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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

#621

Post by sandworm101 »

slg wrote: post #573
sandworm101 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> hosting pirated content? If you run a service that allows people to upload data, you are hosting pirated content. The DMCA was specifically designed to address this, to create a system whereby those who host data are not on the hook for every violation. The issue is not that you host pirated content but whether you are following all the rules necessary to enjoy safe harbor protection.

If you look into the case, this wasn't a situation in which they accidentally hosted pirated content as a byproduct of hosting legitimate content. There are records of internal communication of the business discussing how to encourage piracy on the platform. This wasn't early Youtube turning a blind eye to piracy with plausible deniability. This was a business consciously and intentionally using piracy as a growth st…

Piracy as a growth strategy was very common at the time. Everyone, including Youtube, was just rushing to stay on top long enough to translate piracy into money sufficient to keep the lawyers away a few days longer.

>> Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006. But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer, enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had said he lost, according to court documents. [..] In a July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to "steal it!" in an apparent reference to an unidentified video clip, according to the court documents. After Hurley asked if he wanted to steal movies, Chen replied, "haha ya. Or something."

>> Google had its own copyright reservations about YouTube before it struck a deal. Internal documents obtained by Viacom quote Google executives describing YouTube as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft" and warning the site "is completely sustained by pirated content."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/youtube-viacom-spat-gets-dir...

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

#622

Post by realusername »

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…

> Music industry revenue peaked in 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again.

That's because the music industry was incredibly slow to adapt to the internet. They basically took a full decade to react and lost revenue in the process.

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

#623

Post by throwup238 »

pokstad wrote: post #618
throwup238 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s a subjective opinion. You shouldn’t have a legal system built on opinions.

The legal system shouldn't care about motive?

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

#624

Post by realusername »

xp84 wrote: post #591
hylaride wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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' deci…

> No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue

Just that is an indication on how little piracy affects revenue, the effect is at best so small that it's effectively invisible.

> I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.

Because discussing about the real financial impact of piracy is a sure way to throw a lot of pretty extreme copyright laws out of the window.

They really don't want to start this debate. Piracy is just a boogeyman at this point to pass ever stronger IP laws and the large IP conglomerates are pretty aware of that.

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

#625

Post by KeplerBoy »

sizzle wrote: post #588
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…

Who is running mega.co.nz? It looks like a superior offering compared to mega upload with sophisticated encryption and decoding.

Kim runs it. Isn't it the defacto successor to the now defunct mega upload?

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

#626

Post by bandyaboot »

NamTaf wrote: post #516
lenerdenator wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know if it’s just coincidence, but I’ve been seeing this so much lately. People reflexively responding that thing A is totally different than thing B, completely missing that the point is not to suggest similarity between A and B, but to challenge the reasoning being applied to A by noting that it would also apply to B (in most cases where applying it to B leads to a clearly wrong outcome).

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

#627

Post by KeplerBoy »

Eumenes wrote: post #374
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.

> What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts within the DoJ

YouTube was acquired by Google within two years of it launching. It's life as an independent operation was just too short to get into that sort of trouble.

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

#628

Post by lupusreal »

lenerdenator wrote: post #525
epolanski wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your point stands. How would US citizens would feel if another country, say China, wanted to extradite a US citizen because he allegedly violated Chinese copyright law? Dotcom is absolutely right in saying that US is playing world police.

Depends. Are there actual reasonable grounds to suspect that the US citizen violated copyright law in China? Can China be held to granting them a fair trial with a reasonable punishment (read: not executing them in the courtyard and billing their family for the bullet) being prescribed if the US citizen is found guilty? If those two things are present... well, then it is what it is. Now, I doubt China would be able t…

> Can China be held to granting them a fair trial with a reasonable punishment

Hmm, excellent question. And for context, America is going to give Kim Dotcom a functional life sentence in what Americans like to call "pound-you-in-the-ass prison". For sharing files. He'll be given more years than harsher than most murderers.

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

#629

Post by mulmen »

pokstad wrote: post #618
throwup238 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s a subjective opinion. You shouldn’t have a legal system built on opinions.

Sure but the legal system is only one branch of government. Many of the rights we enjoy today were earned by what the legal system would classify as criminals.

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

#630

Post by raggles »

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.

This is just not at all true, and we are hardly dependant on the USA, which makes up only 10% of our trade. The way that Americans think the world revolves around them is embarrassing.
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