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Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

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Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#311

Post by [deleted] »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #186
roenxi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might make sense if in the long term we build out a nuclear deterrent? We'd need a handful of deep water submarines with big missiles on them. Although I expect that it'll turn out they're designed wrong for that or something. Other than that I can't see what situation they'd be useful in practice though. If we get into a war with Indonesia, China or the like that is the end. There will be no winners and we'll e…

> if a country can't defend itself with diplomacy then it is in a lot of trouble If you have a strong neighbor that wants to take something you have by force, how do you get them to instead practice diplomacy with you? The only way I'm aware of is by projecting enough of your own strength that they think it might not be worth it to try and take by force. Military might is an arm of diplomacy.

[deleted]

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#313

Post by dangus »

BowBun wrote: post #176
agpl3141592 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that they pushed it left and right as 'dropbox' share everything platform targeting pirate groups with referral money right? He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows

Wait until you hear how Crunchyroll got to where they did! Plex is on much the same trajectory. Heck, even Google Play Music used the strategy by letting people upload their pirated music libraries to get users. It's a tried and true strategy.

There are big differences in the details there. I suggest you go to the Megaupload Wikipedia article and go to the “basis of indictment” section.

Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.

Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.

Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.

Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.

Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#314

Post by rvnx »

fluoridation wrote: post #263
codetrotter wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misremembering things here but AFAICR, it went something like this: MegaUpload existed as a file hosting service. It was widely used by pirates, and MegaUpload earned a lot of money off of hosting pirated files because users would buy subscriptions to MegaUpload specifically because of the pirated content that they could download, without the limitations that are placed on the users of the free tier. With…

Thanks, I had no idea that's how it worked. Embedding the key in a part of the URL that's not sent to the server is a stroke of genius. I still find it surprising that so many people use Mega (at least enough that it can stay in business) when BitTorrent can easily saturate a downlink and is free.

Legally they can decrypt the content though, they have access to the key, they just need to change a piece of JavaScript so it sends back to the key to their server the next time a page visitor comes.

It's up to the courts and to them to decide. Perhaps they are doing it already, but just keeping it low-profile, so the "real" dangerous people get attracted to the service and caught.

Like VPNs.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#315

Post by moralestapia »

tzs wrote: post #232
moralestapia wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not completely different, actually, they're pretty much the same. The only difference is the "we encrypt everything so we don't know what users upload" trick, which seems to have worked so far (and branding and stuff).

No, it was not "pretty much the same" as Dropbox. Megaupload took steps to specifically support piracy. When a movie studio would report a pirated copy of one of their movies, Megaupload would tell the studio they removed it but in reality they would only make it so the specific link the studio new about would stop working. They would not delete the underlying file and any other links would continue to work. This fai…

I was talking about Megaupload vs. MEGA.

>This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation.

This, and the rest of your comment makes sense in 2024, but not around 2010.

Back then:

* All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem at the time. You were even able to find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.

* Most of these companies (including the "good ones"™ like YouTube) thrived under this (unlawful) sharing of copyrighted content. Measures against it were being actively developed and tested and there was a big backslash from the platform's users as they were being introduced, i.e. it wasn't an armchair software engineer's "easy problem". When these platforms incorrectly labeled and removed content due to copyright infringement, it was a bit of a scandal, with many of these events reaching the news and people boycotting platforms and threatening lawsuits.

* Piracy was huge compared to today, torrents were almost the norm. Not trying to justify it, just trying to put in context what internet users used the internet for. If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it. The "market" was there, with or without Megaupload. I would even go as far as to suggest a wild point of view where Megaupload was actually a victim of piracy as well.

* A lot of legislation around this was not in place and/or mature enough. Some landmark cases around Section 230 were just starting to take shape. It was not black or white clear whether a platform should be responsible for its content or not and what are the legal requirements for them to address this liability.

* The overall sentiment of tech people (even in communities like this one) was that internet services should behave like utilities, in spirit; I still believe this to be the right approach. It follows from that that whatever misuse of them made by end users should hold them liable and not the utility provider.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#316

Post by thinkingemote »

DSingularity wrote: post #62
popcalc wrote: post #2

One-way flight to Russia? His Twitter feed for the last decade does give merit to the idea that he's been on the payroll.

Ah yes, the classic. Everybody who opposes american foreign policy is labeled. Tweet about opposing the genocide in gaza? Oh dont listen to him -- he is pro khamas. Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll. I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination atta…

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#317

Post by butlike »

codetrotter wrote: post #177
i80and wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedantically: MEGA runs today as a Dropbox-alike, and has very little to do with Kim Dotcom beyond his being involved at the very beginning and then departing quickly. You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different despite the name similarity.

I might be misremembering things here but AFAICR, it went something like this: MegaUpload existed as a file hosting service. It was widely used by pirates, and MegaUpload earned a lot of money off of hosting pirated files because users would buy subscriptions to MegaUpload specifically because of the pirated content that they could download, without the limitations that are placed on the users of the free tier. With…

I FORGOT that movies used to be split into 2+ ~700mb downloads way back when.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#318

Post by chaostheory »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259
chaostheory wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry isn’t a “goose that lays golden eggs” for the greater economy. It’s not as democratic or accessible as the tech industry either. You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.

The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans. But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've pa…

This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home.

At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#319

Post by herendin2 »

popcalc wrote: post #8
wepple wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not categorize him as “small folk like us”

Agree. "Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts wor…

$175M quickly becomes meaningless in this context, believe me. It's already much more than you need.

Re: Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

#320

Post by laweijfmvo »

OutOfHere wrote: post #312

YouTube has a thousand to a million times more copyrighted content than Megaupload ever had. And no, not all of it is via partnerships with the copyright holders. Kim's problem apparently was that he didn't bribe Congress.

you could argue that YouTube is "trying" to not have illegal content. i don't think Mega was "trying" very hard.
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