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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

#351

Post by nadermx »

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…

Is that alleged or proven? Because the law does no require you to take down a file and the make sure that file is not uploaded by someone else. In fact all it requires is you to take it down if you're hosting it, so if someone else uploads a file they would have to notify you of that file as well for the simple fact that it may actually now be the rightsholder uploading it.

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

#352

Post by vander_elst »

rurp wrote: post #347
vasco wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you learn over the years is that people make up everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning he could control the situation regardless. The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor cr…

Matt Levine is great at writing about the difference between laws as written and how they work in practice. He's pretty fascinated by some of the cases where the two diverge sharply.

Do you happen to have a link?

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

#353

Post by colechristensen »

treprinum wrote: post #207

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.

For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips of things were popular and there were things split between many videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me using youtube for.

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

#354

Post by fastball »

curiousObject wrote: post #120

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…

Don't forget Aaron Swartz.

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

#355

Post by throwaway984393 »

butlike wrote: post #317
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…

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

[dead]

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

#356

Post by fluoridation »

zaSmilingIdiot wrote: post #323
fluoridation wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mockery of jurisdiction. It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like that.

NZ is a member of 5 eyes IIRC, and so likely have various relations/cooperative agreements in place that make it easy(-ier) for justifying the handing of citizens over to another state.

I wonder if the same would have happened if the roles had been reversed. Somehow I doubt it.

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

#357

Post by jkirsteins »

delusional wrote: post #336
vasco wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you learn over the years is that people make up everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning he could control the situation regardless. The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor cr…

I've heard it articulated as "There are no rules, only consequences." which I take to refer to the Legal Realism idea that the rules are just what we bind each other to. The written rules only matter if some "powerful" entity (like the government, or a mob, or civil court) is committed to holding you to them.

> There are no rules, only consequences

I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the consequences, then there is no rule."

E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket, so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)

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

#358

Post by bArray »

It is rumoured (by locals) that Kim Dotcom has been allowed to reside in New Zealand (being a German/Finish) on the basis that he spent his money in New Zealand. I don't think they are in a rush to extradite him to the US, and the US will not come after NZ for the money spent.

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

#360

Post by Der_Einzige »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #218

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…

Source for the final claim? Is this still the case? Shit Man I distributed a dataset via megaupload for a paper awhile ago. Am I now a target of the glowies?
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