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 stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise? But people are superficial and tend to develop an "i'm the main character" personality, pushing them into recklessness, like persisting doing certain things or publicly talking shit. Hope he and his family will be ok.
> Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
The problem is that government doesn’t have a line, that line is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses is a fool’s errand. Copyright holders, the government, and powerful interests are entities that have no problem playing dirty.
To add: you know with the stable-diffusion function, there are ranges of vectors whereby technically just conjuring them is 15 years federal and possessing them is 5 each. That is 20-25% of a lifetime in one, 7.5% in the other!
You know how nuts that sounds to me as a mathematician?!
It’s not nuts when you stop being intentionally obtuse and speak plainly: yes, child abuse material can be represented by a variety of mathematical means, but it’s abhorrent nature makes it morally correct for those laws to exist.
I've had to avoid taking certain cutesy photos of my 3 year old toddler son because he is sometimes naked (example: bathtime or beach) and I have to fear my innocent photos being misidentified as CSAM.
What's crazy is that my library contains naked photos of ME as a toddler (I scanned a bunch of old slides in a few years ago) and I have to of course wonder if that is going to get flagged. (My parents were German immigrants. Germans DNGAF about human nudity, unlike the puritanical Americans.)
There's a cost to automating this. You might say "well a human can tell" but humans don't scale.
Regarding the evaluation of everything else, I find it useful to ask what the concrete demonstrable harm is that has been done. Not the hypothetical harm, mind you. So for automatic generation of self-indulgent pornographic material (or for example things that are not even possible in reality such as... hentai?), I don't see an issue unless it is acted upon and demonstrably harms someone or violates consent (harm caused by creating a court case should not count towards this since that is circular reasoning). Most people who are only attracted to adults have fapped to content that is something they would never do in reality; I don't think it's a strong argument that the mere possibility that that might occur is enough to ban it.
For a multitude of reasons, both are evil and should be illegal. However, I do think they are significantly different severities of crime, and ought to be treated as such. Same for sex offenders; streaking should not be punished the same way as rape.
Something can only be evil when it harms or is going to harm somebody.
No matter how abhorrent a picture is it can not harm anybody by merely existing. Harm can (or may not) only be inflicted to others during its production or with its demonstration.
Banning possession of pictures produced without participation of any living person other than the viewer makes no sense.
Banning possession of child abuse pictures used to make sense because possessing implied buying and buying incentivized production which depended on actual child abuse. Nowadays nobody has to be abused and I'm totally fine with weirdos using whatever pictures their sick imagination may want as long as this keeps them satisfied enough to be able to keep their wicked desires secret from every living person. I don't want the police to bust such people as long as they don't actually harm anybody and don't pay anybody to do the harm. No crime without an actual victim is worth ruining anybody's life, whatever kind of freak they are.
Child porn is a unique case. Its presence normalizes child sex in the mind of its consumers, and feeds an addiction that greatly increases the likelihood of an actual action taken against a child.
It's the same logic most countries use to ban possession of firearms. Their presence greatly increases the risk of lethal violence and suicide, despite being harmless to people when used correctly at the range or for hunting. The lack of need for firearms weighed against the harm they cause to others makes it a hard sell for remaining legal.
Firearms may get a pass because they have real utility in self defense, but there are no positive benefits to having an endless stream of fake child abuse.
I get your point and won't hurry to object. You maybe right. But I wouldn't hurry to agree either. You may be wrong as well. This is questionable. For example many people enjoy bloody violent games and movies (I specifically did during my teen years, when I actually wasn't formally allowed by the ESRB ratings) but absolutely don't want and never wanted anything like that to happen in the real life. Perhaps a middle way should be chosen - still ban all, incl. AI generated child abuse content - don't really normalize it, but don't put anybody in prison for having artificial pictures on their PCs.
Probably in the exact same capacity as violent media normalises murder, or rough porn normalises sexual assault. Or drug use in media normalises… drug use.
When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader".
1s and 0s can be sending bitcoin to a hit man to kill your wife. In this case, link to harm is indeed obvious, and evil and years in jail are justified. Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
> When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader.
I don't know if theres a correlation between evil and jailtime. The debate around the severity of punishment is different than the debate about whether or not something should be illegal. I do think my (US) justice system is very flawed, especially around sentencing.
> Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
I can take a stab at it. Simulated CSAM :
* if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.
* has the potential to normalize the distribution of CSAM due to #1
* has the potential to normalize the consumption of CSAM.
To address the comments being birthed around unproven causal relationships- yeah I know. The parent asked for arguments. Besides, a study into this doesn't seem very ethical or possible.
I am not able to discount the "ick factor", but I'll try to make a counterpoint.
All of the arguments I can think of to the contrary center around free speech, false positives and weaponization. That's where I think the challenges are and where subjectivity can cause issues. Without a real person, it's difficult to assign a simulated age unless a prompt is captured or other context. Otherwise it becomes the job of a person or other 'AI' to guess the simulated age of the image.
> if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.
Yes, but at the same time it'll greatly devaluate the real CSAM. It'll be like flooding the black market of perfect copies of rhinoceros horns. People won't have any economic incentive to create real CSAM.
Perhaps. I can't speak to the motivation of these folks, but I suspect it's more than just sending the pictures for them. Also, even if the market is flooded, I imagine we'd still want people looking for victims so it doesn't really help.
Child porn consumption is a product of an unhealthy addiction. Addicts tend to need more and more extreme fixes to feed upon. In the case of drugs, that generally leads to self harm. In the case of child porn, a child ever more likely is to be harmed.
We've banned this account. Whatever you're arguing for or against (and I'm not tracking it), you can't attack another user this way on this site.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
As much as i'm leery of connecting abstractions for the sake of bad laws, your example is a bit reductionist. After all, the people who created things like Stuxnet (ironically, a government-created worm) were really just assembling code characters in a certain interesting way.
You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...
> Writing down 1’s and 0’s in certain permutations, is ‘evil’ and ‘should be illegal?
I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.
True, but ‘creating and distributing’ some physical paper or pdf filled with 1 and 0, is the actual action. Just blank white rectangles with lots of lines and ovals on it, being shuffled around.
Even in the extreme case, where it really does contain images in binary format, there is only the latent potential of that being transformed into something objectionable, several steps removed.
If this was the accepted norm everywhere, then practically every adult in the US would be guilty of some latent potential crime, after several degrees of separation.
e.g. even though lunatics use knives in mass stabbing sprees, we don’t assign blame to those selling knives or knife making equipment in stores where the lunatic happened to have gone shopping.
I don't follow the point you're trying to make. We are talking about the output of an image generation model, right?
If we are talking about a physical book containing 1s and 0s that represent CSAM, I'd ask how you encoded the image to get the binary representation...
That is the point, once it’s been transformed into 1’s and 0’s and distributed for the first time, it’s all random intermediaries handling it.
Intermediaries who likely cannot recognize it and won’t think twice about reproducing it, even if later on it does get transformed back.
What the original impetus for creating and distributing it is irrelevant to anyone subsequently encountering it.
To continue the knife analogy, even if the knife factory was also in fact owned by some maniac, the salespersons in the retail stores still not assigned blame even if they promote the knives.
The salespersons are just random middle men who couldn’t possibly have been expected to personally investigate the actual background or provenance behind what they’re handling.
Sorry, you lost me. If the knives were illegal, the salespeople would held responsible. We aren't going to agree, no matter how clever the analogy, so I'll leave you here.
Huh? Some types of knives are illegal in certain jurisdictions… and I haven’t heard of anyone blaming them for not opening and verifying every knife box that passes through.
"Every (bad) thing we do, makes the next one so much easier."
For a more than just relevant part of people who would play with weights on a model to create anything that compensates for "child abuse" with "fake child abuse", the risk of lowering the threshold is extremely high. VR, AR, fake news and the scripted nature of some world events that are driven by common subgoals of interest groups are decrementing the opaqueness of the line between reality and delusion/illusion. Loss of reality & dissociation from humanity are things, especially among people with a fanbase & influence, money, power.
Games & TV and their influence are obvious and they do erode the threshold as well but it's reversible because the player is not the creator of his reality while with gen ai, prompts & weights, the player becomes more and more capable of simulating his own reality based on his derived preferences & idiosyncrasies. Games and TV have constraints that are set by the devs and show runners and all the crews involved in the process. Gen AI doesn't have that.
I'm working on gathering the fractions. In order to go from observations, witness accounts and quantifications in and of institutions and identify logical links in patterns of consumption of future abusers, I would have to travel in time.
I have not tried to reduce my hypothesis but there's plenty of discussions and research into mental health crisis, recurring and one-time/impulsive (sexually) violent behavior as well as the correlating &or causal psycho-pathologies.
But I'm not a scientist. I just think. And sometimes I read.
It matters anyway. It's hard studying this stuff in the lab. Relevant measurements in the field need to be isolated but that can mostly only be done in retrospect and we are talking about LLMs, what can be generated, what will be generated and should it be legal or not?
Should the system prepare? Can it? What kind of colony will we become? Are there multiple endings/"liminals"/paths? Who (exactly) cares? Who will be affected? Who is aware and who isn't? Who is misguided (maybe it's me)?
If I was a different kind of idiot in the past, I would have made the money to have the peace of mind to dive deeper but as it stands, just babbling some thoughts isn't gonna get me anywhere. Except that it stimulates to put it into words and maybe get something coherent on paper some day, something that isn't purely wannabe-megalomaniac, but constructive ^^
That statement is carrying a lot of non-evidence with it.
Say my fetish is chocolate. If I ask an image generating AI to give me a photo of an adult made of chocolate and covered in sprinkles, that doesn't necessarily mean it was trained on that specific thing.
Thank you for dodging my point with a non-sequitur. The contrived example does not diminish the potential real harm that exists in the original use case.
You don't seem to understand that "potential" is not "actual" (and also conveniently says nothing about actual probabilities). I could claim almost anything is "potential".
Eating grapes could "potentially" result in choking. Living in a house made of wood could "potentially" result in dying in a house fire. Driving over 70MPH could "potentially" result in hydroplaning if it is raining.
Why do we not care more about the "actual" harm (and its probability), as measured by science?
Oh, of course- Things that are banned are difficult to study, which is why people can invent any beliefs about them that they want to.
the abhorrence is not in the vectors, not in the pixels' inherent nature.
the problem with CP is ... sigh ...the violations, the harm, the unconsentability, the trafficking, the exploitation, the "gateway drug" problem (which might or might not be the correct model of this psychopathology), and the other negative externalities.
Same thing happens in chemistry: some compounds are legal, some aren't. If you come up with a clever way to synthesise the illegal thing, it's still illegal, or will be made illegal eventually.
I think theres some detail missing. Are you talking about someone crafting a prompt to generate simulated child pornography and being held accountable for the action and content?
Yeah writing down the 0s and 1s of a child pornopgraphic image is forbidden, like the 0s and 1s of copyrighted material. Nothing to do with stable diffusion. Some numbers are forbidden to use since the 90s. That's basically what it came to.
This is what an illegal meme looks like: "Tyler Kay, 26, wrote a post... calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight. He responded to several comments posted by others following his post, adding that it was “100% the plan”.
Kay also reposted... another message inciting action against a named immigration solicitors in Northampton" https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/man-jailed-just-two-days-aft...
I think we are stretching the definition of a meme here. This was original content orchestrating attacks. Not some repost of a joke (however bad taste it might be).
At which point is the boundary between meme and instigator?
I'm pretty sure that's the point they're getting at - that the original person commenting was talking about this stuff like it's just memes, in bad faith.
It’s a pity you’re being downvoted because this is a very reasonable request.
I too would love to know the story behind that claim because, having lived in the UK for a good number of years, I’d guarantee there would be more going on than simply just what the GP suggested.
I don't believe you, since you didn't bother to actually post what you found, when you directly responded to someone asking for a citation. Your comment is less than useful, and completely untrustworthy.
> 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
UK law does not prohibit memes. It prohibits incitement to riot, as does US law. It prohibits incitement to murder, as does US law. In fact, these acts are illegal in almost every democracy in the World, even the most progressive and liberal ones, because they are reasonable statutes to extend common law (protecting people and their property from damage by others).
In recent weeks, a young man born in Wales to Rwandan-born Christian migrant parents, diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, stabbed three 6-year old girls to death at a dance class. He attempted to murder the other children in the class, and the adults who intervened.
The "illegal memes" as you put it, were that he was a foreign-born Muslim who had entered the country illegally (all aspect of this narrative are false), and that people should riot to show their displeasure, and kill Muslim migrants to "save our children".
Seeing these "facts", mobs rioted in multiple towns over the course of a week, injured multiple (unarmed) police officers, caused tens of millions of pounds in damage to private property, and attempted to burn down a hotel with 200+ migrants (including children), staying in it, while many people of colour were individually attacked, their shops looted, their homes and cars damaged, and so on.
Arresting and charging the people who did these things is an obvious priority.
Arresting and charging the people who spread misinformation (I believe it was actually disinformation - purposeful, intentful lies), and suggesting that riots and murder should take place, are just as guilty of incitement in the UK as they would be anywhere else in the World.
The internet is not a fantasy land. What you post has real World consequences. If you get together in a private forum and plan to kidnap, rape and kill a celebrity (a case also tried in the UK recently), that's not "online meme banter", that's conspiracy to kidnap, rape and murder. You're going to prison, you're a threat to public safety.
The lines you say the government don't have, they're there. They're called "laws". Some of them are arguably unjust - I've campaigned against some IP law extensions in the past, including the introduction of software patents in the EU (when the UK was still a member), and think RIPA was a tragedy of law making - but to say that laws are irrelevant and action is defined only by the resistance a government faces is absurdly cynical, naive, and simply not true.
Your last sentence leads to an obvious question: what do you think people should do instead of "sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses"? Do you think inciting riots and murder are the way to go?
These people know what they're doing. All the crowds at the riot are the same kind of person. Yes, it's scary that the government has such power, especially when the government is usually so socially and technologically inept, and usually panders to the hateful people rather than prosecute them. I think the situation was that an online post was having a direct influence on the real world; there were people actively carrying out the requests.
Definitely something to keep an eye on, though. Then again Youtube comments sections are still full of homophobic comments, often including suggestions to imprison or kill people like me; would the people leaving those comments feel so brave when unmasked? Why don't they put their faces on what they say?
That case of murder was not the only reason. And while it is based on misinformation (and I agree it was made on purpose), just one case would not cause the riots. It was just “the last drop”.
Perhaps you could explain the previous drops. I don't think they exist, other than as disinformation and propaganda.
Migration of all forms is at a record high in the UK [0], yet violent crime is at an all-time low. How is violent crime correlated to migration, as so many people claim on Twitter, WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages?
"What about the money we spend on them?", some ask. Well, contrary to popular belief, asylum seekers don't get mainstream benefits [1] and legal migrants aren't entitled to public funds until they have been granted indefinite leave to remain [2]. NHS costs need to be paid for either through the IHS scheme, or directly at 150% of cost [3]
"Oh, employed are they? Taking jobs off locals, are they?", the pub bore starts to snort. Well, no. Nobody really wants to spend 12 hours a day running a corner shop, or working in a field picking sprouts on minimum wage, which is why there are record levels of job vacancies in the UK right now. [4]
I'll ask again then, where are the previous drops? Migration does not cause increases in crime by any measure, the only costs incurred are caused by delays in processing, they're not "taking anybody's else's job" and overall migration leads to higher tax incomes, and they pay their way for services through taxes on jobs no local wants.
So please, spell it out for me. I'm really curious about those previous drops. I suspect that you may have been lied to.
How is beating up police officers protecting the cenotaph “protest” that people should have a legal right to?
What about burning down a community library because somebody had put the lie up on a local Facebook page that “all the kids books have been replaced by copies of the Quran”? Never happened, somebody lied, the lie spread, mob burns a public library down. Is that a legally protected right to protest?
On the 75% number, well, now you’re showing your hand. I will take your insistence you’re not a fellow traveller at face value, but I do need to point out you have drawn a line of association that the far-right want you to, they do it all the time, and it’s intentional and harmful.
You have called out a number referring to Muslims, but the “protests” were meant to be about immigration. Do you not think British people can be Muslim?
So let’s dive into the numbers [0], and have a think about something important.
In table 2.1 we find “Number of persons arrested for terrorist-related activity, since 11 September 2001, by self-defined nationality”. 3,302 of these people (62.6%), define themselves as British. It seems to me that by the logic of the dominant group being the dominant threat, MI5 should be spying on every Briton they can - these British people are all a threat to public safety!
Ah, but of course that’s not what people mean by “British”, is it? And there’s the problem. This is thinly veiled Islamophobia and racism. The far right like to suggest that “Muslim” and “migrant” are synonyms. It’s othering. It’s dehumanising. And you just showed you unconsciously agree at some level. Many people do, and it’s that sort of lazy thinking that means a) we never solve the actual problems we face as a society and b) create divisions when there don’t need to be any.
Migration has never been the risk some think it is. Protesting it by looting shops in your local high street is transparent thuggery. Provoking people to do so because of “immigrants” (nudge, nudge, we all know the targets are all brown people), is incitement to racial hatred. Threatening British born people because of their religion and skin colour because of “immigration” is - I think you can agree - not a reasonable form of protest at any level. The objection isn’t sound, never mind the protest action itself.
Do you mean pre-Windrush when Irish people were OK, but black people were not? Do you mean pre-1926 when Irish people were not OK? Are Americans terrorists (18th century), or fellow countrymen (prior to that?). Catholicism was outlawed for 400 years, so we keep that or adopt the view after that (it’s tolerated), or prior to that (it’s a requirement to be accepted in society)? Do we need to roll back to pre-Norman invasion and expunge French influence? Is Magna Carta OK, because we have thousands of years of history prior to that meddling? Wait, do I like Vikings (they settled), or reject them (they raped and pillaged their way in)? What about the Romans who eradicated Celtic and Pagan ways of life?
What your comment suggests is that there is a single “British culture” to conform to. There isn’t, but the closest we have to it is a fusion culture.
The most popular foods - curry, fish and chips, burgers - are a result of remixing immigrant flavours. Our music, film, writing, all a fusion of ideas and styles and backgrounds. There is an official religion (the Monarch is the head of the church), but it’s observed by less than 2% of the population. Our laws (and constitution), are intended to flex and evolve over changing understandings of who we are.
So this might be hard for you to understand, but it’s what we like: come here, be you, be free, respect all around you. It’s what that whole punk thing was all about, it’s why Cool Britannia exists.
I doubt you find many people here who are against the right of peaceful protest. But protests are only worthwhile if they address real issues, not misinformation.
Don't forget about the Heisenberg immigrant, who is simultaneously
1. a lazy sponger who just came here to live on benefits
and
2. taking your job
Sky News interviewed someone recently who said he was against immigration because it meant he couldn't get a job. It turned out that this guy was a convicted sex offender who had been in prison for his offence. But no, it was definitely immigrants to blame for him not having a job.
Some of the people that rioted were a motley assortment of right wing thugs following their warped ideology. Others were just yobs who were gullible enough to believe the misinformation, or just saw an opportunity for mayhem (one of the rioters has, IIRC, 170 previous convictions).
Yes, people are frustrated about many things in the UK (lack of affordable housing, dentists, decent jobs etc). But a most of these things are down to austerity, poor governance and the greed of the ruling classes. They aren't caused by relatively tiny numbers (29,437 in 2023) of desperate people coming across the channel in small boats. They are just a convenient scapegoat.
Mp3s were yesterday literally long time ago. Parody is always legal. And Mickey mouse by the way is way past copyright. Don't you know at least the original.
Since when? Some people keep local copies of their media. Censorship and arbitrary license disputes can have streaming content snatched away at any moment.
I'm sure there's still a large number of people downloading mp3s and other files to permanently store.
But really, how often are people offline? For me it's only when I'm on a flight, and I can prepare for that by using spotify or youtube and pressing the download button on a playlist.
I am when I am hiking, camping, or have poor reception like in my apartment complex. There are vast swathes of the globe that do not have connectivity at all.
Also, worth considering the online service could change its offering or die at any time. Songs I like are routinely removed from various online platforms, and it enrages me every time.
I agree with you with content changing being one of the many downsides of relying on streaming services. I just think that most people are willing to accept the trade off.
THIS is why the Second Amendment. It's easy to revenge-kill a crazy, it's harder to revenge-kill a government. Keep your governments small and your crazies armed!
I've never understood that sentiment. The US has the second amendment, and it doesn't seem to do much for personal freedom there. Europe does not, and I feel a lot more free in most European countries than I do in the US, especially when it comes to encounters with representatives of the state (LEOs).
I can imagine an alternate reality where the second amendment has the benefits often ascribed to it, but it would be very different to the one we live in.
Checks out for Europe provided you're not an immigrant. Being blond also helps. I never get flagged for traffic inspections or in any way harrased by cops. But I constantly see people who aren't my skin color, or simply poor, get treated rough. True for France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and based on personal experience. ACAB.
There was a twitter thread where someone from Russia said he was beaten up by police in Netherlands during a peaceful protest. He was accused of attending the wrong protest by twitter Europhiles. Now, something tells me it's easy to feel safe when you conform.
Sad to hear that. Was that completely peaceful pretest? Why was police even involved then? For a record, I was never beaten up by a police officer, and I've attended all kinds of "wrong" protests (what is the right protest anyway).
Do you have a source? There's plenty of disinformation on the internet, and I'm curious to learn what has happened.
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?
What is the point of asking that question if you strictly intended no comparison between the subject of the post you’re replying to and the people you mentioned?
It is like posting “You have interesting thoughts about Kim Dotcom. What is better, paragliding or parasailing?”
It's not. They were attacking an argument made in the original comment. That argument had no reason to only apply to Kim dotcom. It applies to everyone. The poster attacked the logic behind that argument using a few different people as examples.
On the internet, questions like your first comment are statistically likely to be smug gotchas. It'd be nice if it was different, but it's not. So if that's not your intention, it's worthwhile to say so in the first place rather than assume people will understand.
Just to say up front, I think you are the only one that gets it here and am not criticizing you, but the answer in question could also be read that way (of course with the excuse that "the other guy did it first!").
Am I the only one that didn't read either that way? I think a lot of biases are hanging out in this conversation.
Truth. I'll go further. He was a scam artist. Back in the day, I remember using MegaCar.com as an example of all the evils of Flash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9RIkwvFjfw
Also Data Protect was a fraud masquerading as an information security company. I was living in Germany then and it was a joke in the infosec space.
"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 inputs, as the GP did here.
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".
What you're calling their "actual argument" is also a bad argument. The original proposed rule (which amounts to "Don't do stuff if someone powerful can likely punish you for it") doesn't distinguish between commercial opportunists and real activists or whistleblowers, so their "actual argument" is spurious.
It also seems designed to shut down criticism of the original proposed rule -- or at least that's the only interpretation I can ascribe to it. This is bad because that original proposed rule is bad (in my opinion) and deserves criticism. Ihe best kind of criticism of any rule is "Let's try this other input, and see if you still agree with the conclusion".
Haha, of course the original comment doesn't distinguish... that was the whole reason for pointing it out. It was done specifically to separate the two sets of actors for comparison.
It "being designed to shut down criticism" is a wildly subjective take at best and at worst way more spurious than anything they or I am suggesting. I think your bias is showing and you are doing everything in your power to avoid addressing the point that "he was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower."
> the point that "he was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower."
This "point" isn't connected in any way to the original proposed rule, which is what is under examination here. So when the GP sought to test that rule by applying it to a different type of person, this "point" does not amount to an objection -- it's simply irrelevant.
It's simple enough, it's just nonsensical. You don't get to declare rules for discussion of a topic. When someone proposes something, it is valuable to explore how it fits in different scenarios. I don't think I can make that any simpler for you, and frankly, I don't know why I'd need to explain that to an adult acting in good faith.
So would you like to address the topic or would you rather continue playing pretend with imaginary rule sets for conversation?
Ironically, it's you who is attempting (and failing) to shut down criticism instead of addressing it.
> Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross. He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.
Publicly available information supports the fact that Snowden was also an opportunist - the vast majority of the material he leaked was unrelated to domestic surveillance, which was his stated purpose for leaking.
Regardless of the reason, he gave many kids who couldn't afford to pay, a way to access movies and TV shows. I haven't watched a movie or a TV show for the past 20 years because its a waste of time for kids, but when I was young and couldn't afford to pay, I would use mega
I don't think they were actually comparing Kim to anything else besides using his "resistance to the law" approach in a general sense to ask if "Isn't it wiser to stop at some point" should also apply to whistleblowers.
Literally the whole point of comparing things are that they are different. If you could only compare things that were exactly identically equal, the concept of comparing wouldn't make sense.
>Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross.
Victims are victims. We just overlook victims of the state because of a biological religious adherence to revenge. Righteous violence and all that jazz.
The written justification that judges give for their rulings is literally called a "judicial opinion."
Human understanding of humans and human social structures (which one needs to make just rulings) isn't objective. To claim otherwise is not just subjective, but incoherent. It's an infinite regress. Many people throughout history possessing ideas that we now consider to be stupid were convinced of their objectivity.
FWIW, I think this vendetta against Kim Dotcom is way out of line, and wouldn't have happened if he were more important.
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.
I think there's a significant difference between someone who does the right thing despite personal risk (because it's that important), and someone who does the profitable thing despite personal risk (because they can't imagine the rules actually applying to them).
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).
It's not a coincidence, it's become extremely common lately in online discussions. Instead of addressing the argument and, perhaps, pointing out why the two differing things should be treated differently, they just act offended and shut down the argument as if making the comparison at all is so offensive and wrong that we can't even discuss it logically.
Back in the day, piracy was seen as a symbol of free speech and censorship much like how abortion is still a symbol for women's rights today.
The premise was that these services didn't actually perform the piracy, its users did. Kim Dotcom played both sides of the field, much like how social media platforms are right now with the whole "we're not a media company" but wanting all the profits of providing services that those companies do.
I'm not saying I agree, but it provides context as to why people felt Kim Dotcom was a hero.
I find this mentality is always directed at rich people, but never applied consistently in anyone's life, so I have a hard time taking this opinion seriously. Hopefully, you can convince me otherwise, but I've never heard anyone suggest the best sports teams should stop competing when they've won enough, or that the best inventors should stop, or the best artists, and so on. Money isn't zero sum. We're constantly creating insanely large quantities of money. If the people at the top are accumulating that money from individual consumers making their own free choices, then would you suggest that the people at the end of the line be given things for free? Or maybe they should be disallowed from making the purchases? Or maybe you're suggesting the rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits away? and who would they give it away too? The federal government controls more money than any entire private business, so obviously it controls orders of magnitude more than any individual. Should these wealthy individuals be forced to give their money to the largest money holders in the world? What value system would that make sense in?
> never heard anyone suggest the best sports teams should stop competing when they've won enough, or that the best inventors should stop, or the best artists
While they want you to believe that, there’s no correlation between being rich and being best, or even good, at anything. You’re not the best athlete because your mom and dad were the best athletes. But if your parents were wealthy, you’re wealthy.
If they want standards to be applied ”consistently”, great. They can start by paying their taxes.
If you have issue with the taxes they pay then you have issue with the tax code, but that still doesn't address any problems or apply any consistent values. How does moving money from one rich person to the richest organization in the world achieve any goal?
Money is just a way of keeping track of to what fraction of future output of other people you are entitled to (as agreed upon by human race).
Why shouldn't this quantity be softly capped at some value to prevent natural runaway towards 100%? What's wrong about capping it on the other side slightly above zero for the purposes of personal survival and preventing organic deterioration?
> Or maybe you're suggesting the rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits away?
Obviously that.
> and who would they give it away too?
That is really irrelevant. The money they gave away can literally be burnt and it would still improve the situation. Money is not value. Money is just a score indicating how much value are you entitled to obtain in the future.
> The federal government controls more money than any entire private business
Is that true? Despite trillions of debt? There are national governments in the world (and not small ones) that currently owe more to businesses than they own assets.
Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success. Once you win everything you should step aside and let others have their fun. You shouldn't feel compelled to punish your body even harder for years to come and others shouldn't have to wait till your performance deteriorates.
> Money is just a way of keeping track of to what fraction of future output of other people you are entitled to (as agreed upon by human race).
I don't agree with this definition of money. The vast majority of money doesn't represent human output/labor and none of it is created by human labor. Probably the simplest to understand example of that is crypto. It represents trillions of USD in wealth and has almost no human labor input or output. That's a simple example, but certainly not the only example.
> Is that true? Despite trillions of debt?
Yes it's true. It's not even close. The US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out. They could save up for roughly 6 months and buy out the most expensive company in the world (apple). A company that has been growing their wealth for 50 years. This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money. Moving money from the grossly rich to the insanely unthinkably rich doesn't make much sense to me.
> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.
What problem does this solve? I don't have anything much against it either, but I can't find any reason to do this.
> The vast majority of money doesn't represent human output/labor and none of it is created by human labor.
I agree. That's completely not what I said.
Money is how we keep track of what fraction of the future output of others (of our civilization really) someone or some organization is entited to command (consume or destroy for their needs or schemes) in the future.
> US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out.
I'm still not convinced. You can spend a lot when you are incredibly deep in debt. Spending doesn't make you rich.
> This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money.
The point is not giving money, it's taking the money away. Because there's a limit of how much control over others any single person deserves regardless of what they did.
>> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.
> What problem does this solve?
No global problem. But professional sport takes a huge toll on the body and pretty much excludes those people from any useful form of activity for entire span of their career and possibly later only for our grotesque entertainment. I don't agitate for limits in sport but that's just an example that reasonable limits may benefit people in many areas.
> Money is how we keep track of [...] output of others
How do I reconcile that you agree money doesn't represent the output of others, while understanding this comment that says it keeps track of the output of others?
> Spending doesn't make you rich.
I would argue that being rich doesn't matter at all. We can always print more money. The only part of being rich that matters is the influence your spending represents. Otherwise it's nothing more than numbers in a computer database and has no impact on the world. The fact that the government spends so aggressively is what makes their influence so powerful and scary. Unlike rich individuals, the governments wage war frequently. I would much rather see random people have obscene net worth rather than see major countries grow their military budget, building weapons that are even more efficient at killing poor people in other countries.
> Because there's a limit of how much control over others any single person deserves regardless of what they did.
agreed, that's why it matters so much as to where the money is going when you take it from rich individuals. Giving it the federal government grows their military budget, which the president of the US has complete control over. A single individual with the authority to launch a full-scale invasion tomorrow. Compare that to elon musk or bill gates. Their purchasing influence is infinitesimally small compared to the same money utilized by the federal government.
> sport takes a huge toll on the body and pretty much excludes those people from any useful form of activity for entire span of their career and possibly later only for our grotesque entertainment.
valid argument. I don't agree with it, but I don't find the argument to be inconsistent or without merit.
> How do I reconcile that you agree money doesn't represent the output of others, while understanding this comment that says it keeps track of the output of others?
Simple. If for example government decides to print million dollars and give it to you for no reason then it doesn't represent any economic output of others yet you having it means that you are entitled to acquiring some economic output of others in the future.
Basically you can easily get money by contributing nothing or even by destroying economic value, but this money entitles you to acquiring economic output of someone else. Money is nothing more, nothing less, just a right to useful things people other people (and their machines) do.
> I would argue that being rich doesn't matter at all.
Great, so you don't oppose taking a significant part of wealth of the people that hoard so much of it, right? Since it doesn't matter at all.
> Unlike rich individuals, the governments wage war frequently.
Business literally devastated entire planet, is in the process of acidifying the oceans, raising sea levels, poisoning biosphere, destroying communities, health, lives, all the time. I don't think governments will ever do this much bad (unless WW3 happens). All thanks to unchecked power of having too much money and wanting even more because it's allowed. You seriously underestimate impact of greed and overestimate impact of governments.
> agreed, that's why it matters so much as to where the money is going when you take it from rich individuals
I'm telling you for the third time that it doesn't have to go anywhere. It can be burned as easily as it was printed. And no value is lost. Only the share of influence on the future changes so that the richest loose a bit and every one else gains a bit.
> A single individual with the authority to launch a full-scale invasion tomorrow. Compare that to elon musk or bill gates. Their purchasing influence is infinitesimally small compared to the same money utilized by the federal government.
Small handful of tobacco industry owners cooperate to kill 8 million people each year and they are allowed to do that. It's perfectly legal. Just 10 years of this and you have deathtoll of WW2. I think if a person in power suddenly on a whim decided to kill 8 million people a year there'd be some questions form the electorate.
And that's just a single small industry and only one small group of rich people.
> I can try. Have you ever played competitive sports against a kid? You start to feel bad after a while. Winning comes easy, but you're worried that the kid might hurt themselves in over-exertion. In truth, the kid literally cannot make a decision that will beat you. You're the best. You know this. It's not fair.
If online gaming is any indication, what you are describing is largely not the way the most vocal people feel. It's more generally, "let's actively hunt down little kids to ruthlessly defeat and record it while mocking them so we can make ourselves internet celebrities!" and "if I can't do it myself, at least I can watch this other guy mow down kids with no chance of competing and cheer him on!"
There are exceptions of real skill of course, but those exceptions are what the others are desperately trying to emulate by seeking out weaker opponents. Introspection is going to be a hard sell for those others.
Snowden quit working for the NSA and left the country, and Assange does not appear to be operating Wikileaks anymore. I would imagine that they would both agree that there comes a point where it makes sense to factor consequences into your choices and quit what you are doing.
>> 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?
I don't think it's a relevant comparison, but I do think that particular suggestion should apply to them. Imo a fundamental component of "succeeding" in Western culture is in how quickly you learn which parts of which systems act on perverse incentives or actively against the good of the people, and subsequently being able read the room when there's an opportunity to play hero; sticking your neck out might earn you a smily face sticker next to your obituary, but more likely it'll end up screwing you, and it's naive and/or arrogant to think that this time will be different and you'll singlehandedly rid the ocean of pollution (metaphorically). Realizing that you can't rid the ocean of pollution doesn't mean you should start dumping more trash into it, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't do your civic duty to reduce your personal waste, but it does mean you have to set your ego aside for your own benefit, because in practice and in all likelihood you'll make practically zero or even very negative difference, and put a real tangible target on your back, in whichever context this plays out.
Could be a safety meeting at your company in which you're just a peon and you feel like speaking up about a code violation, could be that you're a young Mr Beast employee that wants to vouch for their co-worker who's making less but doing more, or it could be that you want to make your company's website more accessible, in any case, unless you very clearly have the latitude to do so and control over the outcome, don't, because you'll screw yourself or someone else.
Drive as well as you can in your lane, whatever that means to you, and if you don't like it, signal and change lanes, then do it again.
This also means not overexerting oneself on things that require real tangible sacrifice but have only tenuous, nebulous, or only marginally more financially beneficial outcomes. Don't sacrifice too much time alone or with your partner or family or in nature for shipping yet another arbitrary AI SaaS bs product that will disappear in a week, pick the relevant battles and demand am important outcome, we don't have enough time to squander on such asinine missions. Again, that doesn't mean don't do work, or earn money, or help others, or whatever, just be careful how much of your life you trade for some 1s and 0s.
>Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
No, you make tools which are easily copied and spread which disempower states and groups and instead empower individuals to act unimpeded. You make tools which make it impossible to enforce copyright or any other state imperative because everybody has the tools needed to neutralize the group attempting to use force.
The correct answer is to formulate software and memes (human software) which act as viruses which infect the local carriers of the overall social operating system (in America it is some flavor of American Westernism), turning the original operating system non-functional (Bezmenov's demoralization), and steamroll the reigning technocratic elite off top the tiger and install yourselves, or your StateDAO, or whatever.
When the system is going to take at least a decade, that should be treated as a pending life sentence or execution, and I admire anyone who fights it to the death even. Just don't go in, get housed in concrete, work for $0.68/hour they deduct 75% for housing from and then sell you bricks of Ramen for $1, while dodging shivs from behind. At that point it is too late to act to defend yourself!
You need a year of this treatment if you disagree with me!
Thanks, your response made my day. In practice though it's a lonely and a difficult battle for those who are even remotely capable, most of us or not. Side note: I'd argue that the larger problem is not the state, it the masses who enable them, by their ignorance and stupidity.
The problem is, then they just go after the tools. There’s absolutely nothing stopping one from creating a pirate streaming tool based on e.g. torrents, but popcorntime doesn’t exist precisely because the movie industry frowned intensely at them. The core problem is that the government, if compelled to act, seems able to do whatever it wants to protect rich people’s interests. Cute loopholes like making tools vs sharing content are covered over eventually, hell even links are taken down now by DMCA requests.
Because people don't generally build from the ground up like they're selling fake IDs and cocaine on the darknet. They have no experience, and no understanding on how normal everyday choices and behaviors leave trails which track back to them. When they register a domain, did they use false info? Payment cards well detached from their identities? Do they post code to GitHub with accounts tied to their personal e-mail addresses? Does any normal person sit down like me and think about the ways their true identity can be discovered? "LOL no I'm not selling drugs or snuff so I have nothing to hide nothing to fear! :^)" is the chorus most recited. Ergo, when MPAA lawyers come knocking, they got the dox and they got men with submachine guns and badges on speed dial.
Set it up right and you can thumb your nose at all of them forever.
How is the government wrong? He is being charged with money laundering and wire fraud, both things that require pretty substantial paper trails to prove in court.
I think enough time has passed that I can say this openly: I worked for an ad network that was used by MegaUpload. Most of the traffic from his site was fraudulent bot traffic. Mysterious advertisers would repeatedly rebuy ad placements that were clearly not generating any returns. There was definitely things that didn't add up to the point I would error on the side of believing the government on this one.
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.
Dabbling, sure. But Kim was never a dabbler. He chose to go for ALL the money and the money only, everytime.
Many people seem to forget or not know that all along his career he went ripping off fellow nerds and hackers left and right for his personal gain. He spied on them on his BBS, stole their secrets, defrauded them, ridiculed them, even tipped them off to law enforcement when it was beneficial to him. He proudly admitted to doing all of this in german interviews.
Kim and his endeavours are undoubtedly part of hacking history, but he himself was never part of the culture. He couldn't give a rat's ass about the culture if it weren't to build his legend and bedazzle his followers. All he really ever wanted was cold hard cash, Rolexes and cars.
>Know any decent computer nerds in the 80s/90s that weren’t at least dabbling in that stuff?
I mean, if your definition of decent requires you to be a fraud and a conman, then no.
---
My father, while he certainly pirated a lot of software back in the 90s, wasn't stealing any phone cards, or doing any embezzlement. Presumably, that makes him not decent with computers.
I know zero decent people, computer nerds or not, who engaged in embezzlement. A number of people dabbled in stealing phone services, and some of them probably made some money reselling them, but not to the tune of 60,000 euros — that's definitely career criminal territory.
And, much as it may surprise you, large numbers of "computer nerds" did NOT engage in any unlawful activities.
But your mention of "clot shot" certainly clarifies why you would be simping for a low life POS like Dotcom.
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 it was a file that was already on their servers, they would just make a new download link for it, and the "upload" would finish. Links would be taken down by DMCA notices from forums and other file sharing sites (back then you could get good money making affiliate links and such, so people did a lot of their own uploading). But your private links and links you didn't share would remain. The files remained.
The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. And that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice. This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and convivence for the end user of course; though outside of Linux ISOs there's little question what kind of files people are sharing), screwed him.
Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK. Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him 10... bet he regrets that now.
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.
They can claim that a file is infringing everywhere it exists but they'd often be wrong and I don't think inherently infringing files are a valid way to interpret copyright.
"Better safe than sorry" is certainly, uh, safer. But I don't know if you can really say the DMCA requires it.
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.
They (mega) may have started to do this, but for several years I used to come across saved text files with lists of of mega links on most pedophiles computers.
A different unit in the police sometimes checked the links and anecdotally they still (months after seizure) were valid and contained Child Exploitation Material (CEM). Often the same material stored on the device that I was wading thru. (insert cannot unsee meme)
I am not talking about fakes, I'm talking about photographic documentation of the worst abuse held by offenders either as memories or currency.
So when Mega came under fire I didn't really care that if came from the "copyright" end.
I understand that Mega faced a large task to address this. Not simple. But the fact that CEM was hard for them to sort from the large corpus of "pirated" material seemed like a feature, not a bug. A least from a site design perspective. Selfishly, my sympathy is low in this case. Motivated by my own secondary exposure to some horrible shit as a result of the legal process.
Not 100% sure what your first line means so apologies if I'm telling you something you already know but just want to point out that Twitch is JustinTV. They just rebranded the gaming section of the original site.
No need to apologize. To clarify. I remember when JustinTV was basically 100% illegal (copyrighted) content.
That's how the service that we now know as Twitch built its resilient infra: battle tested with a bunch of teens broadcasting random stuff. No one batted an eye . So i was using JustinTV (Twitch) as an example of piracy that was overlooked, because because someone big had invested in it.
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 we all decide that copyright should exist for a term of life PLUS 70 years? The government does not seek our permission when applying these laws to us yet we have to implicitly sacrifice our freedoms in order to blithely comply with it?
And we all know that the problems with these individuals is not that they committed these crimes, it's that they explicitly called into question this very authority in the first place. That the government then uses this as further justification to destroy these individuals lives, permanently destroy their liberty, and broadcast a chilling effect over anyone who would ever attempt to improve these policies is what inspires people to lionize these figures.
It seems to me you are missing the forest for the tree here.
A society where we have open, legal access to all the cultural pieces of the last century is very different from our own. And it seems difficult to know how it would affect both the consumption, but also the creation of media.
Sometimes, when I argue about this IRL, I'm told that we are practically there because of piracy. But this is a debate of tech enthusiasts, we know how to download, we now how not to get caught. The majority does not
If there were no copyright capitalists would find a way to invent it, so nah. Infringing copyright is just robber baron stuff from a capitalist perspective. A profiteer, maybe, but not a capitalist.
I still do wonder also in the light of Julian Assange why in the age oft the Internet one always need to worried about extradiction. Why cannot New Zealand handle the crimes or maybe Germany where he is citizen. Also in the age of the internet a remote trial should even be possible and if the US is keen on it they can pay for the prison in New Zealand. Not saying I like him or what he did. But this always seems so political.
Yes but he also let his true colours show through when it came to his treatment of New Zealand, as a safe haven to run from the law rather than a home. He wanted to stick his nose into politics and start twisting things using his wealth there too, to the point that many Kiwis couldn't give a shit about what happens to him.
If everyone just sat back and allowed the powers to do what they please, we'd have absolutely nothing in this world. Countless have spilled blood or have been killed over the fight for freedom in the past giving us the humanist open society we have now. The fight is never over.
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 someone's work for free.
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.
Copying scientific ideas (with attribution!) is completely OK and good.
Having heterodox ideas is vital for society.
Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to) is the worst evil.
But making a movie is a commercial enterprise that involves risking a bunch of capital. It rarely pans out to make a profit. Copying it without payment is a very minor form of theft, but it's still theft.
> Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to) is the worst evil.
Like forcing people think that copying is theft? Or that by clicking a button you agree to few hundred page agreement you couldn't possibly read or understand?
Depriving someone of their liberty over interference with a revenue model based on copyright protections is not 1000% in favor of free ideas and free speech.
If the content is a movie created in the last 100 years, it was almost certainly created to slot into that revenue model.
The artists have a right to sell their property on their terms. And if they decide to do so by selling their rights to a studio, then that's how it is. And if you don't like corporations, contracts, or the revenue model, then that's completely irrelevant to the parties involved.
You could add restrictions to anything to create business models. Doesn't mean it's natural and helpful to society. The vast majority of movies are tripe and provide no real value to humanity. And the vast majority of revenue go to a few executives and middlemen rather than the artists. The fact that this regime exists now is not proof that it is a good thing - that's circular logic.
Not all stipulations sellers place on items are legal. For example, I cannot sell you a scooter with the stipulation that if I need a kidney, you'll have to donate one to me.
Furthermore, what is and isn't legal is a product of the legislature and the judiciary. Let's not forget that people write laws and interpret laws. They aren't some function of the cosmic order, though it's convenient to posture them as if they were.
When someone "has the right," it's because a group of people gave it to them, and anything that can be given, can be taken away. The fact that we forget this reality is a massive collective hallucination. Once you know how the hallucination works, it's hard to buy into it ever again.
TLDR; The arrow of implication doesn't go from reality -> laws. It goes from laws -> reality.
This is an interesting argument but at the moment the laws say piracy is illegal. And they do so in a way that is super reasonable, no kidneys involved.
The pirated works were created under this understanding of the rules.
In other words, movies and games were financed and made at great expense and effort with a view to selling copies and tickets and making money off of VHS rentals / Netflix streaming. Piracy is a clear subversion of this, and by the way, if it became mainstream, would break the industry that creates some of the things we like.
While the law isn't part of some cosmic order, there's nothing written in the stars that entitles you to every creation of every other person, at your convenience, for free.
Definitely. It's good to point out that these discussions often co-mingle two topics: "What should happen given these laws?" and "What should these laws be?"
I'm glad there's room for both and the gray areas in between.
Do we, for example, have an obligation to those who play by laws we believe to be unjust?
It's not theft in any sense of the word. Please stop reporting this misinformation ASAP.
If movie productions were so concerned about profit, maybe they should stop all the Hollywood accounting nonsense.
The industry has just made several films surpassing a billion dollars. The industry is absolute fine. And someone downloading Deadpool isn't stealing or doing any harm to that industry.
I hope that one day metal 3D printing becomes cheap, advanced, reliable and widespread. I hope you design an amazing epic car, the best ever, which everyone suddenly begins downloading, 3D printing, and driving around here or there. Only then would you know the pain of having your car downloaded, I put that pain on you.
I do create and publish content, I just haven't drunk the kool-aid that makes me think I'm entitled to a set amount of money for every copy consumed.
If people want to pay for it they will, and if they don't they won't. If I don't have enough talent to make a lot of money from my work, then that's the only reason - not piracy.
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?
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.
it's very simple. trying to apply the concept of property to information is unnatural and has hindered human progress more than it has helped. Information is not like physical property, which is limited in supply. In fact it doesn't even really exist. To tell me that having the atoms on MY hard drive or MY ink molecules on MY paper arranged in a certain pattern is absurd. I'm not depriving anyone of anything by doing this. I am the one being deprived by not being allowed to arrange them how I wish.
To try to own information is like trying to own a flame. I lit your candle with my candle, so I own the flame on your candle. Making a copy is the same. To claim you own the copy is just plain stupid.
Information can be any collection of bits. You can copy these easily and almost for free.
But almost nobody cares about information in the abstract. I'm talking about specific, artful arrangements of bits. Lots of effort goes into making sequences of bits. (we can give our sequence of bits names like "The Lion King" or "Windows 98"). You only want a copy of these bits because of the effort that went into it.
Of course nobody can control how you flip the bits on your hard drive in practice, but that's missing the point. It's a particular arrangement of bits that you find entertaining or informative or useful, somebody put a lot of work into making it that way, and it's this creative effort that you end up enjoying and paying for, not the actual bits.
And of course you are depriving the artists of something - a royalty payment. The art was likely created with a view to that royalty payment. Which is why you want to pirate it in the first place. You want to enjoy the creative work without having to shell out for it.
You can come up with elaborate arguments about information theory, but in the end this is what it comes down to - pirates want other people to create value for them, for free, and will howl about "corporations" and "information wants to be free" to try and justify it.
How much effort they went into selecting that particular set of bits is of no consequence to the state afterward. If someone made a million dollar machine that lights a flame, it does not make subsequent flames lit from the original flame any more valuable. Same goes for air or water, which are all deadly important, but as they are also virtually infinite in supply, they have no cost. Nestle is of course trying to change that with water.
I don't owe artists any royalties just because they say so. If they demand a kiss they won't get it either. I won't be bound by arbitrary restrictions around the physical matter in my possession.
> I don't owe artists any royalties just because they say so. If they demand a kiss they won't get it either. I won't be bound by arbitrary restrictions around the physical matter in my possession.
There's a lot of "me me me" in this. If you want to live in a lawless society where morality revolves only around what is physically possible, that might be possible on some remote island; but don't be surprised if nobody on that island bothers to build any million dollar flame-lighting machines for your benefit.
I don't know, Kim Dotcom's Wikipedia page reads like the one of sociopath criminal that masquerades as a fighter of the people against "the man". But the dude has done some real illegal shit, beyond "just" illegal file sharing. Some examples, but go read his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom
> Schmitz was arrested in March 1994 for selling stolen phone numbers and held in custody for a month. He was arrested again in 1998 on more hacking charges and convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud and 10 counts of data espionage. He was given a two-year suspended sentence; the judge of the case described Schmitz's actions as "youthful foolishness".
> In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump,resulting in a €1.5 million profit for Schmitz.
Also, that he used many of these things to enrich himself and live a lavish lifestyle does not exactly make him more likeable to me.
>In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump,resulting in a €1.5 million profit for Schmitz.
This is just _dumb money_. Also I dont see how this is different to many crypto marketeers today.
No he no longer runs it, and no longer is involved with it, and does not own any shares in it anymore.
He started it as an improved successor to megaupload, but something shady happened about 2015ish with a Chinese investment firm doing some kind of hostile takeover.
only in the avenues you continue to inhabit. New aventues that you dont are flourishing with the same human spirit to work around paying for things that have persisted forever
The Kim Dotcom case is the primary reason why I decided a long time ago to never host any content or website on US servers, no matter how legal I believe it is and how much we comply with copyright law.
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 property, but the potential extra profit they could have made if they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and distribute their work.
Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their property. Copyright infringement is illegal because (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less incentivized to create things because they won't be able to profit as much.
This. The phrase "intellectual property" is an attempt to confuse a censorship strategy that's a few hundred years old with an entirely separate tradition that's been with us for millennia. They're very different, whatever words you use for them.
And then you have the people who say that language changes based on usage. Get enough people calling it property, theft, stealing, irregardless, etc. and then you can change the dictionary.
It this case revenue or profit was stolen just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.
Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
a : the act of stealing
specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to
deprive the rightful owner of it
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Revenue or profit where not stolen because they weren't there in the first place to take. There's potential revenue, but it's not there to be stolen yet.
> [...] just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.
Please assume good faith when discussing here. I personally don't think that the concept called "wage theft" is actual theft, for the same reasons I don't think copyright violations are theft. In fact, I don't think I ever used that term anywhere, in this thread or in the past. So please don't attribute to me thoughts that I didn't express.
> You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Why does the fact that something is or isn't theft imply whether or not it is immoral? A lot of things are immoral but aren't theft.
There was no revenue or profit stolen. The copyright holder had an exclusive license (a legal monopoly) to copy/sell/distribute their work, which is essentially a legal contract we've all agreed to as a society. The copyright infringer is guilty of violating the terms of that agreement. But violating terms and theft are not the same thing.
> Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Sure, that offends my moral sensibilities. But it's still not theft.
That said, I think it's a gray area.
Let's say you develop a recipe and start cooking it for people. Perhaps you're the first person to ever make chicken parmigiana. Then I copy that recipe and start my own restaurant that sells chicken parmigiana. Does that feel immoral to you? Probably not, because we've grown up in a world where (due to arbitrary cultural traditions) we're okay with "stealing" creative food recipes but not creative musical or story elements.
My personal moral intuition is that, the more complex a creation gets, the more I feel it's immoral to copy it. For example I'm less upset at someone who copies a riff from a song, or at someone who writes fan fiction, than I am at someone who copies a book wholesale and tries to pass it off as their own.
> 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.
Well they've been arguing over that in various court for over ten years. They didn't just charge him with copyright infringement which itself would probably not be extraditable:
>..charged in 2012 with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.
Often with US law enforcement where there's a will there's a way even if it doesn't strictly stick to normal legal practices. See also Assange, and if you read Howard Marks book Mr Nice there's another example of where they got him in an unconventional way. Plus of course a variety of drone assassinations.
He has US victims though. Fraudsters aren't absolved of responsibility in the USA just because they operate outside the border, and the same can be true of other crimes.
is US intellectual property a national security issue? I don't understand why they went to such extent pursuing a man for simply running a piracy site
meanwhile US is losing influence and trust on geopolitical stage, shouldn't that be the bigger issue
edit: im being rate limited so heres my response to comment below:
I didn't say anybody was replacing US, merely they are losing credibility and prestige on world stage and this isn't recent and not slowing down.
I don't think any country will be able to replace US and its freedom of maritime navigation anytime soon.
China is in no position to project as its undergoing internal turmoil. Neither is Russia. BRICS also won't offer much.
One potential non-zero chance scenario is the northern artic sea routes opening up due to rising temperatures melting ice bypassing the need to route through singapore and suez canal which would put Russia back on the power map.
US is a hyperpower and there is no equal.
Maybe a unified Korea with extended northern manchuria territories can fill the vacuum left by China and Russia in the region. I don't really see any other candidates.
One of the reasons the US is viewed as such a good place to start a business is that the country will go to bat for their (favored) businesses internationally.
National security is very far from the only scenario where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for better or worse.
In addition to copyright infringement, the charges are conspiracy, racketeering and money laundering, and presumably the evidence is strong. He has a long history of criminal activity, including embezzlement, selling personal information and trying to run a fake investment firm out of Hong Kong, after which he fled to New Zealand.
> 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 their own population.
It really IS though. I am both a NZ and US citizen, and I am well aware that the Bretton Woods Accord is alive and well (although I agree with Peter Zeihan that its days are numbered).
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.
Being based in a foreign country doesn't mean you aren't committing a crime. Cyber criminals, drug traffickers, money launders, etc are all still on the hook even though they operate in a different country.
Also what he was doing is also a crime in NZ otherwise he wouldn't be extradited.
>> this is a fight against america playing world police
That is how Dotcom wants it characterized. Everyone else sees a fly-by-night website run by an eccentric millionaire making money by playing fast and loose with the law. It is one thing to be an outlaw subverting oppression by distributing free bread to poor people. It is another to be a bootlegger selling vodka under the table and then throwing huge invite-only parties with the profits.
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 to provide the fair trial part, but if we're trying to compare your situation to what Kim Dotcom is going through, it's a question we have to answer. I'd much rather take my chances in a US courtroom than a PRC courtroom.
> 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.
> 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".
Unlikely. He'll probably be sentenced to a minimum/low/medium-security prison facility/farm. Over 80% of American federal inmates are in a facility meeting one of those classifications [1].
The federal sentence (using that for comparison since the federal government carries out IP law in the US) for first-degree murder in the US is either life in prison or death by lethal injection. Dotcom is exceedingly unlikely to spend the rest of his life in prison and is obviously not eligible for the death penalty. He'd probably be looking at a decade or two at most. Obviously, that sucks for him, but your assertion that he'll be treated worse than murderers and be SA'd regularly in a prison housing violent inmates is simply not true.
They will pile so many charges on Kim that the total sentence will be in excess of a century. He will never get out. In federal sentencing guidelines, second degree murder (not premeditated) doesn't guarantee a life sentence. What I said is absolutely true.
Countries extradite criminals all the time for crimes done here or there or anywhere, its just that US stands above literally everybody else, or at least wants to, so its not an equal situation and never was.
This is underlined by other US excesses, ie [1] or the fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other states, but there are very few US citizens detained elsewhere (in democratic systems, not used for some political deals).
[1] "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody. The antithesis of fairness and basic human equality rights.
>the fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other states, but there are very few US citizens detained elsewhere
Americans commit exceedingly little crime internationally. Even in ultra-low crime countries, US citizens rank below native citizens per capita. That is probably why.
Ratifying the rome statute in the US would be unconstitutional because it violates the sixth amendment right of american servicemembers to a jury trial.
I applaud the USA for fiercely defending its citizens' rights, even against the governments of other countries.
NZ and US have a bunch of shared laws, trade and extradition agreements and stuff. It's not like US dropped in and snatched Dotcom without any NZ cooperation. Not world police, just boring international justice.
Does their size make the moral situation any different?
Many of these are public companies that anyone can buy shares in. Tons of people have part of their life savings in US stocks - these people all own a slice of the rights to various works of art.
Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it, it's OK to ignore their rights?
As an aside, here's a list of public companies [0]. 7-8 of them are "trillion dollar companies", and only one (Apple) has a stake in media (that I know of) and that's a very minor part of their business. The media business is not a very good one to be in.
> Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it, it's OK to ignore their rights?
Let's not pretend these companies give the slightest hint of a shit about morality. They'd destroy the world next year if it meant they could earn a penny more of profit this quarter.
As long as companies like Disney are pulling moves like this [1], I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if these companies are in the right.
The only reason Dotcom (a non-US individual with 0 ties to the US in any way that should matter) is being extradited is because US politicians are pathetically cheap and easy to buy off, and Disney and all the other big media companies have infinite coffers with which to do so, not because of some vague bullshit about morality or property rights.
Are you morally perfect? No? Do you still have legal rights and ownership of things despite that?
It's like that for companies. It doesn't matter if Disney sucks in many ways, if they own something, they own it.
If you think this is vague bullshit, then I'd invite you to read up on how societies tend to work without it. Even communist China instituted reforms and amendments in recent decades cementing the concept of private property ownership.
And Dotcom does have a tie to the US that he willingly and knowingly created: he committed a crime against their citizens and companies.
Do they? I know for sure nobody in my circle of friends cares in the slightest if people pirate media from huge companies.
I don't think anyone other than Disney shareholders gives an iota of a damn if others pirate movies/shows/music from the big guys. And I especially don't think most people would seek extradition for a guy who hosted a piracy website, especially, that's the type of thing psychopathic execs and their ilk seem to be into. Especially someone who's not even a US citizen or has any affiliation with the US.
Also, keep in mind we're talking companies like Disney here, who are currently fighting a legal battle [1] because someone died due to their negligence and using the argument that agreeing to the T&C of their streaming service absolves them of wrongdoing in a person's death.
So yeah, don't expect anyone to feel sorry for the plight of the poor soulless megacorporation here, they'd destroy the earth if it made them half a nickel more in yearly profits.
Nice strawman on the TOC, but there are _plenty_ of people whose jobs rely on intellectual property protections. I know people who have developed recipes and sold the publishing rights to them. Artists copyright their work to prevent it from being copied outright. Even FLOSS is based in intellectual property protections: if someone charges you for access to the Linux kernel source code, they've effectively done the inverse of what Kim Dotcom did, but it's still against the license to do so.
Again, you can make the argument that these protections are too broad or too durable, but it's not in anyone's best interest for intellectual works to be unprotectable under law.
Trust me, we’re sick and tired of being the world police but the reality is that no one else can do it and the alternative apparently is letting every murderous autocrat and tin-pot dictator run amok.
Totally fair point, but what can you do? This is how the world works. Fighting such beasts is pointless. You might tame them with lobby money, but no billionaire is interested. And we're now talking about the human spirit that cannot be chained, as also seen in Pirate Bay or Snowden. Sure, people do need heroes and hope from time to time. But I have become less romantic over the years, and more careful.
You can adapt and fit in to the establishment, and I wouldn't suggest any moral problem with it. We definitely need stability - the raising of children requires it, trappings like clubs and societies and clean streets are great, but I think the spirit of mavericks like Kim is much more 'right' about something that institutions will always miss.
I can't celebrate this at all, and I am never sympathising with legal thuggery. It is just naked power exerting itself and it will always be ugly.
While it's true the copyright lobby tried to make an example out of kim, it is completely useless in stopping piracy nor any form of copyright infringement that will inevitably continue to happen.
> It is just naked power exerting itself
and it's a relatively minor showing of it. Compare it to direct assasination of foreign nationals (of which both the US as well as russia has done). The chinese stationing covert forces to try to police their migrant nationals overseas (spy stuff basically), or if what snowden leaked is as widespread is it is alleged, the amount of hoovering of information and surveillance that exists!
A lot of the best things we have in the modern world are "socialism". Libraries and parks are socialist. Socialism isn't a dirty word, nor is it an argument or a criticism.
This is why definition of terms is so important in discussions of this type. The word socialism/socialist has been bastardized and propagandized beyond comprehension now. Socialism covers a broad range of potential policies and structures, but in modern discourse the average person seems to slot it in almost exclusively to mean government tyranny and communism. Meanwhile communism now seems to mean evil beyond any consideration.
Is there somewhere I can read more about it? Because there are democratic socialist countries doing quite well (especially in Scandinavia), and autocracies of all kinds doing poorly (like Venezuela).
Contrary to popular myth, the model socialist Scandinavian country, Sweden, is not socialist. [0]
They were more socialist in the 1970s, when the country suffered greatly under the socialist government. Popular writer Astrid Lindgren was taxed 102% of her income at one point. [1]
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 peaked in 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again. Also, the entertainment industry are not multi-trillion dollar conglomerates. Not even close. Disney is worth $160B and Netflix is $260B.
That being said, if it were up to the music industry we'd still be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 for an album we only like one song on and we wouldn't be able to create out own playlists. You can only fight the consumer for so long (and they fought long and hard). That's to say nothing about the morality of repeatedly increasing copyright from 14 years to life plus 70 (which is BS). The Beatles' great great grandchildren (or whoever owns the rights later on) shouldn't still be benefiting from intellectual property.
> 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.
This is what rule of law is. KDC knew he was breaking the law and not only didn't do anything about it, but invested in an encouraged it to benefit himself financially. Even after being charged and having megaupload shut down, he then tried again. Do you really feel sorry for him?
> > 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Oh, I 100% agree that IP laws are too strong and last too long, which allows media companies to charge too much and stifle competition.
It actually also hurts the content creators themselves. The music industry spent too much time fighting "internet distributed" music and the only alternatives they pieced together were too restrictive to the way people actually consumed music. "Want to listen on more than one device? Pay multiple times!" was their attempt back in the day.
Here's your evidence: I would have bought House on DVD 15 years ago if there hadn't been the option to stream it illegally.
You might object this evidence by telling me that you bought all seasons of House only because you had been streaming it illegally before, and that you wouldn't have done so without previously streaming it – but in most jurisdictions, this kind of "business procurement" does not cancel out the harm done in the first case.
Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me not buying it is on you.
I think what they are saying is there is no way to compare a good when it's free to when there is even a nominal cost.
My "counter evidence" to your example could be something like: I bought House on DVD 10 years ago because my friend who had pirated it told me it was a good show to checkout.
There is no harm done in the first case. You say you would have bought House if you couldn't have streamed it, but I say that's nonsense. If you didn't want to pay for it you would have borrowed it from a library or a friend.
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.
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. Those people are sharing a smaller pie than they used to before Internet piracy devalued their music.
In your opinion it's tyrannical. Sure, most certainly a non-violent crime against a wealthy corporation isn't on the same level as murder or assault. At the same time, copyright infringement is conceptually not that different from property crime.
You would want the police to arrest someone who broke into your home and stole your movie collection.
You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own website.
It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
Don't forget that Megaupload was specifically designed to enable piracy and discourage other uses of the technology. It wasn't a file storage service that could be used for legitimate personal use because unpopular downloads would be deleted. The company actually paid people via an incentive program to upload popular files that were copyright infringing. This wasn't just "YouTube is bad at playing whack-a-mole with DMCA claims," this was a company that was responsible for something like 4% of all Internet piracy all by itself and actively encouraged it.
It's not like they were a company that didn't have access to lawyers who could warn them not to do what they did. Kim deserves his fate because his own hubris invited it.
> You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own website.
> It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
For many (if not most?) software businesses nowadays, the code itself holds little intrinsic value. If someone were to steal my SaaS code, it's unlikely they could deploy it and sell a similar product. The value of my business lies in its domain expertise, not in the code being a trade secret. Many internal projects aren't open-source simply because opening them to the public would require significant maintenance. Otherwise, there would be no issue in sharing the code, as much of what's built today is based on open-source projects.
Similarly, if I'm selling an application and its code is leaked, people would still prefer to install it from the app store. Few would go through the trouble of compiling the code and deploying a "hacked" version.
This contrasts with the 80s and 90s, when illegal copies of floppy disks and CDs posed a significant issue for some software businesses. However, times have changed. Nowadays, people prefer to pay for the support of a SaaS or the convenience of installing an app from a store, complete with updates.
There are exceptions, but I believe most software engineers don't work on projects where the code itself has significant value that needs to be protected by copyright laws.
The situation with music is somewhat similar. People have stopped buying physical media because it's no longer practical. Even those who collect CDs, vinyl, or tapes typically use streaming platforms for most of their music consumption.
No, but piracy didn't stop being the #1 way to obtain digital music until streaming offered a convenient alternative. Streaming was essentially forced into existence by the wild rampancy and ease of music piracy.
You really think if Spotify came along in 1998 that all the major record labels would agree to give them their entire catalog for $10 a month? Back then they were selling a single CD for around $20.
Every good stereo from the 80s and 90s had two tape-decks, one of which could record from any other signal source on the stereo. It wasn't so you could play two tapes over the speakers...
Piracy existed a LONG time before Napster hit the scene.
Streaming was forced into existence by the invention of digital media. The ~20 years between the point where could stream and the point where we did stream seems in retrospect to be an artifact of having an entrenched industry clinging desperately to the concept of music as a physical product.
I mean... they did (basically) give access to their entire catalog to radio stations for even less than that.. but I almost sound like a troll mentioning it.
>> 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 use like the camera's they use to film said movies.
ALL of those people? Their employment DEPENDS on movie studio's and the work they do to keep them gainfully employed. When you pirate movies you're not taking money out of the faceless multi-trillion entertainment companies, you're taking money out of the people's pocket who are integral part of creating the movies and shows you watch and who's livelihood depends on their continued employment by those companies.
Take a studio like New Line who put out the Lord of the Rings movies and was wildly successful until a series of flops effectively closed the studio:
From 'Nightmare on Elm Street' to 'Lord of the Rings', New Line Cinema created some of Hollywood's most influential blockbusters. But now its 40-year history is in tatters following a string of big-budget box-office flops.
Actually, if you’re not buying movies and TV, the money comes out of producers pockets, not the tradespeople. They never get residuals. The case you point to is about box office flops, which, again, come far after tradespeople have cashed their last check from a production. People made stinkers every year even before pirating and past performance does not guarantee future success.
Also, I would consider pirating a perfectly valid protest of what producers have done over the last two years, dragging their feet to break the backs of unions in advance of negotiations. Hollywood, Atlanta, New Orleans, NY, all filming far less over the last two years due to producer’s greed and hope that they can enjoy these pesky trades entirely by automation and AI. This has done more damage to tradespeople than pirating ever did.
Fortunately, it’s pretty clear that it will not be feasible to make a coherent movie or TV show via AI in the near term. Hopefully consumers vote with their wallets too and don’t buy or stream any content that is made without trades.
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.
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.
What's going on here? A new account, attracting several comments about a controversial figure. I'm not convinced the parent comment is actually bringing much to the party, yet it's getting traffic.
How do online communities discuss controversial subjects while ensuring good-faith participation?
I’m not sure what this comment brings to the table either, I mean are you really saying their opinion is invalid because they’re new / haven’t “put enough time in”? That doesn’t seem very fair.
I don’t think newcomers should be excluded from conversations…what’s the requirement; 12, 24, 48 months? Who determines that? Account age isn’t the best indicator of good-faith participation (accounts can be hacked, bought, etc.).
Instead engage with the content itself and where it comes from to determine if it seems to be in “good-faith”. Ironically, writing off someone’s opinion based on a single (potentially unrelated) fact is probably “bad-faith”.
HN has moderators that track things like that and can see where the upvotes are coming from and determine if the attention is genuine. If you're concerned, the correct approach is to email them about it, not post vague accusations of astroturfing.
From the guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
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 totally impracticable to pirate.
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.
> 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 company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.
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.
This is what I am talking about. "There's no [practicable] alternative" is possible with the level of lock in and vertical integration that Apple has. Whereas PC manufacturers cannot really charge so much for storage and RAM, because you can upgrade.
> 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.
I am sure if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well. Thats the evidence against Kim Dotcom, emails.
Funny you should say that, because there are literally such emails all the way up to Google's C-suite. They leaked a few years ago when Viacom sued them for mass copyright infringement on Youtube. In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted?
>Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom show that many top Googlers — all the way up to co-founder Sergey Brin — were concerned about YouTube’s copyright piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google’s ethics.
>[...]
>Google executives — who previously had referred to YouTube as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” — nevertheless agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006.
In its filings in U.S. District Court in New York, YouTube said that Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central and other entertainment properties, secretly tried to use YouTube’s popularity to promote its content, posting “roughed up” videos to make them look stolen or leaked, and even sending employees to Kinko’s to upload clips that couldn’t be traced back to Viacom.
> In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted?
I mean it's actually a pretty good argument.
If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be expected to police it?
> [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission."
---
Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10 times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other links would still let you download that file.
It's actually a hideous argument. You could make tons of money with any service platform by bypassing all copyright that way. The only interesting thing here is that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it. If held to the same standard, they would have to face the same repercussions.
> You could make tons of money with any service platform by bypassing all copyright that way.
Only if copyright holders voluntarily upload their content in a complete crazy manor. Otherwise the argument doesn't work since uh the copyright holder can easily identify which uploads were infringing.
> The only interesting thing here is that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it.
Lawsuit is public record, feel free to link to those emails.
---
Also from reading the lawsuit, Google removed the content in question.
To quote the case.
> [1] This case concerns the alleged infringement of a closed universe of
videos posted on YouTube at various times between 2005 and 2008. As
this Court explained, “only the current clips-in-suit are at issue in this
litigation.” SPA54. All those clips were removed from YouTube years
ago. SPA45 n.7.
Viacom originally claimed that hundreds of thousands of YouTube
videos infringed its copyrights, but ultimately identified approximately
63,000 clips-in-suit. JAXIII:3135(¶¶6-7). It turned out, however, that
Viacom’s own employees and agents had actually uploaded many of those clips. JAIX:2213-14(¶¶150-152); JAXIII:3135-36(¶¶8-11);
JAXXII:5745-46(¶¶1.63); JAXXIII:5973-75. Even when it realized that
fact (after years of litigation), Viacom and its lawyers still were unable
to identify all the clips-in-suit that Viacom was responsible for posting.
JAXXII:5717-20(¶127), 5544-46(¶11). Many clips-in-suit, moreover, are
identical to or indistinguishable from promotional clips that Viacom
now acknowledges uploading.
The non-court filings are way more accusatory but should really stick the court filings for matters of fact.
> [2] It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.
> [2] Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
>It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked.
Did it occur to you why they did that? Perhaps to make them appear legit on a service that was well known for piracy in the first place? The big difference here is that megaupload was not as popular as youtube among normies. So they didn't bother to leak there. Or maybe they did, and we just don't know yet. Dotcom could still come up with the same defense in the coming trials and it would be hilarious. Especially since there is research that show that piracy can boost media. So if Viacom didn't do it, someone else certainly did. The double standard is very real.
No need to for speculation. Viacom can explain their own behavior which they never do and just admit it happened and they also later informed YouTube about it the next day.
> The double standard is very real.
Maybe go read the lawsuits. Reading poorly summarized (or not even summarized) content of it is really not going to show the differences.
No one is speculating here. Read the discussion again. The argument was literally "if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well"
That is blatantly false. No need to sugarcoat this.
If it's so blatantly false why can't you quote the emails? It's not like they're not publicly available in the lawsuits.
You're conflating emails from Google Videos with YouTube ... Those are separate products and at one point even competitors. That would be like using emails sent amongst Trump staffers to prosecute Joe Biden for treason.
One big (alleged) difference that many folks skip over when mentioning YouTube is that Kim actively and not very secretly recruited pirates to upload known pirated stuff. YouTube may have done a crap job at preventing privacy but they weren't actively soliciting pirates and paying them.
More than that. They gave the media basically a tool to identify music that they owned, then either remove it or take all the money from it.
I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored content or product placement stuff in music videos).
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)
Spotify too (allegedly) had bunch of pirated content to bootstrap the service. I guess the difference is that they (and YouTube) tried to pivot away from it, compared to Megaupload which seemed to have leaned into it instead.
Nope, I'm sure I'm thinking of Spotify. Grooveshark, AFAIK, didn't try to pivot and instead later got shutdown, compared to Spotify which seemed to have been able to navigate the pivot.
> When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay.
> Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.
Yeah, I remember in the early days, when I installed Spotify it would scan my computer for music and upload everything it found. I imagine this is basically how they bootstrapped
I heard stories of how Spotify used to have obscure death metal records the staff would rip, but which were gone by the time the service gained traction.
For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips of things were popular and there were things split between many videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me using youtube for.
In my social groups at the time(late highschool, early college) it was exclusively used for watching TV shows. The 10min limit was only a minor annoyance, and more than made up for the fact that it was free fast video hosting at time when that was extremely rare.
It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked down on TV content.
As a former megavideo user… i watched many American tv shows I wouldn’t have watched otherwise. And i wouldn’t have paid anyway because at the time as a teenager i had no money of my own to spend.
Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like extortion, it’s unfair anyway (prices constantly increasing, and you still get ads even if you’re paying… might as well go back to pirating stuff)
They have license and royalty agreements with labels now and takedown methods for rights holders who object to things as well as quite capable detection machinery.
I work in this space and there is still a ton of illegal content on YT. As stated earlier, the main difference is that YT complies when infringements are eventually found.
Kim was a maverick, and his political connections were weak and easy to break. If you don't have the connections, you shouldn't be playing such a dangerous game.
My original youtube channel was basically just funneling split up episodes of Daily show & Colbert Report directly onto it. Would get about 100,000 views a day until they started cutting down.
Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put everything up in chunks and at the time there weren't many super user friendly options to download them as a batch. You'd often enough have things where one part would eventually be missing and that'd ruin the whole thing.
For tv shows it could be okay but for films once you're dealing with 10+ parts, often without knowledge of playlists, it'd get grating fast.
Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo
Salty hot-take but not grounded in reality if you remember or look back on the facts. He actively encouraged piracy, of whioch there is ample proof, then doubled-down on this, then tried to frame his own take on "following the rules" - all while continuing to poke the bear. We can debate what the laws and punishements should be, but he's about to feel justice in many different forms.
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.
One of the cool things that lawyers do is that they advise you on how you can comply with the law and avoid such pesky things as “imprisonment” and “extradition”.
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 a primary school sleight.
The US look like an ass because the law they're seemingly-autistically pursuing, is an ass.
Pragmatism has no place here, it would seem.
Also, downloading from Mega will get you a (partial at least) red flag from intelligence / law enforcement.
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 drop, and KDC is lucky it was just lawyers.
You have to look at this through the eyes of the government and how it conducts foreign policy, often over long spans of time, with the goals of expanding and defending American interests - which includes protecting industries.
I think this is a good take. Much of the commentary here has been on the morality or otherwise of copyright infringement, proportional legal response and extraterritorial reach. All topics of interest, certainly, but clouding the real story here.
This is foreign policy, and the US has pursued control of copyright distribution, globally, for a very long time. Being from Australia, I remember the sense of disquiet as our copyright laws were modified as part of trade deals with the US. Many other nations (perhaps most?) have done the same (whether the law changes were pushed via the US directly or through UN related bodies is largely irrelevant). You combine that with the extremely tight coupling of large corporate bodies and the US government, and US foreign policy looks like authoritarianism.
So I agree that what we see with these extreme examples of “Kim dotcom” and “Assange” extraditions are part of a broader foreign policy strategy. Where I disagree with your post is the statement “American interests”. To me, the interests served are the conglomerate of political and corporate powers, which may be at odds with the average US citizen.
> To me, the interests served are the conglomerate of political and corporate powers, which may be at odds with the average US citizen.
That's a fair criticism, and thank you for the insightful comment that I think gets at what I was talking about. I think at the heart of it is the question of whether what's good for American industry is good for the American people, and that question almost never has a good answer.
I have complicated feelings about this issue, because on the one hand, I have experience working with these media organizations and I can tell you they are extremely adverse to change and would prefer dumping money into legal battles than even consider innovating. They will always be dragged kicking and screaming into doing it. And the pressure that piracy put onto the industry did lead to some innovation that was for the better. No example is better than early Hulu, which was an industry collaboration, and at its heart was an admission of failure of legacy business practices to put television and later film on the internet for free (and then later, for a price).
On the other hand, entertainment is an extremely important American industry. It's one of our chief exports and a source of soft power. It gets people around the world to learn English without us shipping teachers to foreign countries, it teaches Americanisms to people who've never visited the country, and helps influence not only the perception of America but allows us to export American values to countries that don't have them (whether or not that's good or moral is up to you to decide). Those are all good things for the American people when we're exporting or importing anything else, and in the globalized economy that's the kind of soft power that has second order effects on every other industry.
When that industry is threatened and they can point to a specific foreign actor that is maliciously targeting them and making it harder for the industry to operate efficiently, then yea, it makes sense for the government to bring down the heaviest hammer they possibly can and flex their hegemony on allies to put an end to it. And in terms of pragmatism, it's easier to shut off the threat at the source than to deal with the effects domestically while suffering those internationally.
This is an antiquated example, but it's why the government invaded Tripoli in the early 19th century. America was dependent on exports of their goods to Europe, and Barbary pirates threatened that. So instead of just accepting what happens overseas, they joined with Sweden and sent naval squadrons and marines to force the state of Tripolitania to enforce peace (through war). You could say that was some conglomerate of political and corporate powers with exporters, but at the end of the day it was crucial for the fledgling state to make others understand they shouldn't mess with American ships at sea. And it's something we do to this day, by putting naval forces on major shipping routes and effectively destroying piracy as an institution. And we, the American people, get lower prices and higher profits as a result.
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.
Mega succeeded Megaupload and together they operated freely for almost two decades. I think we can conclusively say they were not a threat to US industries.
The only threat that movies/music industry face are divided attention and changing tastes, it’s not pirating. They don’t want to face the reality of their situation and improve their products; people like twitch, YouTube, social media, TikTok, etc just as much as going to the movies or watching cable television or listening to Spotify.
All problems smooth away the moment some based brogrammer chad puts in a pull request on a clone of Hyphanet's Opennet (call it Onionnet), and just swap out all the IP address variables for .onion address variables and clean things up.
Literally. I might do it myself even and I hardly know how to terminate a C string! Nationstates are going to love me dicking with the code...
Ah, so it's not because of the piracy but because of the privacy?
I remember a quote (from close to 20 years ago?) that anyone who uses GPG lights up on NSA's radar "like Christmas lights". This seems to be the same thing.
Source for the final claim? Is this still the case? Shit Man I distributed a dataset via megaupload for a paper awhile ago. Am I now a target of the glowies?
Re: source.
Hopefully I'm consistent, you can go back through my comment history. I was raided by the police a bit over two years ago. When I got my stuff back (8 months later, no charges) the lead detective said that there was evidence I'd downloaded things from Mega, and that this was "suspicious", amongst a couple of other things.
I got the feeling she thought I was still guilty and had somehow managed to get away with the distribution of which I was suspected (or it was some kind of retro justification for gross violation of my rights and she was taking a front foot stance to minimise the chances I'd see what legal avenues are available in such situations - turns out very few to none).
She specifically mentioned as suspicious:
- history of downloading from MEGA
- using virtual machines
- having "tor" installed.
Interesting combination of cluelessness (wait until they're introduced to containers!). MEGA somewhat stands out in that bunch, in that there are lots of similar services as far as I know. Makes me wonder if it's a honeypot (but maybe not, because then they'd know the only thing I downloaded from MEGA was android ROMs).
Other than being outspoken on certain topics online, my browsing history is as boring as the next guy's. So I really think they put some weight behind MEGA activity.
Does that mean usage of all file lockers are equally flagged as suspicious?
My memory gets a bit patchy here, but I'm pretty sure the detective said something along the lines of "MEGA is only ever used for <thing I was accused of>". Which struck me as blatantly false and indicative of either an agenda or incompetence.
And I tend to subscribe to Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hearsay, but I hear (and say) they basically got netflow and hell many ISPs are selling it and at least one firm exists re-correlating it back to users. Now mix networks are going to need to start being set to X GB/day and then uniformly emit traffic regardless if legit or padding. Also say goodbye to low latency.
I think Hyphanet or IPFS or the like with fixed and padded bandwidth links will be the next step in privacy. Again, there are consumer ISPs selling netflow data!
Seems like a terrible experience, especially the "use of virtual machines" being flagged as suspicious considering what a benign and widespread tool that is.
Here's a thought experiment for you: if you were raped, would you want the government to give up prosecuting your rapist just because 10 or 15 years passed before they could locate them?
I'm not saying that this crime is on the same level, but Megaupload was at one time responsible for 4% of the entire Internet's piracy activity. And it wasn't a non-profit peer-to-peer file sharing community like The Pirate Bay or anything like that, it was a for-profit corporation directly profiting from stolen IP. Kim built himself a gigantic mansion off of other people's work.
And he certainly had the means and ability to consult with lawyers who almost certainly told him that what he was doing was incredibly risky.
I'm not sure that can be applied consistently. Would you say the same about heads of drug cartels or human trafficking rings (not equating these to Kim, as I'm sure you understand)?
I think you should build your argument a little bit more.
I’d say, why not say that also for drug cartels? The only reasonable argument that comes to my mind is that some big cartel head might have local government influence, but that does not apply to Kim and New Zealand, right?
Another possible argument would be that the damage has been done elsewhere. But in the case of the dtug cartel, if there are victims in 20 countries that why would any third party have priority for enforcing their law?
> if there are victims in 20 countries that why would any third party have priority for enforcing their law
That's not really relevant. No one is arguing priority. "Priority" implies there's 20 countries fighting to prosecute someone and we need to resolve it. In this case, it was a cooperation between multiple countries who agreed someone needed to be prosecuted, regardless of which country did it.
The point being why should any argument in this line end up with “lets extradite him to the US”, when he is already in a cooperating country that will enforce acceptable local law. And his own country, where he resides, and where the did the purported crimes.
I still don't understand how could he got an extradition to US.
He doesn't have US nationality and he was living most of his life in Germany and New Zealand.
We have copyright treaties signed by most nations. I think the copyright infringement crime shall be judged at the jurisdiction the suspect is living and committed the suspecting act.
I come from Russia which is an extremely low bar with respect to human rights, however giving up a citizen to a foreign government is explicitly forbidden by the constitution. It's a very reasonable rule because by doing so you're effectively stripping him of constitutional protections (which sadly don't exist anymore but they did in the past).
I always assumed all decent countries have that, and of all especially the USA which is famous for things like "The Hague Invasion Act".
I believe it could be surprising because a person's government has turned them over to a foreign government where they have no representation. The foreign government is not governed by the same Constitution, Bill of Rights, laws, or checks and balances. A core cultural understanding in the US is the rule of law and right of representation in a government by-and-for the people. It could seem like a loophole where the US government can forcibly remove a person's rights.
Key here would be transformation rather than reproduction?
Youtube is mentioned in the 2013 brief:
>b. According to the YouTube “Terms of Service,” users who upload content
to YouTube retain all of their ownership rights in their content. By
uploading their content to YouTube, however, such users grant YouTube a
license to use, reproduce, and distribute such content.
>
>c. In general, the further reproduction and distribution of videos that are
taken from the Youtube.com platform violates the copyright of the
individual who uploaded that video to Youtube.com.
Solely making a copy isn't copyright infringement, otherwise your ISP, your browser cache, the CDNs providing data caching on the internet, your screen, your router, and about a million other components in the stream would need a license for each piece of data.
Infringing copyright requires far more than this.
And if the output is transformative, then they can read whatever public facing information they can find, just as you can.
If I steal loaf of bread from bakery to make bread statue what does the guy who delivered bread have to do with my act of thievery? Is he also a thief just because bread was transported in his van to the bakery?
What the heck are you going on about with isp, router, screen etc? Btw, have you heard about HTTPS and what it does, while we are at it?
Same as the cart in the store. If you take it out of the cart and save it in the home folder, well. If you put a web server on the home folder (or cache folder), well well well...
So how much of a book of poems can I assemble from other books of poems and spit out as an ebook on amazon before it is not "transformative and fair use"? Few words, sentence, chapter?
There's a difference between a fair-use reproduction of Mickey and reproducing an image of Mickey that you claim is your own original creation (or there was until the copyright ran out recently).
He has done some shady stuff in Germany with stocks
then used those proceeds to launch his other businesses
I really enjoyed Megaupload & rapidshare those were almost as good as the WaReZ days if not better: direct links to any digital content without waiting for seeders
It's a shame. Arresting Dotcom won't do anything to curb piracy in fact it would raise the stakes even higher and more untraceable leading to more uncensored content that would be deemed "harmful"
Dotcom should've chosen Russia or China instead of NZ but obviously the quality of life isn't quite up to par with NZ. Russia dacha outside moscow would've been great for him without worries of US extradition.
> On or about February 13, 2007, ORTMANN sent an e-mail to VAN DER
KOLK entitled “my concerns about the thumbnails table.” In the e-mail,
ORTMANN asked VAN DER KOLK to create “a dummy lifetime
premium user,” stating that “[t]his is very important to prevent the loss of
source files due to expiration or abuse reports.”
The company was literally reposting copyrighted material under puppet accounts.
It's about MegaUpload, not Mega. True, they both offer(ed) cloud-storage and public sharing, but MegaUpload was much more on the shady side. They were stalling and ignoring requests for removing illegal content. Furthermore, they were even actively supporting uploads of popular content. I vaguely remember they were even paying some people. Over all, it was a platform strongly focused on distribution of illegal content. And this is just about commercial content. I wouldn't be surprised if it also was popular for porn and abuse-content.
IIRC you had to pay for "premium" on MegaUpload, but if you uploaded a file that got downloaded many times, you'd be granted X months of premium (or lifetime premium, can't remember)
Not completely different, actually, they're pretty much the same.
The only difference is the "we encrypt everything so we don't know what users upload" trick, which seems to have worked so far (and branding and stuff).
Megaupload took steps to specifically support piracy. When a movie studio would report a pirated copy of one of their movies, Megaupload would tell the studio they removed it but in reality they would only make it so the specific link the studio new about would stop working. They would not delete the underlying file and any other links would continue to work.
This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation. When child porn was reported they were able to kill the reported link and the underlying file, thus breaking all links to it.
Is that alleged or proven? Because the law does no require you to take down a file and the make sure that file is not uploaded by someone else. In fact all it requires is you to take it down if you're hosting it, so if someone else uploads a file they would have to notify you of that file as well for the simple fact that it may actually now be the rightsholder uploading it.
>This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation.
This, and the rest of your comment makes sense in 2024, but not around 2010.
Back then:
* All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem at the time. You were even able to find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
* Most of these companies (including the "good ones"™ like YouTube) thrived under this (unlawful) sharing of copyrighted content. Measures against it were being actively developed and tested and there was a big backslash from the platform's users as they were being introduced, i.e. it wasn't an armchair software engineer's "easy problem". When these platforms incorrectly labeled and removed content due to copyright infringement, it was a bit of a scandal, with many of these events reaching the news and people boycotting platforms and threatening lawsuits.
* Piracy was huge compared to today, torrents were almost the norm. Not trying to justify it, just trying to put in context what internet users used the internet for. If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it. The "market" was there, with or without Megaupload. I would even go as far as to suggest a wild point of view where Megaupload was actually a victim of piracy as well.
* A lot of legislation around this was not in place and/or mature enough. Some landmark cases around Section 230 were just starting to take shape. It was not black or white clear whether a platform should be responsible for its content or not and what are the legal requirements for them to address this liability.
* The overall sentiment of tech people (even in communities like this one) was that internet services should behave like utilities, in spirit; I still believe this to be the right approach. It follows from that that whatever misuse of them made by end users should hold them liable and not the utility provider.
> All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem back then. You could even find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
At Megaupload they were not eventually removed. At Megaupload the same physical file could be accessed by different URLs. When a rights holder reported the content Megaupload only made it so the specific URL no longer worked.
> If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it.
He was encouraging it. Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
They published list of the top downloads, but first checked them for pirated content and removed those items from the list. What purposed does that have other than trying to hide the infringement?
This is not true. All DMCIA requests were properly addressed and the content removed.
They even had a dedicated page to submit these requests, years before YouTube and others did so.
>Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
Dropbox scans shared files and checks hashes against known-pirated material. It's not just and "edgier tone", one actually makes an effort to take down infringing material and the other tacitly (and at time explicitly) condones it.
It feels like a decade ago, but I remember the issue being with how they dealt with abuse reports. To save storage space, they matched similar files. So if two people ripped a DVD and compressed it, they would just keep one source file, and generate 2 different metadata files, to avoid wasting space. So they'd have different filenames and creation dates, but only take up half the space. Then, when one got an abuse report, they would delete that metadata, but as long as one still existed, the source data never got deleted. Law enforcement called it a conspiracy to commit crime, megaupload called it smart database deduping. It was usually much more than 2 copies, so content owners were playing endless whack—a-mole while megaupload was barely shuffling a few kilobytes around.
NZ elected a business-centric government last year. Since then, all government decisions involving individuals-vs-business have taken a distinct lean towards the business side.
A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective.
I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution.
The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new business models / protecting current models in law, and then a fair amount shaking down and sorting out happening as new technology hits the scene, going back to radio. Each of these waves has led to push / pull between distributors, retailers, artists and song writers, and whether or not you like it, that’s the system we have today.
MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. But, it wasn’t the wrong model using tech of the time. It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly.
One thing you learn over the years is that people make up everything. I can't recall the exact quote but the character Frank Underwood once said something to the effect of "the law is the law, but the law is people and I know people". Meaning he could control the situation regardless.
The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor crimes will not get them in hot water because other people do worse but keep on the low down, but time and again you see these guys being made an example of, probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.
So I guess like, don't behave like an asshole generally, but specially if you're also committing crimes. Kinda like not breaking traffic laws if you have a dead body in the trunk.
>> probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.
More likely because those people remain naïve about the real world. In a past career I had some interaction with IP enforcement lawyers. They were stuck in the past then and have not really evolved. Their understanding of "the internet" extends only to those things discoverable via google search. Megaupload was knocked down because it was so visible. Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA cannot see it.
> Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA cannot see it.
How so? Google is a major distributor of most pirated material through YouTube and their search engine still makes finding stuff easy. I'd argue that p2p is nearly irrelevant nowadays and server-oriented distribution is the main model.
Probably the largest source of piracy is the widespread normalization of VPNs. Once upon a time VPNs did not advertise so as to not attract IP enforcement attention. They constantly shifted host locations to stay ahead of blocklists.
Now VPNs openly advertise on youtube, touting the ability to "access contend not available in your country". That's piracy 101 stuff, at least it used to be. I just watched a youtube by LLT on how to bypass encryption to rip your own Blu-ray disks and upload the resulting files to your plex server. Even talking about such tech was considered criminal only a few years ago. The laws haven't changed. We just now have a generation of adult decision makers who have grown up with piracy as a norm.
There's way more. I'd risk saying google drive has more pirated content today than MegaUpload and Rapidshare combined ever did, just based on the size of the user base and basic knowledge of long tail distribution. Other than that today you have so much piracy on discord, telegram, p2p communities stay strong, and of course the first rule of usenet is you don't mention it.
While having a sabnzbd+*arr setup isn't particularly difficult to a technical person, the general opacity of its underlying workings (NNTP? News articles, providers? Block accounts?) has kept lawyers outside of USENET for decades.
A decade ago, I had a successful book business online, which included used college textbooks. I had IP lawyers (the same that represented the music and movie industries) send me threatening cease and desist letters on at least 2 occasions accusing me of selling counterfeit books.
At that point, I had gotten really good at spotting counterfeits, so I really doubt we were selling any counterfeits, especially when they couldn't come up with a single instance. The publishing companies continue to do this because used books cut into their profits.
I just sent my lawyer after them and they never came back.
Amazon and the publishers eventually came to an agreement that there were certain textbooks they just won't allow to be sold as used on their platform.
Wow. And I'm assuming the publishers are now sprinting into the arms of rented, time-limited e-textbooks with DRM, and either eliminating or discouraging the sales of physical books that they can't fully kill resale of.
My wife asked me last week to help her get a textbook in a format that could be viewed on a reMarkable tablet, which can read PDFs but won't work with arbitrary DRM schemes. I checked my options and found the publisher selling some DRM crap, and some clearly illegal sites selling DRM-free PDFs. Since I found plenty of people vouching that they'd received what they bought, I chose to (using a Privacy card number) willingly buy from the criminals, since they were the only ones willing to provide me what I needed: an unencrypted PDF that we can actually use on the device we want.
I know publishers are afraid someone will email the PDF to the whole class, so that's why college textbooks probably ought to be folded into tuition, that way (1) publishers can get paid for the correct number of copies and (2) someone who actually has to pay the money (the school) is somewhat in the loop on textbook selection. It's broken now since those actually paying (students) have no say in book selection.
Colleges and universities started moving towards the book fee instead of buying books years ago. Many institutions already do the folding book costs into tuition.
Matt Levine is great at writing about the difference between laws as written and how they work in practice. He's pretty fascinated by some of the cases where the two diverge sharply.
He's at Bloomberg right now[1]. His main output is his 4-times-a-week column Money Stuff, but he also has a podcast and writes in other venues. I love his writing!
Sometimes this translates even down to the individual level. I've watched a lot of police bodycam videos and it's surprising how many people make their situation worse by being loud obnoxious tightwads when calmly answering questions and handing over your license would have you on your way in 5 minutes.
I get what you're saying, but being an obnoxious tightwad isn't actually against the rules, and it's not OK that there are some societies in the world where being an obnoxious tightwad towards a force ostensibly tasked with PROTECTING their fellow citizens (including the obnoxious one) will take this as a cue to 1) violate your civil liberties/rights, and/or 2) commit bodily harm to your person, and then 3) get away with it primarily without consequence.
I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our society that needs to be eradicated.
Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this composure the entire time.
>I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
What are you doing to justify feeling like this? Is it just out of abundance of caution? When I interact with police it's usually for boring reasons - like I broke some petty law and they justifiably question me about it (and more often than not just let it slide, but they don't have to -after all they're just doing their job).
I'd still be more likely to say the officer is making their situation worse. Take away the false dichotomy of loud and obnoxious vs calm and compliant and consider someone who doesn't answer irrelevant questions and is waiting for the officer to do their job (calm and not compliant). That person might have their situation worsened by the officer who thinks the person they're talking to is obligated to answer to the officer's whims.
(Based on what I've seen of police body camera footage.)
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with Kim Dotcom's case. It sounds like he's been more on the "loud and obnoxious" side and the authorities involved are not city response officers; it's hard to draw a parallel. Just pointing out that "you're just making it worse for yourself" is something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
This kind of exactly misses the point the comment you're replying to is making. The point isn't that just complying and handing over your info is the ideal goal. The point is that, pragmatically speaking, it's a lot easier to just do that and move on with your life than making a big scene about standing up for your ideals - because A) You're not going to change shit in that situation anyway and B) It's just going to make it harder for you.
> Something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
Yeah, probably right. But, also, yeah, easier sometimes to just appease the bully and move on with life.
Most of those aren't defending any ideals, they are making content to put ads around at the expense of tax money in the form of wasted police activity to engage with them.
"Obnoxious tightwad" is in the eyes of the beholder. Asserting your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights won't make you popular with the police, and yet you're far safer asserting those rights than getting overly talkative and compliant with the police. [0]
The tricky thing about a principled stand in favour of civil liberties is that you spend a lot of your time defending scoundrels, because it's their civil liberties that are most in danger from the mob and government. And once their rights go, yours are sure to follow.
I've heard it articulated as "There are no rules, only consequences." which I take to refer to the Legal Realism idea that the rules are just what we bind each other to. The written rules only matter if some "powerful" entity (like the government, or a mob, or civil court) is committed to holding you to them.
I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the consequences, then there is no rule."
E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket, so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)
At least for Shkreli he wasn't wrong. Massively increasing the price for a drug is legal.
> [1] On August 4, 2017, the trial jury found Shkreli guilty on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty on five other counts which included wire fraud.
Granted, the case started in 2015 probably in response to him hiking the prices in 2014 but the thing he was being an edge lord about isn't what directly did him in. However, Capone didn't go to prison for murder either.
Pedantically: MEGA runs today as a Dropbox-alike, and has very little to do with Kim Dotcom beyond his being involved at the very beginning and then departing quickly.
You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different despite the name similarity.
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 a paid subscription you got:
- Multiple parallel downloads
- Much faster speed
- No waiting time between downloads
A similar service was RapidShare, also popular with pirates.
Pirate sites would typically split downloads into multiple parts due to restrictions on upload size on MegaUpload, RapidShare and other file hosts like that. They would then upload these parts to MegaUpload and RapidShare and one or two other file hosts so that:
- If files were taken down from one host they might remain available for a bit more time from one of the other hosts
- Free users could speed up download times by simultaneously downloading the different part files from different hosts. So you’d start a download for part 1 from MegaUpload, part 2 from RapidShare and part 3 from some other host. Then you’d occasionally check on the slow progress and the countdowns from each sites before they allowed you to download another part, and continuing downloading parts from each as soon as they allowed you to again after you finished downloading a previous part from them.
The connection to Mega is that after MegaUpload was shut down, they started Mega and they made it so that all uploaded files were encrypted client side during upload and the URL contains a fragment with the encryption key so that it’s decrypted client side and the key is not shared with the server (unless of course the JS served by the server is modified to explicitly send the key to them either during upload or download).
This solved a problem for the pirates and it solved a problem for Mega.
Previously 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.
Now, with encryption users could reupload the exact same parts without having to do anything on their end. And the users downloading did not have to do any extra steps either on their end either.
This benefits the pirates greatly. When you’ve spent 3 days downloading a bunch of part files and suddenly the remaining parts are all taken down and their hashes banned it sucked to be a pirate. But with this automatic encryption the same parts could be reuploaded and new links could be posted to pirate forums and the users could pick right up again where they were in the progress of downloading all the parts.
Less work for users uploading. Less work for users downloading. Happier users. More paying customers.
And in addition to more money, Mega also have less work to do as now when someone argues that they should police the uploads better they can point to the files all being encrypted and then not having the keys to decrypt the files there is no way that they actually can inspect the files they are storing for their users. (Again unless they modify the JS they serve to their users so that they intentionally send the key to the server.)
Of course, encryption benefits everyone. Not just pirates.
But at least to me it appeared strongly that the main motivation for building Mega and having it use this client side automatic encryption and decryption was very specifically because of the experience they had with takedown requests for intellectual property hosted on MegaUpload. It’s a neat way to cater to the pirates and encourages them to become paying customers of Mega.
Meanwhile Mega is actually a really good Dropbox alternative. Stable, fast transfers, desktop sync works very well, lots of sharing options, decent pricing. I've been a happy customer for years instead of Dropbox and iCloud.
> 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?
Adding to this there were stories that came out that even beyond knowingly profiting from pirated content people working on the MegaUpload backend would search it directly for warez to share amongst each other.
Thanks, I had no idea that's how it worked. Embedding the key in a part of the URL that's not sent to the server is a stroke of genius.
I still find it surprising that so many people use Mega (at least enough that it can stay in business) when BitTorrent can easily saturate a downlink and is free.
Legally they can decrypt the content though, they have access to the key, they just need to change a piece of JavaScript so it sends back to the key to their server the next time a page visitor comes.
It's up to the courts and to them to decide.
Perhaps they are doing it already, but just keeping it low-profile, so the "real" dangerous people get attracted to the service and caught.
Hosting pirated content is a liability, and putting it on MEGA helps clear it. Many countries have issues with torrenting such data too, as it's an easy way to get a notice at home from your ISP if you're not on a VPN. I assume many kids in dorms and whatnot may have bittorrent traffic blocked as well.
I dunno if this is unreasonable, but I fear dling Torrents with high number of seeders in case one of them is malicious. With Mega you only had to trust one server.
Torrent files have hash check sums of the fragments. If someone sends you a bad fragment it will be discarded.
Magnet links are also hashes, so when you retrieve torrent metadata from your peers from a magnet link that data will also be verified for integrity.
However, if the original torrent itself was made from malicious data then it’s still gonna result in malicious code on your system.
Interestingly though, it is probably far more likely that a torrent with a very low number of seeders is malicious, than that a popular torrent contains malicious data in the files you download.
I suppose it could still be possible that the malicious code sent by a peer was targeting a weakness in your torrent client itself though. And that they could get remote code execution on your computer that way.
The main thing I would worry about with torrents is that your IP could be seen in the swarm by one of the companies that monitor torrent peers on behalf of rights holders and send you a nasty demand for money and threats of legal action.
Malice in this context could mean that they are concerned about someone tracking the activity.
If you are connected to a server, the server is the only connection(and only one with a log) but with a torrent, there are multiple connections so multiple parties could be keeping logs.
SHA-1 has been broken since 2017. It is considerably more expensive to produce a SHA-1 collision than an MD5 collision, but certainly not impossible. However, BitTorrent v2 also came out in 2017 and uses SHA-256, for which no known collisions exist even today.
> A fair amount of “this is fine, governments enforce IP laws and that’s a public good” vibes in here, which is all a very reasonable perspective.
I'd say it would be a a reasonable perspective if his case was being tried where the offences actually took place and/or where he was a citizen of and not a country who refuses to give the same rights to non-citizens being tried there compared to citizens[1] and wasn't even where the offense took place. This is absolutely chilling for anyone who isn't an US citizen honestly.
Note he's a permanent resident, which is a lot closer to citizen than most other resident class visas in NZ and forbids one from being spied on like the NZ government did.
>It does, inasmuch as your sentenced described the NZ jurisdiction as a mockery on the basis that it "sells out" its citizens.
No. What I said was that this is a mockery of jurisdiction. I seem to recall that DotCom lived in South Korea when what he's being accused of happened. Whether he's a citizen of NZ or not, this is a joke. The US has no legal right to demand his extradition just because the servers were in the US. It's just using political power to get its way. Like I said in a different sub-thread, what, it now has jurisdiction over the entire planet and can require anyone anywhere to follow its laws?
NZ is a member of 5 eyes IIRC, and so likely have various relations/cooperative agreements in place that make it easy(-ier) for justifying the handing of citizens over to another state.
It's not analogous. The person was being charged of a crime that happened in the UK and fled to the US, then was extradited back to the UK to be tried. In other words how extraditions usually work.
An applicable case would be someone being extradited from the US to the UK to be tried for a crime that happened while they were in a different country.
The general rule is that a crime takes place where the victim stands. Where the perpetrator stand is a potential secondary location. The alleged victims here were "standing" in the US and so the US is proceeding with the case.
Trials in a third location are extraordinarily rare. Only things like the ICC or some admiralty proceedings involve trials in a third location.
So if someone robs your house while you're out of the country, the crime would have taken place in whatever country you happened to be in at that time, right? That's how that would play out. Because if that's not the case it would imply that the house itself would be the victim.
I also think it's odd to talk about this being the "general rule" when there's plenty of crimes/infractions with no victim.
As for the reason, Mr. Dotcom has claimed to have been a supporter lf WikiLeaks and this was probably not of signifigance, but I would overall bet 10% that his less public involvement with WikiLeaks & WikiLeaks-type activity was part of the analysis that led to him getting targeted.
May be worth to compare the usual tactics of IP owning companies to what happened to Kim. I have a feeling that it could be shown that the kind of treatment he got was not very probable for a normal piracy case, even after accounting for his eccentric behabiour.
ALSO politically he was a failure but not so much that it was not worth paying attention to him as challenger of establishment. Even those normally ignorant of related topics but active in politics may have seen him as an agent eating their votes.
My favorite part of this was SOPA was being discussed on the same exact day they arrested Kim Dotcom, and they argued they needed SOPA to do what they did to Kim Dotcom. Kind of a useless bill.
I’m not sure I understand the comparison. Megaupload was a file sharing platform that we used to download mostly pirated material and although they had a music platform at some point, that wasn’t the primary method that most people interacted with Megaupload. The illegal equivalent to Spotify was Grooveshark, not Megaupload. The majority of Kim Dotcoms products outside of file sharing came long after Megaupload was attracting scrutiny. He was not a trailblazer, even Megaupload itself was a clone of Rapidshare. I’m sure we all remember the terrible album he used to launch his music platform which came after he was arrested.
Wait until you hear how Crunchyroll got to where they did! Plex is on much the same trajectory. Heck, even Google Play Music used the strategy by letting people upload their pirated music libraries to get users. It's a tried and true strategy.
Kim just didn’t grease the right palm plus he was a singular face and name. Feds are relentless at getting those who the oligopolists have marked for retribution, just like Assange and Snowden
Except when you read the basis for indictment section of megaupload’s Wikipedia page, I think it’s quite clear that the service wasn’t just another YouTube or Crunchyroll that was hosting copyrighted content and not doing a great job at taking it down. They were doing a lot more than that, they were running a file storage service that actively encouraged privacy and wasn’t actually useful for storing personal files.
They even paid people to upload high demand popular copyrighted files. They crossed a number of lines that other companies of the era didn’t dare cross.
As far as equating Kim Dotcom to Assange and Snowden, if it isn’t clear by now that Assange and especially Snowden are Russian assets by now idk how to convince you. Like, Snowden tried to travel to Ecuador via Moscow and Hong Kong? Coincidentally just stopping by at the number one and number two intelligence agency adversaries of the United States? He could have just flown from Miami to Ecuador directly. Why didn’t his original plan involve flying to South America? It’s so obviously suspect in retrospect.
But Kim Dotcom isn’t a political retribution target on that same level anyway, he’s just an egotistical idiot who thought he could play with law enforcement and get away with running a for-profit piracy website.
The one thing Kim has in common with Assange and Snowden is that he could have avoided a decade of self-imposed house arrest and/or exile by facing justice in court and taking the L. But Kim is attached to his ideals so much that it he’s wasted a good chunk of his life with this issue hanging over him, all because he doesn’t want to give in to the pragmatic reality that he brought upon himself.
There are big differences in the details there. I suggest you go to the Megaupload Wikipedia article and go to the “basis of indictment” section.
Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.
Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.
Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.
Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.
Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
> Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
Of course not, but they had no moderation for a long time so that that's what people were using it for. At that scale it's not an oversight, it's a customer acquisition strategy.
Once they hit critical mass they killed the feature as one would expect before negotiating lucrative deals with distributors via Google Play Music and eventually Youtube Music.
I think the line is very blurry, the only difference is one side is doing it very quietly and strategically, while the other was blustering their way through.
Google Play Music let you upload your own music library to your own account. They didn't check or assert where you got your mp3s. Nobody else had access to your collection.
From the beginning, Kim's company put itself front and center in the piracy world. It was advertised as an alternative to BitTorrent and you were meant to share links with others.
When licensors and eventually authorities asked him to stop, he laughed at them and doubled down.
He's played the pirate the whole time, and he's hated authority and venture capital and IP every step of the way.
There's a reason he would up where he is versus the other IP grey area companies and products that became wildly successful. He deliberately chose this path.
If anything, it's a cautionary tale that tech is only one dimension of the question of creating a process, service, or system that will be a net benefit to people (or even allowed).
A road paver is a great thing to have, but if I rip a three-lane highway through my neighbor's back yard, you can be damn sure someone's going to try and stop me.
Megaupload was not deleting content. They only deleted links to the content. So, if you had 10 links to the same video, and a copyright holder contacted them to delete their content under link #1, they would only remove that link but leave the rest (links and content) intact.
> without cutting in the existing rights holders properly.
That's the killer, right there.
"existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been ignored by tech bros for a long time.
As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse).
If we take that away, guess what happens?
No one wants to do it, anymore.
This may be an issue, with AI-generated creative content. Unless the AI is truly better than human talent (and "better" is in the eye of the beholder), it has the very real prospect of turning the commercial creative industry into gray goo.
[EDITED TO ADD] Watching the karma count on this post, yo-yoing up and down, has been fascinating. This seems to be an issue that people have very strong feelings about.
Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.
> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country.
People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?"
I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill.
We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.
How would his career change if AI music become prevalent? He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.
I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a lot of time to learn to make music. If you can’t make it as a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as becoming a football star), you previously still had the option to use your music skills to make money with boring work: music for ads for example.
That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career.
I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what the job market seems to value is that you have done the exact same thing as what they are hiring for.
I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes.
Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products.
I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count.
So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different?
I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find a way to keep artists secure economically while letting as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are anything to go by).
>The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse). If we take that away, guess what happens? No one wants to do it, anymore.
I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported.
Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.
Being "the guy" is the moat in entertainment. The problem is if you remove that, then the throngs of folks can make content to where it becomes "if everyone's special, no one is." I get it, I just wish it wasn't the case.
The ego stuff can be sickening, but it is definitely a draw. Some of the best musicians and artists, ever, have been rather appalling personalities. I won't go into naming names.
If you get used to stepping on the shoulders of others, that cascades to other aspects of your life and sooner-or-later a paparazzi video comes out of you being a dick to wait staff or worse.
The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans.
But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to).
Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.
It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies the music industry existing as it does today. That would be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that smoking is banned because I specifically don't like smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is access to technology, not the possibility of getting rich.
This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home.
At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
Because you’re not the one doing it. It’s the music labels that are doing it. You’d also be lucky to get fair compensation for your work. Even superstars get cheated.
The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry
Anecdotally, when I was in a grad-level design class as an undergrad, 100% of my classmates first learned to use their tools via a jailbroken copy of professional software. At that level of competition for opportunity, it just wasn't good enough to have waited until you got to college to learn these tools; you needed to have been playing with them in high school to be fluent enough to look good on a college application form (or a grad application form four years later).
AutoCAD, in particular, used to be[1] super smart about this and went out of their way to get their toolchain in front of high-schoolers (even back when that involved pricy copy-protection solutions like physical dongles).
[1] Not to imply they are no longer super-smart about it; I just no longer have clear signal.
I'm probably going to hit 1000 games this year on steam, around 960 currently
I pirated every single game I have ever bought first, with the exception of games that had Demos. If it's a Denuvo game, I refuse to ever buy it (especially since the pirated version is guaranteed to be a better experience).
What leads to lost sales in the video game world (at least if we look at people like myself) is making bad games, whether it be horrible optimization issues, bloated spyware like Denuvo, broken/buggy games etc.
Like Gaben said, people have no problems with paying for stuff, it just has to be high quality and reliable, and most modern games are neither for the most part.
Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1.
A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
You're mixing several valid criticisms of the tech industry with a really invalid critique of Free Culture[0]. If it were true that "taking away the opportunity for individual financial and ego success" meant nobody makes creative works anymore, then we wouldn't have Wikipedia, the SCP Foundation wiki, GNU, or Linux. I also want to point out that it was specifically the Free Software people who fired the first shot against generative AI, because a lot of our licenses are designed to resist enclosure of the commons.
Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.
To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties.
Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same.
As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.
[0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent
[1] Fascism with extra steps
[2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.
this likable/unlikable narrative gives me chills. it’s just like with assange—(il)legal imperialism at play - basically a rogue country playing the world police for the capitalist class, yet we’re fixated on personalities. it's like mistaking the finger for the moon.
Do you think UK will sign an extradition order for JK Rowling to go to France over a olympic harrassment lawsuit? Or USA will sign an extradition order for Elon Musk if France asks in that same lawsuit, or if UK demands he be extradited for participating in incitement from abroad?
Something tells me the extradition orders only work one way — if the US Government wants it.
Who knows. To be fair it took years and seems to have been given due process. But how much of it is “leaning on” the countries? Recently on his X interview with Musk, Trump bragged about “how quickly” he was able to use US leverage to extradite people they wanted, from LATAM countries! And everyone was like “right on!”
If the media industry is successful in using DMCA against foreign residents to put them in US jail, it'll be a huge deterrent against any other similar people hosting similar platforms in countries with US extradition treaties.
They aren't using the DMCA against him. Where DMCA comes into the picture is that for hosting sites DMCA compliance can be used as a defense against a charge of copyright infringement in the US.
The underlying problem for Megaupload is that what they were doing is illegal in over 180 countries (basically any country that is a party to a major international copyright treaty or convention).
A good general rule of thumb is that if you want to host something that is illegal in country X hosting it in country Y without an extradition treaty is not sufficient. You should pick a Y where it is not illegal there. Otherwise even if Y does not care enough to go after you, if Y has good trade or other relations with X the may respond positively to encouragement from X to go after you.
The indictment was a bit under 12 years ago. As the article covers, Dotcom initiated extensive legal proceedings, with one argument going to the (NZ) Supreme Court in 2020, about whether he could legally be extradited. Presumably we’ve reached the end of those proceedings.
What did the government have to do with this? Sounds like he ran out of appeals through the court system, which is independent of the government of the day.
He'd have one more option to fight tyranny, if your government didn't disarm the populace.
Imagine being yanked out of your home country by a foreign power and their corporate overlords with the prospect of living the rest of your life in third-world prison conditions, for the crime of allegedly reducing their balance sheets from $550B per year to $545B per year.
Our populace is pretty heavily armed, hunting is pretty ingrained in the national psyche. No one's arguing for getting rid of hunting rifles. Pistols and semiautomatics, things designed to kill people are illegal and most of us are quite happy with that, especially after we had a foreign terrorist kill 100 innocent people in a mosque.
The terrorist who shot 100 people in the mosque came to NZ because we used to allow semi-automatics, and his home country didn't, he bought them here, it's why we banned them - to make it harder for terrorists
He's a popular voice of dissent on Twitter and someone must be cracking down right now. Scott Ritter is another--he had his passport seized recently and his house raided by the FBI a week ago.
And Tulsi Gabbard recently was placed on a terror watch list.
All the Federal agencies have been weaponized. SEC only went after companies like LBRY, Inc because their founders and platform share information they don't like. The real fraudsters on Wallstreet get away with anything.
Sad news. I don't really know if there's more than the file sharing thing behind this, but the US is cracking down too hard on this guy. Seems unfair, tbh.
The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO.
I do not think he's a criminal. A big (massive, maybe) fine should have been more than enough.
I disagree, he has engaged in a deliberate media/public personality building campaign over the last 12 years to make the public sympathetic to him and his plight.
>>I do not think he's a criminal
"He was arrested in 1994 for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was convicted on eleven charges of computer fraud, ten charges of data espionage and various other charges in 1998 that he served a two-year suspended sentence for.[7] In 2003, he was deported to Germany where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and after five months in jail awaiting trial he received another 20 months suspended sentence" (From Wiki)
>>The raid at his NZ home was already taking it too far, IMO.
Yeah it was over the top, but he had firearms on the property and bodygaurds....
I'm with you that he should have just been fined, but he made a tremendous amount of money very deliberately (despite his protestations) trafficking illeagaly in Warez, I geniunely think the US is right to go after and nail him.
As a New Zealander, our government should be far more judicous about who it grants visa's to - he should have prima facae been refused his original visa on the basis of his prior convictions (I am sure there is a good story about why this was (incorrectly) overlooked by NZ officials). This ultimately is not a problem of New Zealands government/judicial system making, they have very fairly given Kim every chance to appeal and hear his side of the story - whilst he engages in games of attempted political manipulation for his own aim. The chickens must come home to roost at some point.
IMO I dont think Kim deserves the publics sympathy, the shield of New Zealand residency or that he is a good faith operator.
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 the American empire has on the internet.
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 ability to transact in US Dollars from any country that does not report the holdings of US-adjacent persons every single year.
If you think you're out of reach of a country that treats their own citizens as criminals by default the minute they leave the country, I have some swamp land in Florida to sell you.
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 earnings or dividends. Go visit a country and pay the local sales tax.
If I don't complete my FACTA compliance forms with my Australian bank every 2-3 years to (re)confirm that I am an Australian, living in Australia, using my Australian bank account then my bank will withhold certain amounts to cover my supposed obligations to the IRS.
Sure smells a lot like levying tax on non-citizens living in other countries.
> I did not see that in his comment. He said tax. You are making a pretty big leap.
No, that's exactly what I meant. It's implied from context that I am talking about taxation of people living in other countries. The bit I was directly replying to from root post:
> 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.
So I replied:
"USA can't tax non-citizens. Revoke citizenship if you really ..."
Dodging taxes is not a valid reason to renounce citizenship in the US of A and having renounced citizenship for of "tax reasons" is a question on the standard ESTA form. If you check "yes", you can't enter the US.
So, legally speaking, you not only lose citizenship but also the right to ever step foot on American soil again, no matter which other citizenship you gain.
Of course, you can just lie about your reasons on the forms.
> enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave.
That's not quite true. If you _return_ your green card ("abandon it"), you no longer have to pay taxes. This makes sense as a parallel to being a US citizen, who would pay taxes even if they lived abroad.
I'm not saying it's right, but we need to be accurate.
That's false. FATCA only applies to American taxpayers like U.S. businesses[1], citizens, greencard holders, and other residents [2]. It does not apply to nonresident illegal aliens, former citizens, or nonresident former greencard holders.
[1] In this context, including foreign businesses that file a U.S. tax return.
[2] Note that for FATCA purposes, if a person is a US taxpayer for any portion of the year, they are subject to FATCA compliance purposes for that tax year no matter how much of that year was actually spent as a US taxpayer. However, if they are not a US taxpayer at the end of the year, they would not be subject to FATCA compliance for the following year.
Yes, theoretically. Practically though when one applies to open an account they will be asked "do you have or have you ever had a US address or phone number? Have you ever had a greencard? Have you ever had SSN? Were you a subject to US taxation?" and single YES would lead to rejection.
For banks which make a few bucks per year per customer dealing with anyone who remotely could be a subject to FATCA is just not worth it.
FATCA does not apply once you are no longer a US taxpayer. Moreover, the FATCA regime has been copied by so many other countries (including the EU) that there is now a global version of FATCA called CRS (and the procedural system for implementing CRS is known as AEOI).
FATCA is now considered the least burdensome implementation of CRS, which has been implemented by all OECD countries, China, India, and Brazil.
If a bank is turning you down because you answered "YES" to the FATCA question, the problem isn't FATCA. The bank is trying to avoid an audit and it's a huge red flag not to do business with them.
The fact that some countries started mimicking FATCA does not make it less idiotically counterproductive and stupidly wasteful.
Not to mention it undermining international law and making this world less stable of course.
Banks are run by people and they are private businesses. Humans don't follow laws like computers follow instruction, we are flawed creatures. Businesses will mitigate risks wherever possible, and refuse to work with customers who carry added risk all the time.
While in theory this shouldn't be causing people trouble and preventing people from getting locked out of the banking system or forcing them into unfair agreements, in reality, it is.
It turns out government regulation has unintended consequences. Just because it's "wrong" for them to interpret the regulation in this way, doesn't change the fact that many many established, legitimate banks are doing it "wrong." Nor does it help the people suffering the consequences to point your finger back at the wording of the regulation and say "Ackshually..."
It really is that simple. This has been part of my job for the past decade+ and it has not been an issue for Americans to open up bank accounts in foreign countries at respectable banks in at least a decade.
If a foreign bank won't open an account for you because you were once American, the problem is that the bank has something to hide. Full stop. End of story.
> 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 […]
While it may be true that they are the only ones able to do it effectively, there are some other countries with citizenship-based taxation. According to Wikipedia[0] these currently are:
Hungary, Eritrea, Myanmar and Tajikistan
Some other countries have similar policies for tax heavens.
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.
>The US government is so powerful [...] can invent legal grounds to do pretty much anything to anyone
Sounds like what a totalitarian king would do.
"In vain they change from a single person to a few. These few have the passions of the one; and they unite to strengthen themselves, and to secure the gratification of their lawless passions at the expense of the general good. In vain do we fly to the many. The case is worse; their passions are less under the government of reason, they are augmented by the contagion, and defended against all attacks by their multitude." - Edmund Burke, 1756.
"Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said." - Jun 25, 2012
> As of December 2019, Eritrea, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, and WTO Observer countries Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan are not a party to any copyright convention.
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 strategy.
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."
"Plausible deniability" was the key phrase in my original comment. A one off person abusing the system (before the Google purchase) or Google executives recognizing that "[Youtube] is completely sustained by pirated content." is not the same thing as having corporate policies designed to encourage piracy like Megaupload did.
> 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.
You are definitely misremembering and spreading FUD backed by your biases.
He was hosting illegal material on servers geolocated inside the US. I'm sure if someone were producing and distributing illegal material (let's use the extreme example: child pornography, for instance) on NZ servers and networks, NZers would want to see them extradited.
Was he hosting illegal material, or simply creating a platform where such material could be held? If you post child porn on Facebook, I assume you would get sent to jail, not Mark Zuckerberg. It seems that Kim Dotcom is in a similar position.
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 your points/misunderstandings is debunked, however it's pretty clear what he was doing. And, more importantly to the original point, the laws/extradition would apply similarly to any nations with the same IP laws; "empire" or not.
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 wrongdoing? Just because I say I'm going to hack the Gibson, doesn't mean I actually do it.
Second, there is a real jurisdiction issue here. Kim Dotcom is a German citizen based in New Zealand. The servers themselves are (or were) hosted in the US. Did Kim Dotcom himself upload anything to them? I can absolutely see the case for shutting down servers that might contain illegal data. I don't see the case for extraditing someone to the US for allegedly breaking a law that applies neither to his country of origin nor residence.
Also, I'm not sure why you're being so angry with me, I'm just looking at the facts. I do have a bias, but I'm not moving any goalposts, just making sure we discuss the actual issues at hand.
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.
If you want to make a proper analogy, it would be more like living in NZ and owning a store in the US that receives DVDs and blindly mails out burnt copies as requested.
But we don't need to wonder what the US would do in such a scenario, since we already know. What's being discussed is not that the Internet being in the way somehow changes things, but that countries shouldn't be able to override jurisdictions like this. If other countries had balls, the most the US could do is ask for a person to be tried in the country they were in when the event in question happened, under that country's laws. What, the US now has jurisdiction over every living person? Anyone can be accused and tried in the US despite never having set foot there?
> What, the US now has jurisdiction over every living person? Anyone can be accused and tried in the US despite never having set foot there?
If they choose to operate in/through that country, yes. If he never illegally hosted anything on a server within US jurisdiction, they would never have an argument.
Your entire argument is akin to "oh, I hired someone to kill a guy in the Germany, but I'm in China so...too bad". They only care because someone was killed (pirated material was hosted) in Germany, breaking Germany's laws.
You're delusional if you think other countries wouldn't make the same claims. And it's on the recipient country to agree or not. Plenty of countries deny extradition to the US all the time, just look at Roman Polanski.
>Your entire argument is akin to "oh, I hired someone to kill a guy in the Germany, but I'm in China so...too bad". They only care because someone was killed (pirated material was hosted) in Germany, breaking Germany's laws.
What would normally happen in that case is that one country would present evidence to the other country, which would then prosecute under its own laws and court system, since hiring assassins is illegal everywhere. You're the one who's delusional if you think countries have free reign to impose their laws on people who are not physically there. It's called sovereignty. What NZ is doing here is saying that it's the US's bitch.
It is unconscionable that governments in both countries are spending time on this or chasing Assange or Snowden instead of the criminality of things like government warrantless surveillance, megacorp anti competitive actions, civil forfeiture, etc. Or the cartel of organizations behind this extradition that abuse copyright laws to keep things out of public domain. Or companies all exchanging our private information with each other, which inevitably gets released in a hack, which is far worse than a storage platform being used by some people to share songs or whatever.
Are any candidates actually against this farce? Or are they all simply working for the companies behind this?
It's complicated. Most career politicians like all those things you hate because it lets them outsource the state's dirty work. The state made constitutional commitments it can't quite keep and has worked around them. On the other hand, those workarounds are themselves becoming threats to the state in ways that have made some politicians willing to rebalance power. On the other hand, I do not want to name specific names of people to vote for, because few Congresspeople are actually hacking at the root of power. Remember when Obama was a Marxist and then turned out to just be another neoliberal?
To explain why, we must keep in mind that all states are in a perpetual crisis of legibility. They have more force than anyone knows what to do with, while having no idea of what happens in their territory or whom to use that force on. To make matters worse, most democratic states - and nearly all states in the Anglosphere - have been constitutionally handcuffed to restrict their investigatory powers. This is an existential threat to the state, and so the state will take any chance it can get to impose legibility upon the people by force, lest the state be replaced with something worse.
I've worded the above like some kind of conspiracy theory, so let's remember exactly who we're talking about: the "I'm-just-doing-my-job" types. If your job is to investigate crime, then the 4th Amendment is an annoying hurdle you have to think about constantly. But it's not a high hurdle to jump over because most criminals are profoundly stupid. Drug kingpins are more of a problem, however. Organized crime is the criminal equivalent of an MLM, so you can pick off a bunch of idiots at the exterior, but not people running the organization. This is where law enforcement gets creative, weaponizing things like tax law and - yes, civil forfeiture - to cut at the root.
The pattern of how democratic states deal with limitations on their power that prove inconvenient is simple: they cheat. Or at least, they cheat the spirit of the law, if not the letter. For example, if your job is to investigate foreign threats to the country, you're not fighting criminals. You're fighting the Borg[0] - an existential threat that learns from and adapts to everything you do, even the successes. For the CIA/NSA, having to get a warrant is like running a marathon while having both hands tied around your back and wearing a pair of cement shoes.
Data brokers are the perfect workaround. They built the perfect panopticon and used social engineering to get people to consent to it. The CIA and NSA buys shittons of their data and mines it to find threats to the state because it's significantly easier and less complicated than getting specific warrants to collect specific data.
Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for positive propaganda. Here, we're working around the 1st Amendment, not the 4th. The US government can't legally compel Hollywood to make propaganda, nor can they prohibit Hollywood from making movies that denigrate US actions. But they can still pay Hollywood to make propaganda[1], they'll downplay the critical movies to save face, and even if they don't, it'll make America look like they're aware of and fixing problems they have no interest in fixing. So when the US government treats a storage platform for stolen songs as an existential threat, it is specifically because they are fulfilling their end of a deal with Hollywood.
But there's a catch. Those constitutional restrictions were put in there for a reason. If the CIA can buy data from data brokers, than so can China's MSS. American lawmakers are so irrationally afraid of TikTok because China figured out how to use the CIA's own weapons against it. The government's defense of the TikTok ban is page after page of redactions. They can't publicly say they know TikTok is a Chinese intelligence asset without telling the judge enough information to blow the cover of every CIA agent in China, but the black highlighter[2] itself is an admission.
Same with the anticompetitive actions. The late 90s saw the US government bring the hammer down hard on the tech industry[3], and then suddenly stop. Why? Simple - the tech oligopoly became useful to American interests and so was given a pass, to the chagrin of America's other sweetheart, Hollywood. Politicians only realized how much power had been actually ceded to big tech by accident. Social media made the mistake of ceding power to Donald Trump, who used it to run for president legitimately, lost a re-election campaign, and then attempted a feeble self-coup. Twitter and every other tech company rightfully shut him down, but this exposed how much power they really had been given in the political process. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter in a vain attempt to restore Donald Trump's influence[4], ensuring that the concern over Big Tech would be bipartisan.
I still can't point you to a politician to vote for, but I can at least point you to an ideology and a person who talks about it: the New Brandeis movement[5] and Cory Doctorow specifically. Louis Rossmann is also a good option if Cory is too left-wing for your taste. Lina Khan is a huge figure in neo-Brandeis and she runs the FTC now, which is why the FTC has been trying to do its job again[6]. I single out antitrust here as it is the enabler of all the other abuses I've detailed above. You need economic centralization in order to get perfectly funded propaganda machines or privatized spying and censorship.
[0] I hope Star Trek is still culturally relevant enough for this reference to land correctly.
[3] Examples include the antitrust actions against Microsoft, the copyright actions against Napster and Grokster, and various legislative attempts to either force computer manufacturers to include copy protection hardware or force online services to have upload filters for copyright.
[4] This is an after-the-fact justification; at the time Musk was high off Tesla's stock price and bought Twitter basically in the same way one buys a bunch of shit they don't need off Amazon at 3 in the morning.
>Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for positive propaganda.
Seems unfair to not mention that the US here was aligning with the Bernie convention[0] (life + 50 years, Copyright Act of 1976[1]) and then latter aligning with European countries[2] (+70 years "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"[3]). Seems like something that might happen without any payments for propaganda. Also, I don't want to watch a 2 hour YouTube video, so maybe you can leave a link for the specific point about the US exchanging copyright extension for propaganda. Not even sure what propaganda would even be needed in 1998 - there were no wars, no China or USSR, no 9/11. Somehow I doubt the YouTube video will mention these points either.
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.
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.
We had a friend who threw amazing parties because he had this sort of transgressive sense of humor. He got rich, retired young, and I fully believe that the professional peer pressure was the main thing keeping his screws tight because he just fell apart over three years. At one point he was telling my spouse he was trying to make himself crazy. Congratulations bud, you already are. Sane people don’t do that.
Predatory people took advantage of his behavior and generosity, and by thirty he was involuntarily committed, his mother given power of attorney. My spouse was the person feeding his mom the information she needed to see to intervene. All he had left was the equity in his condo and $50k.
I’m not sure I believed the deranged millionaire trope until I met this guy. And I watch my younger friends and acquaintances for signs of mania that masquerade as out of box or transgressive thinking.
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.
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.
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.
The DMCA doesn't give anyone a score based on how many movies they have, or don't have. What is relevant is that YouTube provides tools that comply with the DMCA.
> 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.
> They started getting rid of pirated (and amateur content in general) once they had the monopoly on video, not before
That's a rewriting of history.
Google/YouTube started cracking down after Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc was reopened after appeals court ruled in Viacom's favor to listen to it's appeal in 2012 [1].
Google did develop ContentID as part of Google's damage control [0] when the case was in district court (2007-09) but half assed enforcement until the ruling in 2012 re-opened litigation, which forced Google's settlement with Viacom in 2014 [2].
People seem to forget that the Viacom litigation was an existential crisis for Google/YouTube, as the appeals court ruling could open the floodgates to litigation, and competitors ranging from Microsoft to CBS to the MPAA all supported Viacom [3]
> They took probably 10 years to attempt compliance at all.
ContentID has existed for all but 2 years of YouTube's entire existence. It was initially released less than a year after Google's purchase.
> Youtube was absolutely loaded with copyrighted material
And if they comply with Safe Harbor, it doesn't actually matter.
By comparison, what did Napster and Megaupload do?
Napster did nothing. Their argument was that they didn't need to comply at all.
Megaupload publicly pretended to comply, but intentionally nerfed their tooling to support non-compliance, and internally documented that they weren't complying.
Did it? If I go to youtube right now, I will get tons of ads selling illegal stuff which Youtube profit from. This is against the law but it seems that they don't get bothered by the law enforcers.
I expect different treatment for Pablo Escobar / Chapo level drug dealers vs a guy who gave some of his weed to a buddy of his for some cash and later bought a pizza with it.
They are both technically drug dealers, just one a bit more successful than the other.
Success even when obtained with some illegality is fine so long as it plays well with the interests of elites. Kim didn't just break the law, he also painted himself a target by upsetting people with power.
For all of his flaws, I think where I'd give someone like SBF a significant amount of credit is that he understood very well that if he wanted to do dodgy things he had to remain on the right side of those in power.
Kim hasn't played the game right. Had he tried to win friends from the start he may not be in the situation he's in now.
> “If nobody or barely anyone used Megaupload, he wouldn’t have been in as much trouble”
And if Captain Kidd hadn’t managed to raid any ships, he would have avoided the whole unfortunate hanging business. It goes without saying that unsuccessful criminals mostly don’t get caught.
I always thought that was impressive, and he was a good player but I remember him admitting st some point that he was paying people to play on his account which is what kept it at no. 1.
Hmm, still unless the ratio of them VS him playing was close to 50% that’s quite incredible given how massive the game was already and how demanding it is to be competitive, skills-wise but also just time-commitment-wise. I imagine to stay in top-10 requires no less than 4-6 hours of daily win-heavy gaming.
I know little about this case but remember the wild show Kim put on before his arrest. The way I saw it then was his colleagues pleaded guilty and where never extradited so my assumption was new Zealand would bend to his favour but I guess interpretation of rule of law is above precedence... I wish I could say I know what Im talking about.
This raises an interesting question: when you piss off the current hegemon (for good or bad reasons, not the point anyways), where can you currently go to get out of its reach ?
Asking, because his "plan" is very likely that. Some folks have been know to travel in boxes inside a container [1]
All of the anglosphere is clearly not a good destination choice as they are basically all vassal states.
Russia does not look to hot right now either, and the PKR is basically not an option for a very long list of reason.
As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our region.
With some 'diplomacy', Julian Assange was brought home after near 15 years fighting for BS extradition charges.
The news and politicians in Australia follow almost lock step with whatever our US overlords allow us to say.
It's been more of a thing lately with them trying to secure the pacific away from China's sphere of influence and the biggest 'dumb' thing from our government is that silly submarine deal (under something called AUKUS) which is about as good as our F-35 jets purchased (totally useless IMO).
There's probably some bootlickers in NZ trying to gain political favour / power by brown-nosing with the US of A.
>As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our region.
Fox News is an Australian product built to flood the US with far-right, pro-business outrage. We'll get out of your lane once you get out of ours.
All kidding aside, describing these sorts of things in terms of national influence is extremely unproductive. New Zealand wouldn't be turning itself into a pro-commercial-pirate haven or anticopyright haven but for the influence of the US[1]. The question regarding extradition is not "should we consider what Kim Dotcom did to be a crime[0]" but "do we abduct him to another jurisdiction to face trial." It's bikeshedding over the color of the wood on the electric chair.
[0] In general, extradition treaties only apply for acts that are crimes in both jurisdictions.
[1] Even China's pro-copyright, they just don't want to pay America for any of it. If they were anti-copyright they'd be freely sharing all the "IP" they keep stealing.
Murdoch is a US citizen and has been since the 80s. Fox news is purely and always has been an AMERICAN product, regardless of the birth citizenship of the CEO of News corp.
> As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our region.
You got our attention by filling all our streaming channels with your shows.
As is common in the international film and television sector, a key driver of Australia’s ongoing production upswing came from an enhancement to its incentive schemes.
In July, the country’s national government increased the location offset program in its annual budget from 16.5 percent to 30 percent. Thanks to those changes, films spending at least A$20 million dollars (about $13 million U.S. dollars) in the country can claim back 30 percent of all expenditures on goods and services upon completion of the project.
Previously, it often was [already] possible for especially savvy producers to add to the guaranteed 16.5 percent offset and bring total support to 30 percent by cobbling together prior grant schemes — but the increases introduced last year provided global producers with a much-needed sense of ease and surety.
> As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our region.
Look at Sky News Australia, literally all they talk about is US politics.
My theory is that as US focus shifts to East Asia, Australia is being groomed as a proxy state. Not as a deliberate effort, just as a consequence of a lot of different things coalescing.
China is a concern for Australia whether the US is in the picture or not. Australia's interests are highly aligned with those of the US. The increased engagement from the US is being welcomed by most Australians, but the issue is really around the implementation.
AUKUS is one of these huge deals with the results coming many years after huge investments creating great uncertainty. That makes it easy to attack politically.
EDIT: What's missed by the original commenter is that Australia was already investing in submarines from France. If delivered, there would be similar outcomes. The project had just as much uncertainty around it and was off-track when AUKUS was announced.
A claim that is categorically untrue and easily disproven. It takes less than ten seconds to google up multiple surveys that show the opinions of the Australian public. The most recent broad survey was conducted less than a month ago, but before Biden dropped out when it appeared Trump was likely to win the upcoming presidential election (relevant fact because the question was asked and answered regarding whether another Trump presidency would diminish support for the US.) Several key take-aways from this survey show:
- 80%+ said close ties with the US was important to AU security
- 70%+ named China as a security threat to AU
- 55%+ stated confidence in the US acting responsibly in the world
There are other similar points if interest in the survey but the facts are quite clear that Australians do welcome more engagement with the US and see it is a counter to Chinese threats in the region.
But that's the majority of dumb Australians, much like the majority of dumb Americans. Our two sets of dumbs have a lot of similarity.
Australia's identity has been lost in the last thirty years up it's own anus of mineral riches and the feeling of lifestyle entitlement that came with it. The USs 51st state. Yeehaaw...
The US and Australia are part of the five eyes. They have a very strong connection and a similar culture. It is China who is trying to assert more influence around the world, including the US (e.g. Midjourney doesn't allow criticism of Xi Jinping).
In your opinion why is the submarine deal/F-35 program "totally useless" for Australia? Are you saying it's the wrong equipment? Too expensive? Not needed?
One of our former prime ministers, Paul Keating, came out strongly against the submarine deal. IIRC two important dimensions are that Australia has shallow waters which are not a good fit for the chosen submarine technology and that tactically it makes limited sense for Australia to focus on weapons to be used on our largest trading partner.
They might make sense if in the long term we build out a nuclear deterrent? We'd need a handful of deep water submarines with big missiles on them. Although I expect that it'll turn out they're designed wrong for that or something.
Other than that I can't see what situation they'd be useful in practice though. If we get into a war with Indonesia, China or the like that is the end. There will be no winners and we'll either lose or be ruined. One of the lessons in the modern era is if a country can't defend itself with diplomacy then it is in a lot of trouble.
I assume we're buying this gear as some sort of realpolitik tribute-style thing for the US military industrial complex. If the point isn't to give them money I doubt we're achieving our goals.
I think diplomacy itself can help gear a country to defend itself by creating powerful allies who will come in a time of need.
At the same time, I do not think there is any justification for war or harming others non-defensively.
The amount of money and human power we piss away with wars and conflict is so sad. Humans are the most advanced and capable complex adaptive systems in the world. Why waste such a precious resource?
Stupidly flippant but likely somewhat accurate answer: x-thousand years of tribal evolution.
With all our intelligence we're still programmed to behave in particular ways, and it takes a lot of effort to even try to break out of it, and that's only possible if you're aware of it - which most people aren't.
Hmm, I think you are correct, and from my perspective, speaking to the idea of human heuristics and biases.
Ironically, I think societies and cultures need long periods of peace (not in an extreme sense, but rather enough peace to allow for safer conflict) to have the time and ability to introspect on their heuristics and biases, as well as integrate other people's perspectives.
Having something to lose, makes it a lot more likely to bring you to reason.
It takes seconds to destroy what it took decades to build.
If someone is pointing a mortar at your house, you want to get rid of the mortar, but you also want to keep your house, so it's likely that you will look for ways to remove the mortar, that don't include it being fired.
Run me through Australia's strategic outlook if the US decides to invade us. Or if they decide Australia needs to go and starts supporting one of our neighbors in fighting us.
1) The subs are certainly not for fighting China. By the time they're delivered, assuming all else equal, China will be in a position to ignore them. People are talking about deliveries in the 2050s vs a country that can basically build an entire economy in a few decades; it'll never work out in our favour. And we can't afford to be in a war with an Asian power under any circumstances anyway, we'd probably be better off surrendering immediately rather than fighting back against China if the US's deterrence fails. Ironically we'd probably end up with better infrastructure.
Fighting China with those submarines is a similar idea to fighting the US with those same subs. The plan is not to do that. It won't work out well for us.
2) Keep going with your thought, you haven't gone far enough. If diplomacy works because you have the means to defend yourself, why aren't we fighting the US? We can't possibly defend ourselves from them, and realistically we'd probably struggle to annoy them if they attacked us via a proxy war. And yet there is no realistic scenario where they fight us. Why is that, hm?
Here’s my view of why countries don’t attack each other: The downside for the attacker has to be larger than the upside, that’s when diplomacy becomes interesting. The downside doesn’t just have to be the defense of the attacked country but also the relation with other countries. The US won’t invade Australia because they wouldn’t gain much, compared to the loss of trust by other countries. Defense from china is more important than from the US for Australia, because the “public stage” deterrent is smaller for china than the US. That’s why you need to increase the deterrent by increasing your defense capabilities. You can correct me if you disagree though.
I'm no "submarine warfare expert" but I believe the purpose/value of nuclear submarines is not defense of close coastal waters, but rather as a deterrence that can come "from anywhere". I don't believe shallow waters would hamper the operation of a submarine launching ICBMs or similar. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
I also know nothing of Australian politics but Paul Keating seems to have some curious views regarding China:
> Keating brushed aside human rights concerns about China by arguing there are “disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uyghurs”
> Keating is a noted dove towards China. He has previously labelled Taiwan “not a vital Australian interest” but rather a “civil matter” for China.
> On Wednesday Keating said China “is not the Soviet Union” because it is involved in international institutions and would “fall over themselves to have a proper relationship” with Australia, except that Australia has “manufactured a problem” through its increasing alignment with US.
> Keating said the “great sin” China had committed in the eyes of the west was developing its economy to equal the size of the US
Pretty sure conventionally-armed submarines launch ICBMS. Not nuclear tipped, but basically "big long range missiles". Regardless, I think my point stands: These subs are not for close water/shore patrol.
Sure, your point stands, you don't know much about Australian politics and these subs aren't especially suited for Australia.
They're a symptom of the former governments attraction to big (albeit stupid) grand actions and excessive sucking up to the US | UK at the expense of Australian taxpayers for no real specific local benefit.
A decent portion of the Australian population think the realpolitik of our situation means we should adopt a neutral approach towards China, even if it means a weakening of our relationship with the US.
The need to act as world police (re uyghurs, taiwan) can be a game for the major powers.
> Keating said the “great sin” China had committed in the eyes of the west was developing its economy to equal the size of the US
This is somewhat supported by some of the wikileaks releases, but it's a little hard to disentangle if the economy is the sin or just an intensifier.
> At the lunch, Mrs Clinton confided in Mr Rudd about America's fears about China's rapid economic rise and Beijing's multibillion-dollar store of US debt, asking Mr Rudd: ''How do you deal toughly with your banker?''
The submarines are almost certainly useless. We won't get them for decades. We're not even allowed to service the nuclear reactors when we do get them. And the technology is already an old one and will likely already be superceded by the new much quieter air-independent fuel cell and lithium battery technologies which other countries are adopting.
Air-independent fuel cell and battery powered submarines are not at all a replacement for nuclear submarines, nor even really competing with them. No matter how good the tech becomes, diesel-electric subs running fuel cell AIPs will always have shorter range, less submerged time, and lower speeds than nuclear-powered submarines. Each time they surface, even to periscope level, the chances of detection go up massively.
That's why diesel-electric submarines are best suited for coastal defence, especially of small countries, whereas larger countries with huge areas of territory to protect benefit from having nuclear submarines.
Whether it's the right decision for Australia to get these subs under AUKUS is a fair debate, but it's not at all accurate to claim that they're using 'old' technology that is being superseded by AIP.
The submarines are useless to our (Australia’s) national interest. If we ever get them (and even then there’s serious questions about whether Australia would actually have command authority over them), they aren’t really geared to be super useful for defending our shores (taking advantage of our distance from potential enemies) - we’d need more, smaller subs for that. But they do have the extreme range and endurance that would be useful for, say, projecting force into the South China Sea, following the US into a conflict - and that is something the vast majority of Australians are dead against, but what our politicians (at least on the opposition side) have basically already pledged to do…
The F35s we have are pretty sweet but we are paying a shit tonne for like 5 submarines that we are going to receive in the 2040s. China already had 10x that many attack submarines. The subs deal stinks.
This deal is getting worse all the time.
Courtesy of the latest details of the AUKUS agreement tabled yesterday in Parliament, we now know that the moment it becomes inconvenient for the Americans or the Brits, there’ll be no submarines for Australia:
Cooperation under the agreement is to be carried out in such a manner as to not adversely affect the ability of the United States and the United Kingdom to meet their respective military requirements and to not degrade their respective naval nuclear propulsion programs.
Those programs, as even ardent defenders of the program admit, are already pretty degraded. The Americans have shifted from building two Virginia-class boats a year to one this year, and delayed the construction of the next generation of nuclear submarines by five years to 2040. The new generation Dreadnought-class boats under construction in the UK have suffered serious delays and astonishing cost blowouts.
Somehow, with around $10 billion of Australian cash, both programs will come good, to the point they can build boats for the US and UK, and for Australia, and help Australia build its own. It’s normal for defence policy to double as heavy manufacturing policy, and Australia has a rich history of wasting billions making things here that we could have bought far cheaper from other countries. Where AUKUS is unusual is that Australia will be using its defence policy as heavy manufacturing policy for the US and UK as well
I'm a pacifist at heart, but I'm not blind to the fact that a single digit percentage of humans (in every country) are just plain evil (in lots of ways). These people can do harm without any feelings of remorse. And a double digit percentage of humanity can easily be manipulated into being / doing evil.
Our current, imperfect, civilisation exists because we largely succeed in keeping the whims of these minorities under control. It's a depressing thought, but if I don't accept it, I'll be disappointed in humanity on a daily basis.
We already had an order in for convential working subs from the French .. now we're on the hook for more money and less of a guarantee they'll ever arrive.
> Manning told the court that, during her interaction with WikiLeaks on IRC and Jabber, she developed a friendship with someone there, believed to be Julian Assange (although neither knew the other's name), which she said made her feel she could be herself
When this came out, everything about Assange was made clear. It's just textbook, take someone who is in a mental health crisis, pretend to be kind, you can do anything to them -- and Assange indeed did. Assange became famous, Chelsea went to prison.
When he decided to skip the materials damaging to Russia and published the materials on Clinton, that's when we knew his affiliation. We didn't need Pussy Riot to tell us -- although they sure did, just in case someone missed the obvious.
These are facts. This is not character assassination.
About him being rapist I was clear is not necessarily true. That might be character assassination indeed.
Well, for the sake of argument, assume everything you say is true. I think it's not true but let's roll with it.
Still, the USA attempted to extradite a foreign national for an act that is only a crime in the US but nowhere else, that occurred on foreign soil. Further, the charges were retaliation for activity that is legally protected in the USA but annoyed powerful people.
Aren't you at all concerned by that egregious overreach? It's un-American if you're an American patriot and alarming if you're not.
The funny thing about what you just said is that it has nothing to do with the parent comment. He's talking about BS extradition charges due to global political influence, and your response is: RUN CHARACTER_ASSASSINATION.EXE
I must say, your statement was so profound and effective that you've totally convinced me. Assange is a piece of shit and therefore we should do away with all laws and cater to the whim of your tribe.
Ever watched that show Monk with that villain Dale the Whale who had to go to prison? That's pretty much how I see Kim Schmitz rotting in jail: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DMb6zUTVwAAQwPn.jpg
Are any of the people who were arrested for RIAA/MPAA violations still imprisoned? That was such a weird time to be a kid. Scared if I downloaded a Greenday mp3 my parents would get arrested for piracy and I'd never be able to work in computers.
Oh yeah once they started cracking down I stopped watching any mainstream movies, music, etc., especially not anything less than 10 years old. You miss out on a banger here and there, but it's a lot safer.
Kim was not the robin-hood like figure he portrayed himself to be. If anything he was the opposite given the many illegal dealings he was engaged in before creating Megaupload, and his bad reputation in some German technology communities for being a rat. Kim also in all probability is guilty. I hold no love for Kim however I can't agree with this ruling. Despite Kim's conduct; the case against him has been so rife with so much extreme police and prosecutorial misconduct it should've been thrown out ages ago.
Some of the misconduct in this case includes but is not limited to:
- Abusing the power of a national security agency to illegally spy on him, which lead to the Prime Minister being forced to publicly apologizing due to the political fallout.
- Attempting to freeze his defense funds
- Performing a no knock raid utilizing a heavily armed anti-terrorism task force for a non-violent crime, which lead to the department being successfully sued by all parties for excessive force.
- Performing an illegal search by intentionally and knowingly filling out an improper warrant, and having had the crown admit this.
- Sending the evidence ruled to be illegally obtained to the FBI regardless
- Allowing a foreign government to maliciously apply to revoke someone's bail the day they can no longer afford their lawyer
- Already ruling that under New Zealand law you cannot be extradited for copyright infringement, but proceeding with the case regardless for the more flimsy fraud charges.
Kim is a bad person who very likely is guilty, but at what point do we draw a line and say the abuse of process has been so great it harms the reputation of the legal system to proceed? Cases are routinely completely thrown out for much less. It's frankly a travesty towards the legal system that this case has been allowed to continue, especially given the charges.
Friendly reminder to all of us that copying is not stealing (neither in the dictionary sense nor in the legal sense) and that loaded language like that hinders objective discussion.
It is rumoured (by locals) that Kim Dotcom has been allowed to reside in New Zealand (being a German/Finish) on the basis that he spent his money in New Zealand. I don't think they are in a rush to extradite him to the US, and the US will not come after NZ for the money spent.
How is that a rumour? That's literally how the Investment 1 and 2 resident visa worked before 2022 when they finally scrapped the program. You invest at least NZD $750,000 in growth investments. Given that that's 450k USD, and kim dotcom's net value was quite a few million, that was barely an inconvenience. Then he just needed to spend the majority of his time in NZ to qualify for citizenship.
NZ is not a random atoll island in the Pacific. Kim Dotcom is wealthy, but still way far, way far from having enough money to bribe the whole country like that.
I'm sure we all could appreciate Mega for what it was, and we could also debate the charges and go back and forth on extradition laws. The reality is that according to the DoJ, US citizens were victimized by a service that used US assets (servers) within its territory. That opens the doors for litigation. This happens literally in every country that can enforce it.
Like Reddit, HN has a crowd of anti-US folks with terrible sentiment until, you know, when they need the US or need a job in the U.S. The hypocrisy is astounding.
> ... cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million ...
This bit is standard, trope-style make-believe.
However:
> ... paying users [...], which generated more than $175 million in revenue for the [Kim Dotcom's Megaupload] website.
.. if they can prove that bit, it's a much more damning case.
Not the usual hand-wavey 'We were banking on several thousand dollars of revenue from each of the 12yo's we're going after' claims, but actual, demonstrable, revenue that was misdirected.
What other options does he have? I really wish people wouldn't cheer when smallfolk like us get crushed by the state. Not saying he's perfect, but what him and others have to suffer seems vastly out of proportion to what they did
"Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the realm of dictators and drug lords.
A man's labor and intelligence can eventually earn him $10k to buy a car. Over a long career, one might eventually amass a fortune on the order of $1M. Kim might (hypothetically) have an IQ of 150 and be willing to work punishingly long hours where our analogous car buyer went home to be with his family. But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter or harder-working than a baseline human, that's absurd - it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately. And that's ignoring that it was $175M in cash, as if it was pocket change to him; there's no good explanation for him to have that much in investments much less in physical money lying around.
I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest. Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
I have no sympathy for Kim Dotcom, but he is not proven to be some drug cartel boss or criminal overlord. Reason he had so much cash is obvious - because back in 2012 crypto wasn't yet so successful. And the guy was US government target for a long time before arrest so he had good reason not to keep money in banks where it's easy to arrest them.
Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
That's not how it works. The majority of their wealth is in the stock of their companies. They don't earn anything until they sell their shares, and then the money comes from whoever wants to own the shares.
> But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter
That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101 isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than some average shlob.
> it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's savings. He had a service that other people wanted to use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the US government, claiming they seized his own personal documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would consider legitimate.
> I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits,
Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is what happens when your economics education consisted of a dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth of many billions depending on share price on any given day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a bit less).
That's a lot of good information, and I'm no scholar of the various -isms, but are the above attributed directly to Marxism (and I'm not sure where the boundaries lie between Marxism, Communism and Socialism), or should they be attributed to malevolent dictatorships?
... My assumption is that you believe, and above is all evidence pointing in this direction, that Marxism leads to malevolent dictatorships.
Whilst the example of the actions above aren't literal examples of what Marx espouses, they're the end result of societies that have attempted to pursue Marxist ideals. Emergent behaviour.
To be ridiculously reductionist, if Capitalism gets us Epstein and Communism gets us the stats you've provided, I know what I'd choose for my family (hint: being alive beats any alternative).
It's not just emergent behaviour. Marxism encourages communists to rise up in violent revolution against their own countryman.
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." - communist manifesto
It's hard to directly quantify what causes what, but in general capitalism happens naturally when people's freedoms are protected, and on the contrary (Marxist) socialism must be forced on people with violence. It doesn't lead to, but requires a totalitarian authority to implement properly.
I don't think that all of them were malevolent either. Most of them probably thought that it would work, and that the end justifies whatever means, or that suffering is necessary for the reward in the end.
I'm going to noodle over that distinction of natural capitalism versus forced socialism.
I'm thinking along the lines of family-level (and maybe extended to friends and family / cooperative small village) socialism is natural, but on a societal level, of the scales we see today, capitalism is natural. Cooperation versus competition. Very interesting.
I don't think that way, at all. Capitalism at the core simply means that everyone can own stuff, and everyone gets to keep what they produce. Ownership means that the owner gets to decide how to use the things they own. Capitalism doesn't mean that things aren't shared, it just means that whoever owns the stuff can decide if they want to share. People naturally want to help each other, so they share stuff that they own. People share their things more readily with people they know. Maybe because they might get the favor returned, or they just want to make them happy.
Capitalism doesn't mean competition over co-operation. It simply means that you don't have to co-operate if you don't get equal rewards, or if you don't get rewards proportional to your effort. People hate to co-operate if someone else gets the rewards. People love to co-operate if they get a fair share of the rewards, which is what happens under capitalism.
Owning stuff leads to trading and markets, which leads to the law of supply and demand and the price system. Just by looking at prices of things, people can make rational decisions about what to produce and what to consume. People are pushed to produce things that are scarce and expensive, and they are pushed to consume things that are abundant and cheap. This is a form of self-organized co-operation, where everyone co-operates automatically by just acting rationally. By looking out for themselves, they help allocate resources for the whole community. The lack of this mechanism is one of the major reasons why totalitarian socialism fails. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
What does it have to do with capitalism? People like that or much worse thrive in non democratic states with no rule of law and absolutely no public transparency (e.g. Beria). It's just we don't really get to hear about them..
These weren’t true Marxism. When me and my communist buddies take over next time you will see a real people’s utopia. Not like the last 47 times. I promise. Word of honor. Everyone will get a pony.
I don’t think the money in question was forfeited in the sense that the US uses, only seized pending an investigation. The lack of a corrupting incentive alone makes the seizure less suspicious in my eyes.
I don't know about you, but where I come from this looks like punishment through process. Not even trying to defend this Kim dude, just pointing out just because the process is "fair" doesn't mean its fair. Yes that is not a very well articulated point, but this is something which many people should have a feeling for in their bones.
I agree that process can be used as punishment. But I don't see any evidence that Dotcom has been uniquely or unfaithfully subjected to processes, or that his treatment is unusual given the charges he's facing.
Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of money.
This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
I feel like I'm watching satire of what a 2000s mega rich nerd would be like but it's really him. He even has a basket/hanger on the wall for all of his ... canes. Didn't see the fedoras nearby, though.
"At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a single hit.
The thing about that word "smallfolk", is that there is a very heavy connotation that someone remains smallfolk no matter how positively fortune smiles upon them. No matter how wealthy they might become, not even if they can ride a dragon, do they suddenly become nobles.
The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.
The guy has a lot of money, so therefore it’s very tedious when people characterize him as a smol bean who just wanted to help people share their data. It’s a smokescreen for the real position (which I recognize some people do legitimately hold) that copying and selling movies without compensating the people who made them is a legitimate business model and it’s OK to make lots of money doing it.
How is Hollywood not compensating the people making the movies? Don’t they have contracts managing the payment? Taking a finished movie and just distributing it without consent is something different than making contracts with the creators. Or are you talking about something else?
The contracts aren't necessarily fair. As with gig work, people will take a bad deal that keeps them solvent in the short term, even if it ruins them long-term, if there isn't really any other way to put their assets to use. VFX crews have to work long hours, often for less than minimum wage, to meet ridiculous contractual requirements; the unfairness of the compensation has lead to several high-profile shutdowns of studios whose work helped secure 9-figure returns and Oscars. And even if the studio survives, workers can end up without a credit in the final product, if they had to leave the project early or there were simply too many people involved.
Maybe I’m too liberal here, but in my opinion, that’s how a job market works (and should work). As long as they get minimum wage, they can either do the job with the agreed upon conditions and payment or they can work somewhere else. And if they don’t get minimum wage like you claimed, they should sue. If the contract was broken, they should sue, too.
This is the argument always used to excuse abuse of labor, and I completely reject it. These are skilled artists and technicians with lives to live - minimum wage is far below the minimum they're owed. Just because powerful interests - who can manipulate the courts as much as they do their contracts - have found a reliable way to exploit workers, doesn't mean that it's how things should work. And it definitely doesn't oblige me to feel sorry for them when they get scammed themselves. Just deserts.
Well the film studio asks them if they want to work for a given rate (or they ask the studio) and both sides agree to the contract. If there is too much supply because many people want to work in the space, it lowers the prices. I don’t think they are owed anything just because they have a lot of skill or are creative.
How would you do it?
You don’t have to feel sorry for the film studios of course, I’m not crying for them either. But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
>I don’t think they are owed anything just because they have a lot of skill or are creative.
I do. What's indicated here is an overabundance of pricing power on the film studios' side, which is a direct result of laws and policies that were designed to benefit and advantage businesses over labor (for a variety of reasons, some justifiable and some not). You want to cast this as a natural and organic process when it's anything but; if it were, the skill ceiling involved in the trade and returns from movie sales would likely have topped out at a more appropriate point vis a vis wages. That is, the fact that these CG-heavy films are making more money than ever, and that VFX is incredibly difficult to break into because of the high skill required, and wages are still low, and VFX studios are still going under, suggests that wages are being artificially depressed.
>But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
Nah. It's a case of filthy-rich scammers getting scammed by a filthy rich scammer. Their bad behavior, at the very least, helps to legitimize exploitation (popularly, if not so much legally). But I think it goes further than that. The depressed wages of labor and concentration of capital in the hands of elite executives and business owners has helped to shape the socioeconomic status quo, where so many consumers simply can't afford to purchase film tickets and media the way that they used to be able to, but also where the pressure to participate in pop culture and consume content is stronger than ever. The result is that people are willing to access this content however they can, creating an opportunity for hustlers like Kim.
Obviously, the solution is to dismantle many of the policy benefits that let big businesses exploit workers, and to break up the capital accretion that allowed them to capture policy in the first place. Dismantle the economic distortions that led us here.
Can you explain some policy benefits that let studios exploit the workers? I’m genuinely not aware, I was under the impression that it’s just supply and demand driving down prices.
That's the wrong question. Paraphrasing Baldwin, one might expect from one person and not another, and only when that expectation is defeated in the former does a certain bitterness ensue. There's no reason to waste energy and emotion on a person from whom one expects nothing, and subsequently receives nothing.
But if Hollywood execs are scamming the people whose labor makes their whole venture possible in the first place, that's worth expending energy on. Hence, again, the strikes.
I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing. Anything under about 100” is going to cost more to seize than it’s worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do they seize the cookware?
At least with local departments, yes police will seize kitchen appliances if they are high dollar. Then it all goes up for auction. Maybe a cop likes the look of it, picks it up for pennies on the dollar at the auction. Maybe no one bids and it all gets junked. While the primary purpose of civil forfeiture is to seize valuables, there are sometimes secondary concerns... the cops like to fuck with certain people, and if they can just make them paupers by taking their belongings then that alone can be enough motivation. Paperwork's pretty light because jewelry or cash never has lawyers to defend itself.
Feds seem to be a bit more discriminating, tending towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and real estate. But I've seen more than a few news articles over the years where they seized property you might call petty.
I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?
They are. I suppose. I guess to know which police they are, one might have to see who they get their marching orders from. TVs were seized of course, and while an extraditing authority might request/demand evidence to be seized too, what were they hoping to find in the televisions do you think?
> I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US.
Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would point you at the many mainstream news articles of places that make road trips through where the local police shake people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the holding cell?
If someone's a weirdo and wants to stuff their millions into a mattress, that by itself should not be sufficient to presume them guilty of any illegal activity, or justify seizing their money.
Wait til you hear about this new startup called Google. They are going to launch yet another search engine. I doubt there's much money in it, though. They'll be lucky to make a few million.
Are you missing the point on purpose? The suspicious thing isn’t that he has money, it’s that he’s storing the money physically as cash in his home. You think Google has a safe at the HQ filled with dollar notes?
Sounds pretty logical in a world where banking secrecy doesn't exist and most banks are compliant with a single jurisdiction which doesn't respects other ones.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
I’m not even necessarily agreeing that it’s suspicious (ok, it is a bit suspicious but not so weird that I would immediately proclaim that he’s guilty), I just don’t think it’s productive to post sarcastic comments rebutting strawman arguments. If the commenter wanted to say that having a lot of cash isn’t suspicious, they should have just said that instead of making a point about google making a lot of money, too.
he got banned from banks before and he doesnt want his money seized. anyone with the slightest understand of how us government operates would understand why hes storing the money physically.. Even bitcoiners do it....
He's an example to be made of by rights-holders. People smarter than him decided to quit the business or go into becoming IP owners themselves: see Manwin -> MindGeek -> Aylo. It was a calculated risk.
it was. he chose freedom and trusting people. if you go to jail for that you can be sure that it already created a precedent that put into jail a lot of innocent people
But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for things they did while physically outside the US. Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes to its citizens.
Please. It fits his personality perfectly to do something like keep all his money in cash.
If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely connected to malicious security services he would have been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
Why is it so odd that an anti authoritarian individual would keep large sums of money in cash and distribute whatever cash he does keep in as many bank accounts as possible?
Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal case being prosecuted? If there was something there wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years ago?
I’m not interested in arguing for or against him because I don’t care about him or this case.
I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where you just assert that it was perfect in line with is character to have ALL is money in cash while literally the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all over the globe.
I’m just saying that this guy distrusts authority so it’s not surprising that he was caught with a lot of cash or that he has a web of accounts. My larger point is about the fact that these insinuations should be dismissed because it’s reasonable to assume that if there was major wrong doing in his finances (eg drug lord) they would have included the evidence in the extradition request.
He created a site where you can upload anything with complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh, too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ to build a case around so that they could get discovery and find out what they were really trying to get access to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes, the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy agreement/etc)" types.
Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it is in the public interest for him to be held accountable against his will.
I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
"needing to be saved from" is a far cry from the 'used as an excuse for disclosure' that I accused them of. But I do appreciate the irony in conspiracists accusing others of racketeering (or otherwise unduly influencing markets).
This is the clear-headed take. As a point of clarification, I don't believe Dotcom has anything to do with Mega anymore, and the service Mega has gone legit and provides quite a nice a service similar to Tresorit -- end-to-end encrypted cloud storage.
I'm not in a position to disclose anything, but there is plenty of information out there about who was storing data in what repositories and what those people were using other, less-protected, repositories for.
Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested, completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of data.
he did not and at least there is no written evidence that he did. something that OP could look up tho is the stats of the giant reduction of child trafficking/child abuse content posted on X since Musk took it under his wing. Why wasnt it adressed before? this could be a much bigger story but one OP will never address
Maybe I don't know the full story, but as far as I understand, it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time, was aware there was a ton of piracy on the site and didn't give any indication whatsoever that they were even trying to react to it by banning accounts that were uploading infringing content.
I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".
I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says, his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively, which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded directly, but in my experience commenters who start talking about things like "powerful people getting more power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about whether the claims they make are true.)
Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and legal arm wrestling.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
> it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time,
"Long time" is subjective.
> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that
New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
He kept breaking laws with large penalties (or provided others a platform to do so, depending on your point of view) knowingly and repeatedly on a massive scale for many years.
Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
I am not saying that's wrong. What's wrong is the way it's done. Especially the part where another country raids his residence, and has him shipped to said another country he's not even a citizen of, to be judged based on their law.
The original indictment put it at $25mm from ads and $150mm from subs, so my original statement is wrong.
But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.
Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.
I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?
Sounds exactly like a file sharing service. My Google documents are also downloaded much more than uploaded, very often by people who don't upload anything at all.
Because the real criminals are the publishers who keep publicly funded science behind a paywall. None of the people who actually conduct the science see any of the money. In fact, they typically have to pay a lot of money to get their findings published.
BTW she is as bad as Kim Dotcom in terms of being Putin shill and other crazy stuff. So people who dislike Dotcom for this would be surprised to learn that Elbakyan is as bad.
I mean she doing gods work on making science more open to everyone, but if she were living in New Zealand she would land in US prison for 10+ years long ago.
Is that going to be a trial by the laws of the land he resides in and not to a foreign country that the defendant is not a citizen nor a resident nor operates out of and that refuses to guarantee the same protections under the law to a non-citizen compared to a citizen[1]?
This same foreign country who passed laws for invading the hague if they came under trial for crimes in the ICC.
[1]: See assange's bid for first amendment's guarantees when the same foreign country was trying to extradite and "trial" him
He moved to New Zealand after much of the alleged criminal conduct, in a deal where he was pretty explicitly buying residency to the point that immigration authorities tried to keep it a secret. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/6547471/Secrecy-over-...)
IP holder damages should take in consideration what the actual buying power of pirates is, not just multiply downloads by dvd costs, and copyright laws need a huge reform.
He's a modern day robin hood, people would prefer him to win over eg. disney... and disney is not doing itself a favour these days :)
One of the arguments the government used against Kim and Mega was that they implemented tech to identify and remove CSAM therefore they could have (but chose not to) do the same for material that violated copyright.
I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
> I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
Yep, especially compared to other people, who did worse (pedophillia-wise), like Polansky, etc.
> He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for the better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on his fanbase.
Yeah and there is Logan Paul living in US running pump and dumps, scams and other things. But he look nice and popular so he'll continue to do it without any prosecution. As well as many other YouTube personalities. After all they pay taxes to US so they can do it freely.
Again, not protecting Dotcom or like him as person, but he is not some war criminal to justify this kind of effort US put into trying to get him.
There is no evidence anyone who used their services would of paid. The "theft" is propaganda. In fact from the article itself it even says Mega had a notice and takedown system available to the rights holders. So once again what is it that was stolen?
>Anyway, this system was bullocks. It was just a poor lip service which they stalled and ignored the whole time.
I can't unsubscribe easily in one click ? They don't get to complain easily in one click. I can't get easily an email address or phone number to contact them ? They won't get contact info too. They had a taste of their own medicine. It's unfair if it's easier for them to take down my content than for me to appeal the decision.
Please site source where it says theft, since apparently it's a judicial fact. Since last I checked, it says a right was infringed, not theft.[0]. Specifically
"copyright holders, industry representatives, and legislators have long characterized copyright infringement as piracy or theft – language which some U.S. courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise contentious."
And also I'm unsure there is evedence it was ignored, it just seems like you are spewing more copyright propaganda. Might I dare to say they might be in fact lying?
Well last I checked words have meanings. And you needing to resort to ad hominen when facts state otherwise is telling, especially since I am the Great Gatsby of parties.
While I don't disagree with the idea behind the post, Kim is not exactly small fry. He is not as big as he once was, but he seems to be doing well money-wise.
sad to see that kind of comments in HN. I feel that 10 years ago there was more room for accepting that a political opponent should be free to speak up. now our educated masses are pushing for prison and extradition because they don't belong to the axis of good.... you def cannot be for opensource and its values and say things like that
On the other hand, the straming/video 'services', are literally stealing stuff you bought from them. How is that better? If there's a "buy"/"purchase" button, the movie is yours... it's not a "rent" button, where they can take it away whenever they want.
Kim is a modern day robin hood. Illegal, criminal, yada yada? Sure. Is he "bad" for the people? Well... that's very debatable.
Have you read the indictment? It makes a pretty strong case that he knew copyright infringement was the cash cow of his business model, structuring the business and lying to copyright holders in order to make the infringement more effective. Deleting links without removing the infringing content from the server is the big smoking gun to me - there’s really no legitimate reason to do that.
Perhaps we're using terminology differently. When I say "honest question", I mean a question that someone wants a straightforward answer to, perhaps as a starting point for further discussion.
"What is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?" is not such a question. Having been in such conversations before, if I responded with an honest answer like "I generally think the US is a pretty good country" or "I feel that it's important for criminals to be caught and punished", I'm quite confident that the original commenter would respond with personal insults and invective.
You're arguing legality trumps morality. We're in the opposite camp.
Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all things!
The comment you're responding to just speculates that he will escape to Russia based on his (very consistent) views and activism, there's no suggestion that he should go to prison because of them.
The comment he's responding to speculates that he is being paid by russia to post on twitter, as if people couldn't come to their own conclusions based on their own views and their own biases, which are very very strong against the US if you're Kim Dotcom with good reason.
lol. please stop. we know what being on a russian payroll means. just like we knew irak didnt have weapons of mass destruction. you tell yourself the lies because you know once the truth will come out there will be other matters to tend
It isn't 'a difference of opinion'. Dotcom has relayed Russian disinformation to an impressionable mass audience and heartily cheerled an invasion. It's not surprising that people who disagree with him politically find themselves amused or glad at the prospect of due process being served in this individual's case - where they might otherwise have been indifferent or grudgingly sympathetic.
Russia's quite open about it, and figures involved boast about it (as Margarita Simonyan and Vladislav Surkov both have). It's also trivially easy to compare the heavily digested and sanitised information that Russian affiliates feed their western audiences with Russia's domestic information space and notice the contradictions, for example, in outrages dismissed by their foreign servants but celebrated at home.
Kim is not a political opponent, he is a convicted criminal who now very deep in fake news, conspiracy myths and other lies. This is not someone who has just a different opinion on some things, but one with a long history of seriously harmful behavior.
Those are services, not people. And what illegal stuff are they actually doing? Yes, people abuse them for illegal content, but it's not their normal modus operandi. The companies are removing content on proper request and do not actively aid in spreading it.
And BTW since when has Kim any legit political stance? It has always been about money and fame for Kim. Political topics were never a serious part of him.
they did the same original thing he was blamed for. having a platform where people can upload stuff. but like you said he should be jailed for his beliefs because he shouldnt be free to spread his conspiracy theories. how about religious people shoudl we jail them too?
> they did the same original thing he was blamed for.
No, they did not. User abused the platform, and the companies removed it when notified. Kim didn't do that, instead he even made a business of it. Youtube especially had a historical case about this, when they were sued by Viacom(?) for not removing content well enough, which then resulted in the creation of the contentId-system. This was BTW around 5 years before MegaUpload and Kim were raided.
And as you mentioned ChatGPT, AI and content-usage is a completely different story, and a recent problem around loopholes in the existing laws. Maybe the companies will also be sued for this, maybe not, we will see..
also to your point about services removing illegal stuff here the NYT : “ During the first full month of the new ownership, the company suspended nearly 300,000 accounts for violating “child sexual exploitation” policies, 57 percent more than usual, the company said. The effort accelerated in January, Twitter said, when it suspended 404,000 accounts”
how come musk did it with 80% people fired why wasnt it adressed before? would you send the previous twitter ceo to jail?
Ah yes, the classic. Everybody who opposes american foreign policy is labeled. Tweet about opposing the genocide in gaza? Oh dont listen to him -- he is pro khamas. Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll.
I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it? Why would normal people throw baseless accusations like this? What is your motivation? What skin do you have in this game? Is your argument really "Kim Dotcom is an agent because he is opposing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and he is against a forever war in Ukraine"?
He is presumably some guy that youve never met that happens to be fighting against the US government and its copyright laws so why are you making these comments? Are you so passionate about copyrights because you are an artist that has lost money because of mega? What motivates you?
>I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it?
Thanks for articulating this, similar idea behind my sibling comment. Sadly i think the conclusion is that the vast majority of people are small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative the empire feeds them. Wish it wasn't like this
I agree that Kim Dotcom is not likely to be on Russia's payroll, but, as you said, he's simply small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative that empire feeds them.
Most likely he just hate US for a good reason and gonna support anything anti-US. In his particular case he probably just needs a country that not gonna extradite him to US no matter how bad the country is.
I just seriously doubt that likes of Dotcom, Musk or Trump need to be on Putin payroll. They just all have their own agenda to sell "strong russia, good putin" narrative.
tribalism. Probably on the democrat side and probably because Kim has been active on X. propaganda and its effects are literally that dumb and predictable (thus the NPC label).
Eh. I'm far-left and also think that the way he's been treated has been out-of-proportion to his actual crimes, and mostly predicated on his having pissed off powerful donors and not being Chinese. And I'd argue that there are plenty of people on the right who support him primarily because of his edgelord-iness, and not so much out of concern for an ever-expanding carceral state that deals out "justice" capriciously and disproportionately to whoever the oligarchs point at.
The concept itself ("being on the payroll") is archetypical head-in-the-sand American. All countries have intelligence assets on the payroll, and that absolutely includes the US, probably on the #1 spot.
Its like Americans complaining about how Chinese or Indian hit movies are covertly pro-Chinese or pro-Indian propaganda pieces. Ever heard of Hollywood?
> Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll.
Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll - just ignorant beyond measure.
Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now and I for one am happy that in my country it was the post-communists out of everyone who spearheaded the effort to have a deterrent in the form of NATO membership.
Finland and Sweden appear to agree, considering how they joined the alliance.
Why do people who oppose the war in Ukraine feel it's Ukraine's responsibility to roll over and die, instead of Russia's responsibility to turn around and go home?
This is usual tactics of Putins' shills. They all very much against war, but it's certainly must be stopped as is on the current frontline. So Ukraine not controlling part of it's territories and can't get into NATO, so Putin can prepare better for next invasion.
Unfortunately EU and US governments are not much better since they all put dumb limits on weapons usage and never supplied Ukraine enough weapons to actually get any superiority.
Is that truly what people who oppose the war believe? Or is that an easy strawman for you to dismiss the anti-war crowd in the eyes of those who dont know the history of this conflict?
What do people like you mean by "anti-war", exactly? Do you expect Ukraine to stop trying to liberate its people from a genocidal fascist invader who is holding them hostage? Do you want Ukraine to give up? Because, like, I suppose surrendering and being marched to the basement for your 9 grams of lead (that is, unless you accept being ethnically cleansed off your land and becoming a refugee) - well that also ends the war.
Do you deny that Ukraine has ethnic Russians in its territory? Do you deny that Ukraine has been crushing those Russians because of their dissent and their desire for self-determination?
I don’t expect them to stop fighting invaders. But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity. They didn’t. Why I wonder?
Do you deny that Ukraine has ethnic Russians in its territory?
This is a lot like asking, in regard to events of August 1939 -- "Do you deny that Poland has ethnic Germans in it territory"?
Of course it did, and in fact (though this is largely forgotten) Poland was abusing its German population somewhat (far more than anything Ukraine has ever done to its Russian-speaking population). But Hitler's claims of the extent of such abuses were wildly exaggerated and overdrawn. Just as the depiction above of Ukraine "crushing those Russians because of their dissent" (without providing specifics) is wildly out of touch with reality.
And his stated rationale of the need to to start a full-scale war in order "protect" this population was a big lie of course, created specifically to appeal to people gullible enough to believe such things. Putin's claims of the need to "protect" the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are equally baseless, and are designed with a similar intent in mind.
But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity.
Ukraine did engage with Russia on the issues -- they just weren't willing to bend over and give Putin everything he wanted. More specifically it definitely sounds like you were expecting the Ukrainians to agree to permanent large-scale territorial concessions. Because since 2014, that's been the bare minimum of Russia's terms for "avoiding war".
Why do we just dismiss what the Russians keep saying? They keep saying they don’t want US weapon systems on their border. I agree that there is lots of propaganda. And who knows if the elections in the autonomous regions were legit. But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
All I can say is we had similar situations in the past and decades after the fact we realized we were lied to. Too bad millions died I guess?
> Why do we just dismiss what the Russians keep saying? They keep saying they don’t want US weapon systems on their border.
If you listen to Russians, then you're left with an impression that they are being surrounded by US weapons on their borders. If you look at the numbers, then that turns out to be a blatant misrepresentation of truth. For example, the US fielded ~5000 main battle tanks in Europe at the end of the Cold War. In 2013, the last 10 were removed. The opposite is true: post-Cold War era has brought rapid disarmament to Europe, which has emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, because disarmament has limited how much and how quickly allies could help Ukraine.
> But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
Ironically, this is "obvious" only if you accept the premise that Russia is determined to violate the security of its neighbors.
I wasn't responding to what "the Russians" where saying; but rather to what you were saying. Which unfortunately was just plainly illogical and counterfactual (on that specific point, at least).
But to address one aspect of what you're saying now:
I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
This is broadly correct, and perfectly understandable.
However the war was never really about NATO expansion in the first place. And even if it were -- it definitely wasn't a rational response to that concern. And it certainly wasn't a response that the regime was "pushed" into taking.
The war was entirely optional for them - a failed gambit for enhanced "stature" and prestige on the global stage, basically[0]. Very much analogous to, and exactly as evil and stupid as the 2003 Iraq invasion, and supported by lies equally obvious and stupid. That unfortunately far too many otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent people were far to eager to believe.
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
I see plenty of room for debate on alternatives to the idea that Ukraine must keep fighting at the current pace until an unequivocal withdrawal (if that's what you mean by "supporting it endlessly"), and if you talk to Ukrainians directly you will very quickly find that they do as well.
However in order to even get there we first need to free ourselves of broken narratives in terms of what's actually been happening on the ground, and stop assuming that what the current regime says is interchangeable with what Russians in general say or think.
It would also be helpful to just completely forget about "mainstream media narratives", whatever those even supposedly are. When instead you can build your own far more reliable narratives from first principles (studying history, talking with people from there, or actually visiting the safer parts of the country if you like).
--
[0] Along with a desire on the part of the regime to promote and secure its longevity by keeping Ukraine out of Western economic and cultural influence, which it felt deeply threatened by, which is where the analogy breaks down somewhat (the US never had any specific obsession with Iraq in the way Putin has with Ukraine). And now that the initial gambit has clearly failed -- the war isn't about any of these initial motives; but rather a simple and desperate desire to save face, so that the regime can survive for a few more bloody years.
The main point being (as with the US in Iraq) its true aims were/are entirely different from its outwardly stated aims.
It's really upsetting to hear something so dehumanizing, have you ever interacted with russian people? would you say this about any other massive group of people?
Yeah but I don’t think that it is so simple. I would think nations are sufficiently deterred from establishing precedents which can later be used on them. Does Russia want to legitimize a recipe that could be used by Japan to snatch Russian territory? I don’t see them waving the Nuke card at all.
Look: the Russian invasion sucks for everybody involved and in particular the Russian and Ukrainian civilians. War might be good for many things but at the very least it is not obviously good for politics. I think it’s not controversial to expect that Russian leadership would have much preferred to develop influence through significant mutually beneficial relations with its neighbors.
What is to be done however if at some point a third party with infinite resources is those neighbors to an impasse on topics of national security to Russia? And after this those third parties start arming those neighbors with advanced weapon systems? Exactly what do you expect the US would do in a similar situation?
People wishing that the war would stop are not simply siding with an invader or a bully. They are being practical and recognizing a legitimate grievance of the Russians. Unless your position is that we live in a world where nations are unequal wrt security expectations you have to acknowledge the reality that the Russians have a legitimate claim to be upset about.
Why aren’t the other nations upset? There’s nothing legitimate about their grievances. Their super powers days are over, they just won’t believe it yet, and that delusion is costing Russia dearly. Instead of being a prosperous mid power, they insist on going for broke.
> How is it in the interest of the Ukrainians to trigger this invasion? Russia has always made it clear that Ukraine was a red line for what it sees as NATO encroachment on its borders.
This is completely false. "NATO encroachment" is a VERY recent talking point which is part of the neo-fascist narrative that Russia developed attempting to excuse its own inadequacies. You should google Foundations of Geopolitics which is basically a Russian version of Mein Kampf. This book is required reading for majority of Russian politicians, diplomats and high ranking military officials. Before Russia decided that it wanted to pursue a fascist state, NATO was not on its agenda at all.
Russia the fascist state? Russian citizens have greater free speech and expression rights than any E.U country, U.K, Australia, Canada or New Zealand.
In the U.K people are currently being jailed for years for mild social media posts. Hopefully the Axis of resistance will liberate the West. This American certainly hopes so.
>How dare you call Russia the fascist state when Russian citizens have greater free speech and expression rights than any E.U country, U.K, Australia and New Zealand.
So in Russia you can't support the country you're currently at war with. In the West you can't criticize a man who stabbed three children at a Taylor Swift concert.
Would you like to reconsider who has greater free speech rights?
American as apple pie. You're a hacker, see where the IP I'm commenting from is located. What hubris to think millions of Americans aren't completely fed up with this fascist empire. If you're still unsure, for 20 years now Congressional approval hasn't cracked 30%.
I'm sorry but the stats are readily available online. Far more people both in totality and per capita are arrested for saying things online in the non-U.S anglosphere than Russia.
Don't get me wrong, the United States wants the same for its citizens but our annoying Bill of Rights and Supreme Court have slowed the descent into tyranny.
Doesn’t even matter at this point? Do we have free speech when the boundaries of what is acceptable speech is defined by an oligarchy that is willing to suppress stories in all forms of media?
One thing seems certain to me: we were never free. Those in power will do as they please. Here or in Russia it’s all the same.
Right. Because we don’t have Snowden on the run. Because we don’t have a media empire that is suppressing every single Israeli war crime. Because we don’t have international bodies like the ICC being used against our enemies (eg Serbs) and being suppressed against our friends (eg Israelis).
Russia has its interests. It puts them above human rights. We have our interests and guess what we do the same.
Need I remind you that we fabricated reasons to invade Vietnam and Iraq and in the process we killed millions of civilians? Or do you need a list of all the governments we admit to have toppled over the years?
Our misguided belief that we occupy some moral high ground is objectively making the world a worse place. By our hands and by the fact that we are enabling other countries to act the same (eg Iran and Russia). How about instead we concretely define principles and standards that we apply uniformly? Why do we have to pretend like we are uniquely act with impunity on the global stage?
Russia is not a superpower if it can't even have air superiority on its own land and struggles to push beyond 150km from its own border, it's just a very nuclear armed nation thanks to the Soviet days.
As for the NATO enlargement narrative I don't know why people still try to push this when it's clear as water that Russia wants to annex more and more territory, even their conditions for ceasefire are mostly about Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.
So you believe Russia is simultaneously so weak that they can barely push out 150km beyond their borders and greedily eyeing their neighbors for annexation potential?
And are you saying NATO can’t be enlarging because Russia wants to annex territory so that means NATO hasn’t been enlarging?
So you believe Russia is simultaneously so weak that they can barely push out 150km beyond their borders and greedily eyeing their neighbors for annexation potential?
The way you speak about Russia is akin to the way an abuse victim would speak about their abuser - it's everyone's fault but Russia's that they invaded.
Also don't you dare make them lose their temper.
Russia isn't under threat from NATO, as it's a defensive alliance. They seem to understand that as well, as they pulled their air defense systems from the region bordering Finland.
> I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power.
The soviet union was a super power. If anything people realised that Russia's supposed power is mainly posturing.
And it was high time for that. In the past some western governments attempted a policy of appeasement - all it achieved was emboldening Russia.
It's useful to compare Russia with other countries.
Russia pop 145 million. GDP 2.24 Trillion.
Brazil, pop 205 million, GDP 1.92 Trillion.
Brazil isn't anyone's idea of a super power. Difference is Russia has or had a lot of Soviet cold war era weapons and weapons manufacturing. With the emphasis on the increasingly had.
So yes you are right. And I agree about the wife beater logic.
I see you've never seen Estonia or Latvia on a map. Nor realize NATO is already there. Why have they not been invaded while since 2008, Georgia and Ukraine have? Total mystery.
Sure. Or world hunger. Or building more schools and infrastructure in the developing world. Or generally investing in making technology accessible to improve outcomes for people.
> I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power.
Super power that cannot defend it's own borders during the hot war. I guess their superpower army too busy conquering Moon and Mars or far away galaxy.
And you know what's not happened when Ukraine started to capture Russia territory? Putin and his gang said nothing at all about nuclear weapons during last 10 days. Not even single hint even though he like to talk about them every time when his ass not in danger.
This is because they are criminals and bullies and these kind of people only understand force.
Good that Vietnamese did not realize US is a super power and will just nuclear bomb them when they get frustrated they are losing conventional war.
> A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are matters critical to its national security
If the "matters critical to its national security" involve unprovoked invading of other country, then it's good they don't care, even assuming your biased rhetoric has anything close to reality.
I forgot that Vietnam shares a border with the US, is very close to the US capital, and was in discussions with the US adversaries to stage their troops in Vietnamese territories.
Really? It’s absolutely not that Ukrainians are cooperating with western lunatics trying to undermine MAD by deploying nuclear capable weapon systems all over the Russian borders?
MAD prevented WW3. What do you think happens if the US thinks it can cause significantly more harm to China and Russia through first strikes?
Maybe you haven’t noticed recently how there already western weapon systems actively striking targets within Russia. Those same systems can deliver nuclear payloads.
So what your are saying is a falsehood based on the current realities on the ground.
I suppose any of the thousands of regular aircraft that Ukraine has "could" deliver a nuclear payload. But that would be a pretty stupid way to launch a first strike, and doesn't change the MAD equation in any way.
> if anything the story of Finland ascension into NATO supports the arguments that NATO is intentionally -- and aggressively -- pushing Russia to war
It's incredible the convoluted things people tell themselves to explain away the simple and obvious reality:
The only reason Finland and Sweden joined NATO was because Russia invaded Ukraine and started a genocide, while threatening Finland and Sweden with the same (and nukes).
> What would have been better for Ukraine? To find a way to make peace with Russia or to fight it for a decade? And please dont say this is for "democracy", "freedom", and "liberty".
The option is to let Russia freely commit genocide with rape, murder, and terrorism.
Only to then steer their target to the next country and do exactly the same.
I'm not a fan but do you have real proof of this conspiracy theory? It's very popular to accuse people of being on Russia's payroll now. Rather unfortunately it dumbs down the movement to hold Russia responsible for invading Ukraine.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The degree to which the propaganda works is alarming. They'll turn a blind eye to Ross Ulbricht, Snowden, the Patriot Act, etc. while wasting their time foaming at the mouth at made up stories about Russia. Unreal to see in this day and age, honestly - I mean you'd think the internet + a little critical thinking would have given these people a clue.
Which stories about Russia do you find made up, exactly? When my relative had to watch his neighbour being taken to a Russian torture chamber in Kherson, not to be seen for months, and then hearing his stories about daily beatings, electrocution, pulled fingernails and the like - was that made up? Are you one of those people who consider the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Ukrainians in Bucha "made up"?
Kim Dotcom, the Critical Thinker, does. But he curiously suspends critical thinking when pandering idiotic conspiracy theories about biolabs weaponizing birds. Gotta love these selective critical thinkers.
I have a hard time just convincing people in my company to buy a license for some software we arguably need. I literally can not convince them using any logic or facts, it's downright infuriating and I feel like I'm in a crazy world. You can't bring people to the watering hole, they have to get there on their own. And by that point, I've given up and have moved on. And even then, no amount of "I told you so" will have them listening to you next time around, they always just double-up on their own ideas and cope with the existence of any facts that contradict them. Oh and sometimes they forgot you even told them in the first place, and they make it seem like they thought of it first.
I know what you mean and I work with some smart people that also cannot be convinced with arguments unless they come from someone with a high social status. They have to fail to learn anything if they don't have someone around with a high social status to guide them.
Where in the article is Trump mentioned? The article is about extraditing a person, who could just fly to a USA country that doesn't have a extradition pact, such as Russia or China. Dotcom has been saying pro Russia war things on twitter, which is easy to read. So OPs comment is consistent with the theme of the article.
Equating it to possible Trump Russia connections however has nothing to do with the article.
what a bad stretch. You have no intellectual honesty. Kim has also said Trump things on twitter and we've spent literal billions on fake Russia-Trump in the last few years. And here is someone baselessly pushing Kim-Russia. Anyways, good luck on your weird mission to police any mentioning of Trump. Pretty dumb IMO
Kim DC is not a likeable or admirable person, but this vindictive pursuit seems even worse.
It appears very similar to the treatment of
Ross Ulbricht, Assange, maybe even Snowden?
These are the equivalent of white collar crimes (typical massive frauds from the finance sector, etc) but they are getting a blue collar punishment of decades in jail that a successful and persistent street drug dealer could receive, NOT the few years in comfort camp prison that white collar frauds usually get.
One of these things is not like the other. Ross Ulbricht was part of a murder for hire scheme, and was not a whistle blower or anything close to a reporter.
You're right that he wasn't charged, but: "For example, because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact commission the murders, believing that they would be carried out." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#cite_note-46
Just because something doesn't rise to the level of provability of getting charged and sentenced for it doesn't mean that you can't say with a high level of confidence it happened.
Corrupt, convicted ex government agents staged the murders, there is video evidence of some of them that they made for Ross to pay them. Which got them convicted.
Ross was not charged with that, wasnt charged with conspiracy to do that, wasnt put in front of a jury for that. Because the government would lose that case because of their corrupt agents and agencies (Baltimore FBI which hosted the skit) messing up the case.
This doesnt warrant a double life sentence for the crimes he was convicted of.
1 presidential candidate will commute (basically saying ~9 years is enough, ending this debate), 1 presidential candidate will pardon completely, 1 will likely do neither until the FreeRoss campaign learns how to do campaign contributions. Its only a matter of time as crypto savants gain position
I understand what you are saying, but I wonder if that is the right type of defense here. Each of those individuals could be separated from otherwise sympathetic audience by diving the audience( 'he is x$ and therefore bad' approach ).
Same here. Murder for hire is bad, but his prosecution was about just as bad[1] and one could argue that (edit) by using warrantless spying without any probable cause undermined US constitutional rights. In a grand scheme of things, it is better to have one criminal get away than trample on everyone's rights.
What they do have in common, however, is an inordinate amount of resources expended to punish them by the state..
So we're led to believe. But Ulbricht was identified via domestic NSA wiretaps; they used parallel construction to prosecute (oh yeh, the FBI just happened to stumble onto a Stackoverflow question of his years ago and used proper warrants against that!).
Why would I swallow any childish stories that the US attorney made up?
White collar crimes should be punished with the same vigor as blue collar ones. White collar crimes mostly steal money, at scale. Insufficient money is a huge cause of suffering—people don’t get to retire at early, they and their kids don’t get the opportunities they would have had otherwise.
You can be a drug dealer that doesn’t hurt anybody.
OK, but if you want to judge white collar crime and blue collar crime with the same yardstick, you have to put a price on human suffering. How much money do I have to embezzle so it's equivalent to a punch in the face? How much so it's equivalent to a murder? By a scale of suffering caused, I would argue that embezzling a very large sum can be much worse than an assault. On the other hand, not every murder causes the same amount of suffering.
Do you actually believe that or is this some sort of rhetorical point? This stretches my suspension of disbelief to be honest.
People can buy very addictive drugs from pharmacists (legal drugs are a huge contributor to the opioid epidemic), and there were doctors in some areas that were known for being extremely lax about that sort of thing.
Lots of the illegal drug dealers do sell really harmful stuff. But before it was legalized they sold weed…
We should not pretend our laws are perfect, they are always undergoing refinement.
Disagree. Someone who is well and truly addicted to drugs does, in fact, need it like the air they breathe. Drug dealers provide a necessary service to those folks where a lot (most?) of the "above the belt" services aimed at rehabilitation either fail completely or make matters actively worse.
There is a huge difference between a regulated and controlled system and your neighborhood methhead mixing up something in his kitchen to sell to the kids a couple of blocks over
I'd go along with unfair, but it does seem pragmatic to keep criminals who would harm anyone in striking distance away from the public, while only keeping criminals who would harm corporate and investor interests away from executive positions and boardrooms.
One of the things worse than a bad law is an inconsistently applied bad law, as that allows for it to be tolerated for longer and effectively enshrines the basis for the inconsistency as the true law of the land.
US Gov's revenge-deployment machine was first put in motion at the request copyright industry (which funds elections).
Through the 2000s and 2010s, legislators (and by extension LEO agencies) were extremely responsive to whims of copyright lobbyists. ex: ICE agents patrolling events for locals selling knock-off goods.
It was so pervasive, news orgs noticed it - and even covered some non-sensational incidents. Though I don't recall journalists ever following the money.
Seems to be pretty much how the US government operates on these high profile tech cases. They are going to turn you into a martyr.
Ross is a great example of this. He received a double life sentence + 40 years + no chance of parole. By comparison, El Chapo, a dude who most certainly ordered the deaths of many and imported billions of dollars of drugs, only got a SINGLE life sentence + no chance of parole.
"On June 30, 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. While most convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison, Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade and [...] allowed to leave the jail on "work release" for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week."
That's for a horrible crime. Not for allowing people to copy some audio and video files for entertainment purpose.
Bernie Madoff is notable because someone of his stature being pursued so vigorously is rare. If officials went after every financial industry criminal with the same energy, the financial industry would cease to exist. Likewise, executives who sign off on decisions that actually kill people (Boeing) rarely see jail time.
I assume they’re talking about hiding being the corporate veil and just getting a slap on the wrist. Embezzlers are caught and sentenced all the time but people on the board of directors get away with a fine and finger waggle for similar activities
You know how it is. You search someone's home, you set aside the evidence, and you promptly forget about it for 12 years. I dislike Kim Dotcom as much as the next gal or guy, maybe even more, but this is weird.
According to others in this thread, Kim posted pro Russian Twitter messages. Another pro-Russian commentator, Scott Ritter, had his house searched this week and had his UN Iraq WMD documents taken.
None of us has the necessary information. Ritter clearly overshoots massively in his Russia commentary and I disagree with almost all things he says about Russia.
On the other hand, you can find associations of both him and DotCom with LaRouche. And LaRouche is a mystery:
YouTube has a thousand to a million times more copyrighted content than Megaupload ever had. And no, not all of it is via partnerships with the copyright holders. Kim's problem apparently was that he didn't bribe Congress.
YouTube didn't bribe congress. They built significant tooling that gave the rights holders what they wanted, even beyond what the law required them to.
To this day, rights-holders don't even have to take legal action or issue a formal DMCA takedown to have videos taken down or siphon off the profits of those who use their content. It is even automated.
Google has had a massive lobbying effort for a long time, and donating to Congress is a part of it. If not for it, how is it that a takedown process wasn't sufficient for Mega, but it is sufficient for Google? How is it that the rights-holders didn't engage Mega into having such tooling?
Quite simple really. Merely having a takedown process isn't enough to comply with the law. It must actually be complied with. YouTube went above and beyond in this, not only complying with DMCA requests, but not even requiring them. Megaupload's takedown process was a sham. Yes, they had a page where DMCA requests could be submitted, but actual compliance was poor, and intentionally so.
Compliance is a critical part of the DMCA. Once a site knows about infringing content, they lose safe harbor provisions.
Also, how do you think lobbying Congress would even hypothetically help YouTube in court? The DMCA doesn't have any different provisions for YouTube than it does for Megaupload.
> how do you think lobbying Congress would even hypothetically help YouTube in court
With regard to Megaupload, this much is simple. The Justice Department can freeze an investigation under pressure from Congress. Whether an investigation comes to its conclusion or not is strongly under the influence of Congress.
YouTube was found to be in compliance with DMCA in federal court due to Viacom's case years before the DOJ bought a case against Megaupload. I don't know why YouTube would be worried about DOJ investigating something they had case law to support them on.
This quote from Kim, in the op, indicates the same:
> “[T]he obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited, and what copyright holders were able to remove with direct delete access instantly and without question.”
Yes, like many criminal defendants, he always claimed to be compliant with the law.
They did have an "Abuse Tool" available. The problem was, it was intentionally flawed. It was a sham, intended to make it appear like they were compliant, when they were not. It didn't remove infringing content. It just removed the link. Also, Kim intentionally limited content holders in the number of requests they could send. So, pirates using the system just created more links to the same infringing content.
This is a place where “intention” matters to the courts. A lot of these laws require the platform to make a “best effort” at preventing illegal uploads. YT is making an effort and claiming it’s their best.
I'd hope we could be nuanced enough to differentiate lobbying and bribing. "Bribing" is what you do in Russia or Tunisia when a cop pulls you over and you slip him $100 to get him off your tail. Lobbying, while potentially nefarious, has completely non-nefarious uses. Private corporations have a right to be involved in the legislative process.
If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
> If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
The problem with that is the lobbyist has a voice proportional to the money spent by the lobbyist's client. If, for example, I wanted to ban electric cars, I wouldn't even be able to get an appointment anywhere near Capitol Hill. Or if I did, nobody would listen. Just a pat on the head and perhaps some gallery passes to watch the legislature. If 1,000,000 of us across the US wanted that, we wouldn't get on Capitol Hill either. But if a car company or $special_interest_lobby wants a meeting -- they get it because those people are contributing millions to campaigns and PACs. Lobbyists even write many bills for congressmen.
If there was consideration on a federal ban for electric cars (or whatever,) then Tesla and the other car companies can write a letter to their congressman and have it ignored like the rest of us. And if they don't like it, then they can vote like the rest of us. They can even run advertisements trying to convince people to agree with them.
Money and lobbyists should not be able to amplify the importance of a particular viewpoint.
Paid lobbying should be illegal. It's one half step away from outright bribery. The other side of that coin is the administrative state official who makes rules favorable to a particular company, then "retire" from public service to take a highly paid, "consultant" role at the very company they helped. Or in Pharma especially, the so-called "Iron Triangle" -- https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3519281-is-there-an-i...
Lobbying and donations are just legalized bribery. As of 2024, the Supreme Court even strongly legalized financial gifts to government officials. Any distinction is morally tenuous.
You really need not look any further than this thread for what-about-isms and attack-the-man arguments. The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex leaves me disappointed. Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits", well I guess that's how meaningful fights should end, giving up because the adversity is too great or the fight has lasted too long. Shame.
If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.
But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.
Sure the world has changed -- it's somewhat like the world that many hackers invoked in the 2000s when they'd say "it's the industry that won't embrace digital -- the second they make it easier to watch/listen/access content than piracy the problem will go away".
That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.
The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).
I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.
> The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex leaves me disappointed.
The real trend on HN is low-effort comments like this that generalize about HN. How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?
> Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits" ... Shame.
But ... what happens to your point when your comment becomes top-voted like it is now? Is HN redeemed because apparently everybody on HN agrees with you that HN is terrible?
> US Industrial Complex
At this point I wish Eisenhower hadn't coined the famous phrase. Everything gets called some variation of Foo/Bar Industrial Complex which sounds smart and describes nothing.
I miss when this place was full of wide-eyed CS undergrads, now it's just "Exploits in Venture Capitalism". Everyone has grown up and gotten themselves high paying, boring adtech jobs so now they feel the need to defend surveillance capitalism and "intellectual property" at every turn. We used to make fun of illegal numbers and censorship efforts, now we support them. I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
HN has always had lots of startup content; in fact it started life as "Startup News". If anything, there is less such content here than there used to be.
Well, this site was started and is still run by YCombinator, so that tension has always been there, and is in fact part of what makes it so great. (I sympathize mostly with the wide-eyed undergrads though.)
I think the difference is that our goals with startups has changed. Money has always been important, but other things matter too. They still do, but I believe money has weighting that money has to the equation has significantly increased.
I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?
I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.
I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.
Perhaps, but also the new generation didn't know anything else. There's plenty of fresh grads where I work, here, and elsewhere, who just don't value that fight as much or see it as the winnable-struggle-against-the-empire like we did.
I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.
I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).
We've banned this account—first because you can't attack another user like that here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are; and also because your account has repeatedly been posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines in other places too.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I actually see a lot of comments, frequently, on this site pretending to hate surveillance capitalism and sticking up their noses at adtech, at every turn, particularly when used by some tiny little niche website that's just barely scraping by. This despite, presumably, many of these same people working for some of the biggest adsludge-pumping companies on the planet.
I'm willing to bet that there are a bunch of users here that don't work for those companies. Even more that might, but not in those departments. The latter might be more in line with what you're getting at, but we need to be careful casting too wide of a net. I want to convert those people, not push them away.
>Even more that might, but not in those departments.
So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?
It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.
> I want to convert those people, not push them away.
On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.
I'm not looking for a fight. I'm not sure why you decided to ignore the following sentence. If you want to cut comments apart with a scalpel you'll be able to find whatever you're looking for.
I'm convinced that online discourse is overrun with LLMs shilling for various corporations and governments based on how many sycophants and bootlickers suddenly appeared on every social media platform after chatGPT went public.
Or, stay with me here, you hold a viewpoint that most people don't hold?
Nothing wrong with that, and you should share your viewpoints freely. But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Blaming AI seems like using it as a balm for your cognitive dissonance.
My dude, there were already troll farms where actual people were paid to mass-produce social media posts pushing their employers' agendas before LLMs became viable. Do you really think they aren't going to take advantage of a new technology that lets them increase productivity and decrease costs?
And this isn't even something that's in contention, both of America's major political parties have accused the other of doing it.
> But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Okay sure man, I guess we'll just take your opinion as representing "the vast majority of Americans" and go carry on from there.
agree. riaa was a very effective distraction for what the offshore industrial lobby was accomplishing... everyone only talked about frivolous media when discussing TPP at the time.
but if you understand that you also understand what his point was even if clumping it wrongly under the misdirection of blaming riaa.
>The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex
Hacker News of all places! Never would have expected a website created by a billionaire venture capitalist to lean into intellectual property absolutism. Completely out of character for venture capitalist community to bend the knee to industry associations.
>You gotta use other sites if you prefer the company of ideologues with a backbone. Apologists and sycophants will outnumber you 10:1, here.
For one example of this in action, saying anything positive about cryptocurrency and being bombarded by the usual "it's a scam". "We need KYC and AML because governments are simply trying to keep us safe" "All transactions should be fully controlled" and so forth. Absurd.
A sweeping generalisation. Being a "hacker" is a multidimensional thing. Most people here have a hacker spirit when it comes to curiosity and willingness to learn. The only thing we don't have in common with you idea of a hacker -in general- is the anti establishment attitude.
The original definitions (before Phrack) were substantially different. From the Hacker's dictionary, for instance, we see:
> HACK n. 1. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
2. The result of that job. 3. NEAT HACK: A clever technique. Also, a brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch circa 1961. 4. REAL HACK: A crock (occasionally affectionate). v. 5. With "together", to throw something together so it will work. 6. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!" 7. To work on something (typically a program). In specific sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In general sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." (The former is time-immediate, the latter time-extended.) More generally, "I hack x" is roughly equivalent to "x is my bag". "I hack solid-state physics." 8. To pull a prank on. See definition 3 and HACKER (def #6). 9. v.i. To waste time (as opposed to TOOL). "Watcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 10. HACK UP (ON): To hack, but generally implies that the result is meanings 1-2. 11. HACK VALUE: Term used as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP has code to read and print roman numerals, which was installed purely for hack value. HAPPY HACKING: A farewell. HOW'S HACKING?: A friendly greeting among hackers. HACK HACK: A somewhat pointless but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell. [The word HACK doesn't really have 69 different meanings. In fact, HACK has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation a given HACK-token has depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar comments apply to a couple other hacker jargon items, most notably RANDOM. - Agre]
You're not telling me anything I don't already know, but if you want to be a part of "hacker culture" as it is colloquially understood, you can't be pro-establishment.
If your primary goal is corporatized profit, expect to be rejected by the community outright.
Considering there is already another person replying to this comment saying that 'hacker' doesn't really mean anti-establishment, sharing them here seems like a good way to get a wave of unsavory folks.
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...
There’s a substantial ongoing debate about how much responsibility a platform as for what users do on that platform. Nearly everyone in tech is affected by that.
The theatrics and drama of it is a silly distraction, but the fundamental questions seem worth following and discussing.
Interesting. I thought the appeal of piracy-related stories on HN was that there's a lot of piracy going on, as private individuals.
And also because some subset of those consider piracy a hobby, mission, or right, not only a pragmatic way to get the content they want.
But I guess some people could be interested in the platform responsibility angle.
However, when discussing obviously entirely piracy platforms, isn't the interest and dialogue different, than it is for general-purpose platforms with only a fraction of the user contributions being problematic, and good-faith efforts to mitigate those?
I bet that too is a ton of what drives interest, the platform angle was just the primary thing that came to mind now that that’s more the world I think about
The piracy discussion is also hugely fascinating; I’m sure a good portion of HN remember Napster and friends, and the endless discussions had about that. We don’t seem to talk about it a lot.
yeah I guess you just need to fund political campaigns for democrats to be in the good part of "the platform is responsible for what users do on here". seeing what Google and FB got away with its pretty obvious that USA is bending the law to remove political oponnents here with KDotCom and soon with Musk
When a owner of a file-hosting platform face the possibility of being extradited from their resident country to the US because they (allegedly) ignored DMCA takedown requests, it does seem like it could be of interest to many of us here.
DMCA which is not even a law in New Zealand, or indeed in most countries. If the US can extradite someone for ignoring DMCA takedowns, why couldn't Russia extradite someone for ignoring Russian censorship takedowns?
> why couldn't Russia extradite someone for ignoring Russian censorship takedowns
They can, in countries that have entered into extradition treaties with Russia. That's how treaties work.
In this case, the courts seem to think Dotcom was breaking both US and New Zealand law, and in the treaty New Zealand has with the US, they've agreed that someone could be extradited in those cases.
If Dotcom wasn't found to be breaking New Zealand law but only US law, it seems he wouldn't have been extradited.
They probably could if the host country agreed to it. It's just a matter of diplomacy. The US certainly doesn't have any special status, just better relationships, especially with the English-speaking countries.
I am not particularly sympathetic to Kim Dotcom personally; but: Intellectual Property is illegitimate, anti-social, immoral. We should oppose its enforcement, both within states and in international contexts.
I am reminded of Eban Moglen's "dot-communist manifesto" of 2003, worth a read:
There's also the matter of the USA being able to enforce its legal norms on people living in other countries, via instruments like extradition but also sanctions for less-friendly world states.
Basically, this is a win for big money interests and the powerful in the US. It was only a matter of time before New Zealand caved. Meanwhile the US has become a banana republic as demonstrated by the lawfare being waged against the Republican party and it's leading candidate for the presidential election.
For those supporting this change in position by New Zealand, when this erosion of rights used against you remember that you reap what you sow.
