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Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

justice.gov

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Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#111

Post by throwawaykf05 »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #87
BlueAndroid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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-me…

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.

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#114

Post by tedunangst »

jackjeff wrote: post #9

I really dislike the extra-territorial aspect of it. 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 o…

> So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there...

The programmer in question wasn't arrested for downloading something from Megaupload, were they?

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#115

Post by throwawaykf05 »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #103
tzs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was Megaupload's head of software development, which is a bit more than just "a random programmer that touched thing".

This is another way of saying "he was a naughty boy". Yes he was, and no, you can't imprison someone for that. 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.

Have you read the full charges against Mega? They actively uploaded, and encouraged others to upload, copyright infringing material to jack up their traffic. They very knowingly violated the law. That's quite a bit different from the garden variety "download a few files" piracy.

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#116

Post by lucb1e »

pluma wrote: post #85

Sidenote: it's so weird the English language uses the same word "justice" for the legal system and the moral concept. In German for example the two are different, making it easy to explain to people how the legal system is about equal application of the law, not personal closure. The domain "justice.gov" just sounds like propaganda (imagine "freedom.gov") to me as a non-native speaker who mostly hears the term used i…

I'm not sure which German words you are referring to, but as a Dutch person "justice.gov" sounds like propaganda to me too.

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#117

Post by innguest »

BlueAndroid wrote: post #95
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-me…

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…

> 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.

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#118

Post by throwawaykf05 »

DigitalSea wrote: post #60

Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Lets jail the developers of uTorrent while we are at it, thanks to them, I am able to easily queue up a torrent of Game of Thrones. We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no actual harm to…

>How can a figure as large as $400 million be accurately proven?

Does that even matter, given the $175 million number that comes right after? Pretty sure that number can be easily proven from their ledgers.

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#119

Post by jepper »

xorcist wrote: post #69
draugadrotten wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plea bargains. A promise of 1 year in low sec prison vs the risk of getting a life sentence in solitary. 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."

Are plea bargains allowed in the Dutch justice system? I know they're not in at least two neighbouring countries.

No, but confession is often seen as a 'softening' factor in the weighing of the punishment by the judge

Re: Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

#120

Post by throwawaykf05 »

jacquesm wrote: post #75

The programmers of the largest copyright infringing company on the planet (Google) are hopefully exempt from idiocy like this. Youtube contains massive amounts of copyright infringing videos, Google books brought it to a whole new level and the Google cache infringes on a very significant portion of the web.

Youtube honors the DMCA (the spirit as well as the word of the law - something Mega was shown not to do). Google books did get sued, but were found exempt under fair use (and having used Google Books, I'd tend to agree with that decision, though IANAL.) And last I checked, caches are explicitly exempt from copyright considerations.
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