a traffic violation, but, yes, people should be held accountable for operating heavy machinery recklessly.
I don't know why you've decided to deliberately misunderstand things and engage petulantly, but here we are.
I don’t really care about his theory about me if it hinges on missing that I was asking a question / such grand assumptions that I don’t understand where they are coming from.
thank you for sharing that you don't care that you were asked a question, while yourself asking a question
I expect your attitude of not answering questions to now be reflected in others' decisions whether to answer your own
as for your theories regarding the questioner's theories, such theories of yours are irrelevant to your answering: dxfm12 really was asking you a question
Given how long this has dragged on for the real victims are the New Zealand taxpayer.