281–290 of 1001 posts
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What other options does he have? I really wish people wouldn't cheer when smallfolk like us get crushed by the state. Not saying he's perfect, but what him and others have to suffer seems vastly out of proportion to what they did
"the state" is made up by normal people. And in this case the state is just protecting normal people from criminals like Dotcom.
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It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The degree to which the propaganda works is alarming. They'll turn a blind eye to Ross Ulbricht, Snowden, the Patriot Act, etc. while wasting their time foaming at the mouth at made up stories about Russia. Unreal to see in this day and age, honestly - I mean you'd think the internet + a little critical thinking would have given these people a clue.
I have a hard time just convincing people in my company to buy a license for some software we arguably need. I literally can not convince them using any logic or facts, it's downright infuriating and I feel like I'm in a crazy world. You can't bring people to the watering hole, they have to get there on their own. And by that point, I've given up and have moved on. And even then, no amount of "I told you so" will hav…
Didn't YouTube get popular on pirated content first? What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? They both went legal later.
I think youtube cooperated with taking pirated content down while Kim was a bit like screw you, I'm offshore, you can't get me.
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sad to see that kind of comments in HN. I feel that 10 years ago there was more room for accepting that a political opponent should be free to speak up. now our educated masses are pushing for prison and extradition because they don't belong to the axis of good.... you def cannot be for opensource and its values and say things like that
It isn't 'a difference of opinion'. Dotcom has relayed Russian disinformation to an impressionable mass audience and heartily cheerled an invasion. It's not surprising that people who disagree with him politically find themselves amused or glad at the prospect of due process being served in this individual's case - where they might otherwise have been indifferent or grudgingly sympathetic.
Kim DC is not a likeable or admirable person, but this vindictive pursuit seems even worse. It appears very similar to the treatment of Ross Ulbricht, Assange, maybe even Snowden? These are the equivalent of white collar crimes (typical massive frauds from the finance sector, etc) but they are getting a blue collar punishment of decades in jail that a successful and persistent street drug dealer could receive, NOT th…
White collar crimes should be punished with the same vigor as blue collar ones. White collar crimes mostly steal money, at scale. Insufficient money is a huge cause of suffering—people don’t get to retire at early, they and their kids don’t get the opportunities they would have had otherwise. You can be a drug dealer that doesn’t hurt anybody.
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A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective. I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution. The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new…
> MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...
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Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.
> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art I wouldn't be so sure about that. The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what…
I am reminded of Eban Moglen's "dot-communist manifesto" of 2003, worth a read:
https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html
There's also the matter of the USA being able to enforce its legal norms on people living in other countries, via instruments like extradition but also sanctions for less-friendly world states.
The US seems to have this knack of sliding itself into this narrow gap between individuals they're idealistically pursuing and something worse. "If I could just slip in there, ooh, that's tight, yes, thank you, aah comfy, this feels like where I belong". In their desperate attempt to not lose a fight that's been going on for, what, 10 years? 15 years? They're increasingly looking like a child that cannot move on from…
I think this would flag my entire generation, at least back in the 2000s.