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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

#591

Post by xp84 »

hylaride wrote: post #529
halyconWays wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment conglomerates. Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen from another country using the power of the state, and drag him before their feet is tyrannical.

> There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment conglomerates. I think there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated. If I illegally download a song/movie I wouldn't have otherwise bought, did anybody lose out? There was a reason Napster was popular in colleges, because many of those people were cash poor. Music industry revenue…

> > no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm

> there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated

I'm not sure how relevant the harm is. It seems like copyright law doesn't have exceptions for "harmlessness"* -- and even if that were a carve-out, it would be a stupid one for the kind of offenses we're discussing, since it hinges on hundreds of millions of individual 'butterfly effect' decisions and how they hypothetically would have unfolded in a fictional world without piracy vs. the real world. No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue. Maybe "Firefly" was boosted massively in its long-term commercial success by piracy, but some $400 physics textbook had materially less sales. I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.

*I'm aware there are specific exceptions for things like fair use and timeshifting -- I just don't believe all 'harmless' acts are protected or that that was ever even intended.

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

#592

Post by dotandgtfo »

aestetix wrote: post #583
deaddodo wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook wasn't created with the primary intention of hosting illicit material (Kim Dotcom actively made statements along those lines) and doesn't facilitate + protect the hosting of such materials. You can be damn sure that if Facebook refused removal requests for copyrighted videos, that they (and Zuckerberg) would be in hot water. You can try to pettyfog the case and move goalposts all you like, each time one of y…

I'm not trying to move goalposts, I was simply looking for clarification. A couple points. First, wasn't there a huge issue where the data centers had money problems because the FBI (or some agency) was forcing them to retain all the data, as they didn't actually know for sure what was there? Or am I wrong and they had a list of specific files hosted on specific servers and were able to use that to demonstrate wrongd…

If we remove the digital aspect of it. What do you think the US would do if Kim let anonymous people send him DVDs and albums over snailmail and he would burn and mail them to anyone who requested it?

Personally I find safe harbour arguments very weak when the service provider allows anonymous sharing.

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

#593

Post by xp84 »

more_corn wrote: post #423
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.

DMCA safe harbor says you don’t have to actively police your content but you have to take it down if a copyright holder complains. YouTube had robust tooling to take down content when they received a complaint. They got sued anyway, they won because the evidence showed they always took the content down (and that Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place)

> Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place

Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.

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

#594

Post by [deleted] »

umvi wrote: post #578
pembrook wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter because, as the dominant world power and arbiter of the world's currency, the US can invent legal grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone. The US government is so powerful, they are the only country that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave the country. The US treasury will withhold the a…

USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you really don't want to pay. That comes with a lot of downsides though (no more US passport, no getting rescued by the US if you wander into North Korea, etc), which implies the taxes aren't for nothing just because you live out-of-country.

[deleted]

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

#595

Post by laurensr »

pembrook wrote: post #567
aestetix wrote: post #500

I wonder if people have forgotten the legal grounds on which the US claimed jurisdiction. I may be misremembering, but I think it was because megaupload.com was registered as a .COM, and the .COM top level domain is owned by Verisign, an American company, and therefore the US has jurisdiction over it. I guess one lesson from this is that running out of .COM domain names is not a bad thing, because it reduces the grip…

It doesn't really matter because, as the dominant world power and arbiter of the world's currency, the US can invent legal grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone. The US government is so powerful, they are the only country that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave the country. The US treasury will withhold the a…

And then there is FATCA and CRS : when opening a bank account for my non-profit I had to answer 15 pages of questions related to me, other directors and the non-profit itself. I'm a non-US citizen outside of the US.

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

#596

Post by TylerE »

xdennis wrote: post #536
tim333 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property, films, TV shows and music and the like. And unlike say normal use of bittorrent, making a lot of money off it. And being the largest player doing that. I'm not sure about the morals but you can certainly understand financially why they've gone after him.

> He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property, films, TV shows and music and the like. But they have no jurisdiction as he was not doing that IN the US. When the Pirate Bay guys were persecuted, the US got Sweden to convict them. They weren't extradited to the US.

But he was, as many many others have pointed out, hosting files on US based servers

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

#597

Post by jedilord »

umvi wrote: post #578
pembrook wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter because, as the dominant world power and arbiter of the world's currency, the US can invent legal grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone. The US government is so powerful, they are the only country that enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave the country. The US treasury will withhold the a…

USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you really don't want to pay. That comes with a lot of downsides though (no more US passport, no getting rescued by the US if you wander into North Korea, etc), which implies the taxes aren't for nothing just because you live out-of-country.

[dead]

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

#598

Post by gscott »

bdcravens wrote: post #580
preaching5271 wrote: post #24

I appreciate Kim Dotcom for running MegaUpload and later Mega, in a time when the internet was younger and wilder. Also for his pirate spirit and "stick it to the man" attitude. But everything has a limit, specifically his resistance against the law, even if he hid it behind virtues. I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved. Isn't it wiser to sto…

Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich himself off of content that people were already sharing? There's a lot of retcon-ing those like him, Ross Ulbricht, etc as freedom fighters, when the truth is they were simply capitalists.

Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by hosting pirated tv episodes. But one was started by ex-Paypal founders and the other bootstrapped (MegaUpload).

Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but, in their case, now the law is something entirely different and unexpected.

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

#599

Post by EionRobb »

kube-system wrote: post #469
stainablesteel wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really, his website was based on hong kong, this is a fight against america playing world police, which i'm on board with they have no business going after just a single man so fervently, he's a foreign national and the websites weren't based in the US

Copyright is protected by international treaty.

I didn't think NZ was part of that treaty in 2012 when this all went down?

https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/parties/remarks/NZ/... says it wasn't until 6 years later that it joined. But maybe a different treaty?

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

#600

Post by LouisSayers »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #497
stainablesteel wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really, his website was based on hong kong, this is a fight against america playing world police, which i'm on board with they have no business going after just a single man so fervently, he's a foreign national and the websites weren't based in the US

New Zealand is for all practical purposes a USA protectorate. If you want to break USA law don't do it in a country that is dependent on the USA.

It's really not though.

Although NZ has agreements with Aus and the US, you'll find on the ground that kiwis are actually not super fond of the US.

We won't let US nuclear ships into our waters, and we actually have quite a good relationship with China.

NZ is also quite self sufficient in many ways and so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from potential conflict.

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