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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

#511

Post by pessimizer »

kube-system wrote: post #463
mise_en_place wrote: post #452

Much like Napster, his only real crime was success. If nobody or barely anyone used Megaupload, he wouldn’t have been in as much trouble. He paved the way for streaming and digital distribution of media. Megavideo in particular had the highest encoding rates possible at the time, even superior to YouTube.

YouTube is way more successful than Megaupload or Napster. The difference is that YouTube went above and beyond to comply with the law and Megaupload and Napster didn't.

> YouTube went above and beyond to comply with the law

History just gets rewritten daily.

They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all. What's more, Google Video never had any organic participation (i.e. normal people uploading videos of themselves), and was almost exclusively pirated content. Its main differentiation (long forgotten in the age of youtube-dl) was actually how easy it was to download that content compared to Youtube, who made it annoying. Eventually Google realized that they still weren't going to attract the pirates/copyright violators that section 230 allowed them to use as a proxy (piracy still preferred Youtube because people were on youtube), so they bought it.

Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material, and the source of lots of pirated files still being traded is directly from youtube. Eventually they started aggressively scanning things for copyrighted music (because they wanted to make deals with the music industry), and then started preemptively responding to any DMCA claim by suspending the video so as not to look like hypocrites while they were going after music; section 230 implies a lot of helplessness for platforms in the face of users that removing audio tracks from videos where people were singing copyrighted songs doesn't bear.

They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content in general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before. Now they wanted to push exclusive, expensively-produced content, and since producers didn't have any other online outlet, they were going to monopolize that, too. They didn't need the pirated content anymore.

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

#512

Post by Temporary_31337 »

kube-system wrote: post #505
treflop wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used to run an illegal video index, this is not true at all. YouTube had virtually zero enforcement. You could upload whole shows and movies and they were never taken down. Other sites like Google Video or Vimeo did go above and beyond to comply and they lost badly. YouTube started getting heat at some point and that’s only when they started enforcing, but by then, they already won.

They didn't, but then they did, to the satisfaction of the Viacom case. Napster and Megaupload never built the tools to comply to the degree that YouTube did. Maybe if they had, they would still exist.

Moral of the story- ignore the law for as long as you can and comply hard enough when you have to. It helps to have zirp levels of investment too.

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

#513

Post by gliiics »

throwup238 wrote: post #493
gliiics wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always black and white; let's be honest, yes, Kim Dotcom was probably more about piracy than freedom of whatever simply because that's where his money was. But: > Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise? Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?

> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general? Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross. He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.

I agree, and in fact I did not compare them. I asked an entirely different question.

You can re-read the first line of my comment if you think I'm putting those two things on the same level, and you will see that I agree with:

> He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.

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

#514

Post by sleeplessworld »

axegon_ wrote: post #448

[flagged]

I have heard of the worlds tiniest violin - but the 'universes' tiniest? How can we possibly be assured that your violin really is the tiniest? There may be some civilization, maybe in Alpha Centauri maybe around Betelgeuse, that produces really small violins? We cannot know in this primitive pre-warp time that we live in...

A search reveals an offer on Ebay - search for 'Worlds Smallest Emergency Violin!" ... the URL is too long to paste. But this is an emergency violin. Clearly not a violin made for normal everyday purposes. And it is still only the 'worlds' smallest. It also does not describe for what emergencies this may help.

I am still confused. It seems to me that these violins on offer are small, but that they surely can be made much much smaller....? However, there may be some instrument/sound physics at play that I am not aware of...

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

#515

Post by kube-system »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #512
kube-system wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't, but then they did, to the satisfaction of the Viacom case. Napster and Megaupload never built the tools to comply to the degree that YouTube did. Maybe if they had, they would still exist.

Moral of the story- ignore the law for as long as you can and comply hard enough when you have to. It helps to have zirp levels of investment too.

I think the other issue is that, if Megaupload and Napster actually complied hard, they wouldn't have many content or users left. YouTube may have had pirated content, but it also had enough original content to stand on its own.

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

#516

Post by NamTaf »

lenerdenator wrote: post #488
gliiics wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always black and white; let's be honest, yes, Kim Dotcom was probably more about piracy than freedom of whatever simply because that's where his money was. But: > Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise? Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?

Whistleblowing is not the same as hosting pirated material.

Yes, that’s the point the poster is making. They are not the same despite being united by the fact that in both cases the government got involved and said “stop that, it’s wrong”. They explicitly stated their point that there’s a moral spectrum of positions which means it’s not always right to just roll over and find something else to do when the authorities get involved.

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

#517

Post by AnimalMuppet »

__loam wrote: post #508
scarmig wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanism arose during the Renaissance, when scholars and artists gleefully cribbed from each other's work without attribution and copyright didn't even exist. It's perfectly fine to copy someone else's work. The immorality comes in when you start using physical force to punish people thinking thoughts you feel entitled to.

Creative work costs money to make. People who make it should have the right to make a living off it. It's not hard. Most of the people on this site make their money creating intellectual property. How many piracy activists here would be willing to leak the source code their company relies on?

And how many expect that there would be no repercussions if they did, even if they believed it would be a moral thing to do?

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

#518

Post by FredPret »

kylebenzle wrote: post #499
FredPret wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a clear-cut case of humanism vs something else. Humanist values include right to property ownership, and the right to get the benefits of your work. Artists deserve that, and can sell their rights to big studios if they want. Just because it's easy to copy something, or just because studio execs were idiots who wouldn't get on board with streaming, or whatever else, doesn't mean it's morally right to copy…

That is 100% the antithesis of the hacker spirit and I shudder at your callousness. 1. All information wants to be free. 2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free". 3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free for personal profit is immoral.

I have to be a communist to have "hacker spirit"? Hardly.

1. All information wants to be free.

Information on the order of complexity of a movie cannot want anything.

2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free".

Nearly free to copy, doesn't mean you're free to take it.

3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free for personal profit is immoral.

I get the sentiment here but I don't think it follows in the context of an artist creating something specifically to make money from it when it gets distributed.

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

#519

Post by AnimalMuppet »

kylebenzle wrote: post #499
FredPret wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a clear-cut case of humanism vs something else. Humanist values include right to property ownership, and the right to get the benefits of your work. Artists deserve that, and can sell their rights to big studios if they want. Just because it's easy to copy something, or just because studio execs were idiots who wouldn't get on board with streaming, or whatever else, doesn't mean it's morally right to copy…

That is 100% the antithesis of the hacker spirit and I shudder at your callousness. 1. All information wants to be free. 2. The second something is digitized it becomes "free". 3. Artificially depriving someone of something that is free for personal profit is immoral.

1. Information doesn't want anything. Yes, digital information is easy to copy and hard to copy protect.

2. No. It becomes easily copyable.

3. Irrelevant, given the problems with 1 and 2.

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