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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

#691

Post by achierius »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #601
umvi wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. The USA can, and does, tax non-citizens. Many countries tax non-citizens. Go out and buy a foreign stock-they will tax you on…

What he meant was that the USA can't levy income tax on non-citizens living in other countries.

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

#692

Post by sva_ »

mysecretaccount wrote: post #546
skullone wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, he paid people for, and promoted the upload of copywrited works. He knowingly participated and basically tailored his products to pirating. Some people love him, but he will see his day in court apparently, but no one wants to even deal with him because he's gone crazy.

Source for "he's gone crazy"? Curious about the degree of crazy, since he seemed pretty out there from the start.

Looking at his Twitter, he peddles a bunch of conspiracy theories.

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

#693

Post by jfyi »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #683
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.

"Comparing X to Y feels gross [therefore don't do it]" is a gross argument. This type of argument never yields insight, and only serves to draw attention away from the interesting and relevant question being asked, which in this case is: The top-level poster appears to be proposing a general rule for how people should behave. But how suitable is it really? The way to explore that is to test it out by trying other inp…

To be fair, the person you are replying to didn't use the argument you are describing. They stated it felt gross and then went into detail of the actual argument:

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

That is noticeably different than stating, "it feels gross so don't do it".

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

#694

Post by Dylan16807 »

dangus wrote: post #660
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 is a ton of evidence. Ask Snoop Dogg how much money he gets from streaming compared to CD sales. Look at how badly industry revenue has collapsed. It literally never recovered fully since Napster. https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for... It is an industry that employs real people from artists to studio engineers to musical instrument and equipment companies to the bartenders at the venues…

> Ask Snoop Dogg how much money he gets from streaming compared to CD sales.

If you do that you'll get a very misleading answer. That low payment he got was for writing credit on a song with 17 writers.

But the main reason streaming gives less revenue than CD sales isn't a "devaluation of music" thing, it's because streaming is closer to radio.

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

#695

Post by brian-armstrong »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #572
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.

It did. YouTube has paid the piper here and continues to do so. It pays a lot of money to record labels right now. TV networks choose to run their own streaming, and YouTube enforces what networks ask for. Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is tot…

Isn't Apple losing money on their streaming service though?

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

#696

Post by michaelbrave »

halyconWays wrote: post #429
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…

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.

I usually imagine extradition being used for people who are dangerous, for someone who at worse encouraged a lot of copyright violations by making software feels like an abuse of power to me.

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

#697

Post by dpedu »

kalleboo wrote: post #335
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…

> when a file was taken down, the host would usually make note of the hash of the file that was taken down and not allow that file to be uploaded and shared again One of the complaints the US case had was that MegaUpload specifically did not do this. They de-duplicated uploads by hash internally, but when one download URL was DMCA'd, they only disabled that one URL and left other URLs with the same hash accessible.

How exactly are rights holders required to inform MegaUpload of content to remove? Every DMCA takedown request I've seen generally has a collection of links. I don't know the letter of the law of the actual process, but the ability of a rights holder to tell MegaUpload to take down all copies of X piece of media seems... Unfair. Not everybody has a hash based system, and even if they did, variance - such as raring, modification times, etc, would make everything mismatch. And, if that is actually the process, why do they bother to include the links at all?

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

#698

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

duped wrote: post #576
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…

You're looking at this through too narrow a lens, I think. The Government has a duty to protect domestic industry from foreign threats, and throughout history, that isn't reserved to state actors. Megaupload was a severe threat(*) to major American industries, and Kim Dotcom flagrantly ignored pressure from America to stop what it was doing. When that happens the Government gets to pick which of its heavy hammers to…

Completely agree.

For the GP: part of (any) gov's power is what you refer to as "autistically" pursuing a case. A large org will never be nimble or fast enough to catch criminals in the act or immediately afterwards. It balances that slowness by inexorably pursuing criminals, sometimes at greater expense than the cost of the original crime.

Would be criminals should believe that they might execute a heist successfully, but that they will need to always keep running because the gov is doggedly pursuing.

None of what I am saying is specific to Kim Dotcom, just trying to highlight to GP how governments execute business.

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

#699

Post by LouisSayers »

vlovich123 wrote: post #673
LouisSayers wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from potential conflict I suspect the small size of the economy, the small number of people in it, and lack of strategic importance in military matters are what keep it protected from potential conflict more than it's self sufficiency and distance. In fact, if anything was to create conflict would be someone trying to capture that self-sufficiency to support th…

Yes, it's a number of things.

Small country, fairly neutral stance, little involvement in international conflict, and huge distance.

Follow that up with alliances and there's not much reason to come to NZ, other than for a holiday!

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

#700

Post by joshcryer »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #682
joshcryer wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I remember sharing a file to my brother and "uploading" it over very slow DSL at the time (I think I was getting 100kbps a second or something). The file was copyrighted, a TV show, Supernatural, or something like that. Anyway, the upload was instant. Apparently Megaupload would do a quick hash of the file (not sure if it was in browser or probably more likely the first 100k bits or something of the file), and if…

Getting a DMCA for one user's copy of a file doesn't mean every other user's copy is violating copyright. And that's not a theoretical concern, I remember a recent tweet about google drive having false positives in that exact way.

That's an interesting argument but the hash for an "infringing file" would be universal across all copies of said file, since presumably the DMCA striker would be claiming the file as infringing. I doubt a jury would buy it.
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