361–370 of 1001 posts
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…
You know how it is. You search someone's home, you set aside the evidence, and you promptly forget about it for 12 years. I dislike Kim Dotcom as much as the next gal or guy, maybe even more, but this is weird.
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…
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> Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians?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. Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll - just ignorant beyond measure. Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now and I for one am happy that in my coun…
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> A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are matters critical to its national security
If the "matters critical to its national security" involve unprovoked invading of other country, then it's good they don't care, even assuming your biased rhetoric has anything close to reality.
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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.
In fact, if you look at the behavior of many tech company legal teams, that seems more like what tech corporations do, than individual creatives.
This is the stuff I did in the 1980s, when I was considering making a living at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
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.
YouTube didn't bribe congress. They built significant tooling that gave the rights holders what they wanted, even beyond what the law required them to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y... . To this day, rights-holders don't even have to take legal action or issue a formal DMCA takedown to have videos taken down or siphon off the profits of those who use their content. It is even automated.
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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…
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I wouldn't say that, myself. In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales. I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop. This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers. The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspe…
Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1. A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
What exactly has Mega done that Dropbox hasn't? In my eyes they're basically the same product, the only difference being Mega's edgier tone.
It's about MegaUpload, not Mega. True, they both offer(ed) cloud-storage and public sharing, but MegaUpload was much more on the shady side. They were stalling and ignoring requests for removing illegal content. Furthermore, they were even actively supporting uploads of popular content. I vaguely remember they were even paying some people. Over all, it was a platform strongly focused on distribution of illegal conten…