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Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

reuters.com

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Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#71

Post by Blahah »

logfromblammo wrote: post #50
raattgift wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: damages are claimed and argued by one of the parties in a lawsuit, or the prosecutor in criminal actions; the other side can argue that the calculation is wrong. In an adversarial system (in particular most systems that descend from English law), the claimant/plaintiff/prosecutor generally must claim a quantized liability at the start of proceedings, and then justify the quantum of liability. In some cases, so…

In any case, the " lost sale " doctrine is always inherently flawed, because it presumes that those downloading have unlimited entertainment budgets. No one can spend more on copies of information property than they have in discretionary income, and thus the purchase of one copy precludes the purchase of another. It would be easy enough to presume that everyone is always spending their entire entertainment budget, an…

Just want to commend you on an outstanding comment. This kind of comment is why I keep coming back to HN. Careful thought and an intellectual commitment to relatively obscure aspects of a topic, that ultimately clarify the entire situation.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#72

Post by slededit »

derekp7 wrote: post #69
franciscop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Transitory storage falls under fair use. This has been tested in court for things like internet caching.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#73

Post by Retric »

derekp7 wrote: post #69
franciscop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a rather tenuous connection. EX: "Transitory storage" does not count as a copy.

You need to make a copy of a book on the back of your Retna to read it, however nobody calls that copying.

It's easy to argue that playing a DVD is not actually copping the DVD as at no point does a DVD player copy the full DVD. Without a durable copy it's no more copping than the back of your Retna.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#74

Post by Cthulhu_ »

franciscop wrote: post #22
ponderatul wrote: post #9

I 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 main difference is scale; giving your sibling a used DVD is just a 1:1 exchange, uploading it to e.g. megaupload can potentially open it to millions of other people.

There are laws about digital resale though; there was an EU ruling that indicated reselling digital-only products is legal.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#75

Post by tzs »

icebraining wrote: post #23
ponderatul wrote: post #9

I 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…

I don't know about this specific case, but in the US they often use statutory damages instead: "the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringe…

We probably need a new kind of statutory damages geared to this kind of infringement. The current statutory damages are geared toward commercial infringement.

Note, though, that she had to work really hard to get damages that high. As noted in your quote, statutory damages fall in a range. She probably would have gotten near the low end of the possible range if she had not tried to destroy evidence, had not perjured herself in court, and had not tried to blame her children for the copyright infringement.

Note also that she could have avoided this by taking the very reasonable settlement offer the RIAA made before they sued her. She was offering for distribution 1702 copyrighted songs, and they asked for $5000. That's under $3/song.

When she refused and they sued, they only sued over 24 songs. Why only 24 instead of all 1702? I haven't seen anything that explains for sure why, but there are a couple plausible reasons.

First, 24 x $750 = $18000. That's enough to get them the $5000 they wanted, plus a little more to cover the expense of having to actually start a lawsuit to get it.

At this point, everyone in her life that is not a colossal moron should have been telling her to take that initial settlement offer, because when she loses in court the absolute minimum she loses is $18000, which is $12000 more than she could settle for.

Second, for each song that is included in the lawsuit there is paperwork to be dealt with. They will have to introduce into evidence proof that all the proper filings were done at the copyright office, and that they represent the copyright owners and have the right to sue. Each and every one of those can be challenged by the defendant. There's just no point if all they want is what they asked for originally ($5000 to cover 1702 songs) plus something for the extra expense of having to go to trial.

Note also that after the first couple of trials, which first led to a $200k award and then the $2 million award, the RIAA again offered a settlement: $25k. She refused.

Eventually more proceedings got it back down to $200k, and again the RIAA offered to settle for a lower amount, if she would make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#76

Post by Moter8 »

gambiting wrote: post #43
franciscop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Poland it's the same - downloading pretty much anything for personal use is perfectly legal, only sharing isn't(so using Kim's service would have been 100% fine).

But don't the ads on megaupload make it illegal then? (For them of course)

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#77

Post by jonathanstrange »

redm wrote: post #70

Love 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.

They took away his business and more than 5 years of his life, and he hasn't even prevented extradition yet. I wouldn't call this winning.

I personally think that the case should be dismissed because the legal proceedings went on for so long and were plastered with rights violations - such as illegal surveillance, property prematurely transferred to a foreign country.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#78

Post by bloak »

baybal2 wrote: post #30
ztoben wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a typical payout be?

Add two zeroes. In commom common law, defamation damages are all, but damages: they are a sum of assumed and punitive damages. If accused is a corp., already large punitive damages are scaled to its size. UK's record damages were in above GPB 2M

Punitive damages are a daft concept and only exist in the USA, I hope.

GPB must be the Guadalupe Banana, right? Perhaps they have punitive damages in Guadalupe...

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#79

Post by xxx121 »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #46
Mononokay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's just some creep who got rich off of deliberately running a site that facilitated piracy He actually got rich off of the Dot Com bubble years before, which is why he changed his name to Kim Dotcom. He embodies a lot of the stereotypical hacker image that people have - overweight, hacked the Pentagon+NASA+Citibank before he was old enough to drink in the US, a touch dramatic, etc. It's only natural that he's giv…

He didn’t hack anything nor get rich off of the bubble. He was always a fraud.

It is quite amusing that all comments that criticize Kim Schmitz are downvoted in this thread.

I recommend the German Wikipedia page.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#80

Post by ben010783 »

redm wrote: post #70

Love 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.

If you don't have money you take a deal and plead guilty. If you have money, you can drag things out for years.
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