here here!
Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
61–70 of 143 posts
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#62Awarded NZ$60,000 for “loss of dignity and injury to feelings” haha
Ironically, this whole case seems to have turned him into a modern day Robin Hood. I'd say this disaster of a situation has done far from cause him loss of dignity and injury to his feelings. I'd say it's cemented a status that many aspire to and very few ever achieve. His personality has been magnified many times more than it ever would have been by this whole debacle. So to be awarded NZ$60K for this is hilarious.…
>this whole case seems to have turned him into a modern day Robin Hood.
This dude is a professional troll and you comparing him to Robin Hood means you are falling for his schtick. The most recent example of his trolling is the fact that he has become one of the biggest public supporters of the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was behind the DNC leaks and not Russia.
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#63I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material." Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start fr…
It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in…
Can we use this sub thread to post our knowledge of country laws about this?
Don't worry USA you can continue on browsing ;)
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#64I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material." Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start fr…
It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in…
In Hungary, downloading is legal, uploading is not. This makes torrenting problematic, but they never go after torrent users. Also, there's a special "tax" on storage media (CD-R, DVD-R, USB sticks, HDD, etc.) which is supposedly used to compensate copyright holders via some obscure distribution mechanism (read: a big chunk is probably stolen somewhere down the line).
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#65> a Wellington court ruled the attorney general broke the law
When does the sentencing or punishment phase start?
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#66They should make a movie about this guy :D
Like this one?
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who's tired of seeing this guy. No, he wasn't technically responsible. Sure, his site complied with takedown requests to the extent they were required to and literally not one damn quarter inch further . Technically, technically, technically. He also profited directly off of and made no secret about enabling people to skirt copyright laws. I agree they need a lot of work, but you don'…
The reason it matters is exactly what you said. MegaUpload did comply to the law and not one inch more, just like they were supposed to. Then the MPAA got the US government involved in what should have been a civil matter. That wasn’t enough so then the US government induced an allied government to execute a tactical raid on the guy’s house and seize his business assets including the servers containing customer data.…
They violated the law, and assisted others in violating the law, openly, and defiantly.
When he was raided it was of no surprise to anyone who was paying attention, himself included. People like to paint this up as "this guy was just running his business in full compliance with the law and Big Government came in with their jackbooted thugs and took away his business" but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
He was openly snubbing the Feds and MPAA, he was deliberately allowing and not even making face attempts to dissuede his users from uploading copyrighted material to share, and was quite aware and complicit of the whole thing, and wasn't one damn bit interested in stopping it because it was making him rich.
I'm just saying, if you want a martyr for people who got screwed by our Government because of overstepping authority, Dotcom is far, far, FAR from the best example of that. Dotcom is more a poster child for the old axiom, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#68They should make a movie about this guy :D
A documentary was made about him last year:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3640710/
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#69I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material." Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start fr…
It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in…
The word "copyright" implies the right to make copies. Copyright laws (in various jurisdictions) also include language regarding performance of a copyrighted work, but that is a separate issue.
Digital media is interesting, as when you receive a copy of it on a physical medium, it is basically unusable unless you make a copy of it (i.e., putting the disk in a computer and copying the contents to computer memory). So to enable people to actually use that copyrighted digital work, the copyright holder grants an end user the right to load (copy) the digital work into computer memory (via the shrink-wrapped license agreement) for the purpose of executing / watching / reading it. And of course typically things like computer programs are installed (copied) onto a computer's storage device, which the license also typically grants permission to do.
Now it could be written into copyright law that if the normal method of using a work is to copy it into working memory, or load it into storage on a computer, that the law would explicitly allow that (or, as an alternative, the courts could allow that via "fair use" doctrine). But instead, the law, courts, and copyright holders are perfectly fine with this ambiguous grey area so that they can reserve a number of rights via the shrink-wrap software license.
Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition
#70Love Kim Dotcom or hate him, you have to applaud his tenacity in defending himself. When he was arrested in 2012, I don't think anyone remotely imagined he would still be battling, and, in many regards, winning against the US Government.