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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

#771

Post by null0pointer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #519
kylebenzle wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 1. Information doesn't want anything.

The phrase means "want" in the same way water "wants" to flow downhill.

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

#772

Post by mr_toad »

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.

> Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich himself

You could ask the same question about the Hollywood studios that were built on evading patents.

What he did was clearly illegal - because the studios make the laws.

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

#773

Post by alphabettsy »

akira2501 wrote: post #743
bdcravens wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd go with "Anarcho-capitalist." Which of course explains their allure and the desire to retroactively improve their origin stories. They stand precisely in the face of what the OP himself retroactively considers. > "I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved." Which is the mantra of the bullied. As if we aren't the government. When precisely did…

I think if we’re having an honest argument this has nothing to do with copyright protection being 70 years.

I’d be willing to bet a massive amount of money that most pirated media is less than a few years old.

I don’t believe that we as a society are ever going to decide that copyright protection should be less than that.

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

#774

Post by cscurmudgeon »

fasbass wrote: post #747
burningChrome wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's no evidence that piracy causes any type of harm to these multi-trillion dollar American entertainment conglomerates. Not sure if you know this, but there are tens of thousands of people involved in making a movie or TV series. Many making minimum wage and many who own businesses that are employed by the studios like catering companies. Or transportation companies, or even all the companies who tech they us…

So what? if someone wants to block the pipes with all their might, they deserve a greasy fat kick. These thousands of people deserve to be available on all media and paid fairly. Not blocked by some fat cow. Kim Dotcom made a proto version of sharepoint and dropbox and he was some of the grease to loosen these constipations. We still have a way to go to get artists paid, but we are getting there.

The "fat cow" is the one coordinating, assuming risk and making the content. If the content flops.. the workers just don't get paid while the "fat cow" looses money.

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

#775

Post by gexla »

nottommo wrote: post #707

Probably Kim Dotcom has done wrong, but I don't think he deserves to go to court and or prison in a country he has never resided in.

His choice was to build a lucrative service off U.S. consumers, knowing the service's popularity was in pirating content, mostly created in the U.S.

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

#776

Post by cscurmudgeon »

csallen wrote: post #481
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.

Minor nitpick, but he was not stealing, he was infringing copyrights. To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without permission, such that you now possess it, but they no longer have it. To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy of another person's work without their permission. Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of copyright infringement are losing is not their propert…

If someone happily says "they stole my heart" do you go:

  a. Go and correct them about using language wrongly
  b. Find the heart and return it to its owner
  c. Understand the meaning correctly

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

#777

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

microtherion wrote: post #649
bdcravens wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kim Dotcom is simply a career criminal, settling on piracy after having previously been convicted of trafficking in stolen phone calling cards and embezzlement. He simply figured out a crime that is socially more accepted than what he engaged in previously, but it was always about the money for him.

Know any decent computer nerds in the 80s/90s that weren’t at least dabbling in that stuff?

Hell there was a whole monthly meeting and magazine dedicated to that sort of behavior. Criminal? Yes. Part of hacker culture? Also yes.

Too bad Mr Goldstein lost all credibility (that he may or may not have had) when he started shaming folks for not taking the clot shot.

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

#778

Post by BobAliceInATree »

miffy900 wrote: post #769
doctorpangloss wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so. Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only co…

I don't think anyone, even the diehardest fans of Apple, thinks that Apple's RAM upgrade prices are reasonable. But we pay it for the same reason that people pay Porsche an extra $10k for a trim package — because you accept the high-margin upgrade as the cost of the item itself.

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

#779

Post by rtpg »

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…

> Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.

I read this and din't quite understand the argument, but realized (if I understood) this is saying that if you are a content host, then you need a lot of resources to deal with copyright violations, so it's hard to compete against these hosts.

Safe harbor in the DMCA isn't perfect, but a world without safe harbor would be a world with a lot less freemium products, that's for sure.

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

#780

Post by ruthmarx »

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…

> 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?

More than two decades of studies show there is no harm to these companies and that pirates spend the most on content.

Piracy is flat out a net good for humanity and society. No convincing counter-arguments can be made.

The only example where harm could be said to happen is with very small content-creators who would be relying on income to get started, but even then I don't think that matters.

If you're the source of a creation and people want to see more, they will fund it. It need not be funded by everybody that will or has viewed or enjoyed it.

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