I wonder if a time will come when the US will extradite the CEO of a hosting company for failing to filter content to the satisfaction of the proposed EU copyright law.
The explanation I've heard is that he had servers in the US, he paid people in the US, he made money from customers in the US by breaking the law in the US and therefore the US government position is that he is a criminal in the US and should face penalities here. Whether he did anything illegal in NZ or whether he should be extradited is obviously a question for NZ legal authorities.
I've always felt conflicted about his case myself. On the one hand I have natural sympathies for people using software to share information. I also think American prisons are terrible places and it would be awful to be imprisoned in one.
On the other hand, MegaUpload did seem like it was brazenly profiting off of other people's intellectual property. Communications referenced in the original indictment made it seem like the Mega employees agreed that their business was based on copyright infringement. That would also match my common sense intuitions.
Hopefully the NZ courts will reach a wise conclusion.
> MegaUpload did seem like it was brazenly profiting off of other people's intellectual property.
As much as US propaganda would like us to see it as a lame technicality, there is a very important distinction here: Megaupload was not directly profiting from copyright infringement, they were profiting by being a place for copyright infringement.
The reason they were so successful is that there wasn't a competing service in that niche other than BitTorrent.
Megaupload just hosted files. They are seen as some evil copyright-infringing business simply because they didn't actively filter those files. They considered the content of their users' data to be none of their business. I think it's ludicrous to prosecute them for such reasonable behavior.
I don't really see this as US propaganda. I think it's likely that MegaUpload was facilitating for profit copyright infringement. If copyright exists for any reason it should be to stop other people from selling your intellectual property for a profit.
MegaUpload did not just host files but they also made it easy to share access to those files and paid people who hosted files that were shared a lot.
MegaUpload knew about content that was infringing on copyright and did nothing about it (per the indictment). When MegaUpload was given take down notices they did not remove offending content but instead deactivated links to the content. If I torrented a movie, uploaded it on MegaUpload, then generated a hundred links to share on a hundred forum posts, I could share the movie, make money from Mega for doing so, and avoid take downs by generating new links.
Do you believe that intellectual property should be defended by law?
The key point for me is that even when MegaUpload was given a DMCA takedown notice, they intentionally made the simplest possible response that barely addressed the issue.
If they'd simply removed all the shared links for a file that matched an infringing file's hash, that'd be a huge difference in my mind. Of course, if they did this, they likely would have had far fewer paying customers...
If they blocked files by hash, users would simply upload slightly corrupt duplicates, and the situation would quickly get out of hand.
Megaupload's business model was to promote data consolidation (more downloads of the same file) and to provide good data retention (don't delete users' data). Now they are seen as evil for favoring that model instead of favoring heavy-handed DMCA takedowns.
The distinction I want to make here is that Megaupload itself was not directly infringing any copyright.
The problem you have with them is that they sided with their customers instead of copyright holders, doing what they believed the bare minimum to comply with the law.
I'm not saying that is not an immoral practice, or that Megaupload was completely following the law. I just want to make the distinction clear.
There are three parties:
1. Megaupload
2. Users
3. Copyright holders
What has happened is that copyright holders had a dispute with users, and demanded Megaupload handle that dispute in a way benefiting only the copyright holders.
Since when are data hosting services police? We have seen the problems caused by that mentality at YouTube, where fair use content is censored. My opinion is that it should not be the burden of a data hosting service to police copyright infringement.
I'm no lawyer but it appears to me that "exempted" countries don't need to prove NZ laws would have been broken [1]. The United States is an "exempted" country [2].
I'm surprised that he didn't try to relocate back to Germany years ago, as Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens. Did any of the court orders in New Zealand prevent him from (legally) leaving the country?
Where are you going to find a boat? How will you buy it?
Where are you going to sail to? There are exceedingly few countries with no extradition to the USA.
Who's going to sail the boat? It would be a foolish idea to try and sail across the ocean with no experience, especially if you have the physique of Kim Dotcom.
How are you going to access your money, most of which has been frozen?
How are you going to get into the country when you have no passport as it's been confiscated?
As an onlooker, it is very hard to understand how exactly this is “justice”, given that he hasn’t been to the US and the US has not been able to prosecute him under other country’s laws - these are not lawless countries but countries with robust legal codes and systems.
Every time this goes to court, the US just looks like a bully trying to throw their weight around.
Either he still has faith in the legal system, or he’s trying to show how corrupt it is - none of those reflect well on the other parties involved.
not surprising. We've the expert witness testimony of the RIAA and MPAA. Unless and until we extradite Kim to the US,we cannot properly dunk him to complete the tests for witchcraft.
The crime was quite sizeable involving millions of dollars, a lot of employees etc.. It was not so much 'grey' as you can't facilitate the distribution of copyrighted stuff - and they were brazen about it.
If it were some hacker or kid in a basement, then yes, it would be more nuanced.
I respect the fact we still need ongoing discussion about the meaning of copyright beyond our era ... but this guy I think was breaking the law.
I hope he doesn't get one of those 4000-year American style sentences, you know, where they give you '10 years' for each movie downloaded though ... that stuff the American prosecutors do is ridiculous.
Dropbox does not specifically encourage, promote or support the sharing of licensed content, moreover, they work with authorities where there is a problem. And of course, their 'boxes' tend not to designed for widespread public use. They are not hiding out in a jurisdiction wherein they can evade legal issues.
Obviously the definition for 'the line' that is crossed is going to be difficult, but it has to be somewhere.
I don't have huge faith that the American legal system is going to do well on this issue for thus single case, however, it's going to have to work it out over time.
As cases make it to the Supreme Court, hopefully there will be more clarity.
AFAIK, Megaupload did not promote our encourage sharing of licensed content. It just filled that niche better than any other site at the time.
Kim Dotcom may have chosen New Zealand for to evade legal issues, but I see nothing wrong with that. If you don't agree with one nation's laws, that is a perfectly valid reason to live elsewhere. He didn't just run his business there, he lives there.
If you want to know the difference between Dropbox and other DMCA protected services and Megaupload you should read the indictment[0]
Some highlights:
* The DMCA takedown tool didn't remove copyright content but rather only shortcode links to that content. The copyright content remained on the servers and uploaders could generate new links without re-uploading the content
* On the other hand when child porn or terrorism material were reported, they were correctly removed
* Megaupload knew and could see most of their referral traffic was from warez sites and talked about it internally
* They incentivized copyright content uploaders with payments and poached them from other warez file lockers
* They removed uploader names of copyright files from public pages to make it harder for investigators to track upload groups
* Employees of Megaupload would share warez/music/movies in internal emails with each other by searching Megaupload (a tool only available internally)
* In emails to uploaders that were part of their rewards program (where you get paid more the more your content is downloaded or viewed) they used scene release file sizes to describe reward steps
* In large payments to uploaders they'd leave internal comments like "lots of popular DVD rips", "keygens", "loads of pdfs - looks like scanned magazines" etc.
* Internal emails would ask about finding particular releases and ask someone to use the internal search to locate them - ex. “the sopranos is in French :((( fuck.. can u pls find me some again ?"
* Internal emails openly talked about which warez linking sites they liked the most - problems with viewing copyright content, fulfilling requests for copyright content, etc.
* They were booted from AdSense, other ad networks and multiple payment gateways/providers for knowingly provided paid access to copyright content
There is a lot more there - a lot of these aren't one off incidents. I come away from reading the indictement wondering how Megaupload and Dotcom ever thought they were going to get away with what they were doing - their attempts at protecting themselves, including their legal arguments at establishing plausible deniability and discussing the conspiracy so openly on plaintext emails on a US based server, were amateurish
Wow I had no idea about most of that, I always wondered why them and not RapidShare or some other host that I remember being common for warez file sharing back then.
Can't say I like the guy but as a society we have learned a fair bit from making him an example thus far. With Netflix and Spotify people don't need to be downloading dodgy MP3 files and whatnot, we have moved on from that era.
Prosecuting him is a bit like if the Police came after me now for routinely riding my bike down a one-way street ten years ago when the street has been subsequently updated to have a bike lane with the on-street parking removed and a Boris bike dock added. Yes I was wrong to have broken the law but things have changed.
I think they should go fully petty on him, take all his stuff and insist that he shed a few pounds for his own health. Make the conditions of his parole dependent on him not being 'plus plus size'.
I think MegaUpload and Napster were important in getting us to where we are now, which is not the wild west it was.
You're right we download high quality mp3 and videos, because as much as people prop up Netflix and Spotify they fall far short of having a quality library to browse, Spotify less so. Netflix tends to replace what quality shows with more and more junk each update
> The crime was quite sizeable involving millions of dollars, a lot of employees etc.. It was not so much 'grey' as you can't facilitate the distribution of copyrighted stuff - and they were brazen about it.
All the links to megaupload could be reported by copyright holders and taken down if I remember, I don't see any facilitation of piracy.
You might be technically correct, but for a service that mostly facilitates piracy, I don't think you can safely argue that strict compliance with certain codes ... should confer Safe Harbor to MegaUpload?
I mean that's technically exactly what the law says, isn't it? But I'm saying, by any other objective standard, MegaUpload was nothing but a great big den of facilitation of piracy. But if they followed the guidelines for Online Service Providers, why aren't they entitled to Safe Harbor?
> MegaUpload was nothing but a great big den of facilitation of piracy.
That's how many rightsholders see it, but that isn't the only perspective.
Megaupload promoted consolidation by promoting download count. If a file is being downloaded more often, it must be more unique. Consolidation is one of the best ways to save on data storage.
When they received takedown requests, they didn't just delete user data; they removed the link. This way they could brag about their data retention: users don't want to use a site that deleted their data because of alleged copyright infringement.
Those two features weren't really provided anywhere outside Megaupload and BitTorrent, so naturally Megaupload was very successful.
The copyright infringement was done by users, not Megaupload. Megaupload was taken down, and is fighting court battles because people want to compel it - and similar services - to police and enforce copyright.
Exactly and NZ citizens are left footing most of the bill. I actually blame the previous government because it's thanks to their policy making that he's here in the first place. Basically if you're rich enough you can buy your way into NZ bypassing a lot of the checks everyone else is subject to.
49 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadI've always felt conflicted about his case myself. On the one hand I have natural sympathies for people using software to share information. I also think American prisons are terrible places and it would be awful to be imprisoned in one.
On the other hand, MegaUpload did seem like it was brazenly profiting off of other people's intellectual property. Communications referenced in the original indictment made it seem like the Mega employees agreed that their business was based on copyright infringement. That would also match my common sense intuitions.
Hopefully the NZ courts will reach a wise conclusion.
The only conclusion up to NZ courts is about extradition; which has already been made. It's up to US courts now.
As much as US propaganda would like us to see it as a lame technicality, there is a very important distinction here: Megaupload was not directly profiting from copyright infringement, they were profiting by being a place for copyright infringement.
The reason they were so successful is that there wasn't a competing service in that niche other than BitTorrent.
Megaupload just hosted files. They are seen as some evil copyright-infringing business simply because they didn't actively filter those files. They considered the content of their users' data to be none of their business. I think it's ludicrous to prosecute them for such reasonable behavior.
MegaUpload did not just host files but they also made it easy to share access to those files and paid people who hosted files that were shared a lot.
MegaUpload knew about content that was infringing on copyright and did nothing about it (per the indictment). When MegaUpload was given take down notices they did not remove offending content but instead deactivated links to the content. If I torrented a movie, uploaded it on MegaUpload, then generated a hundred links to share on a hundred forum posts, I could share the movie, make money from Mega for doing so, and avoid take downs by generating new links.
Do you believe that intellectual property should be defended by law?
If they'd simply removed all the shared links for a file that matched an infringing file's hash, that'd be a huge difference in my mind. Of course, if they did this, they likely would have had far fewer paying customers...
Megaupload's business model was to promote data consolidation (more downloads of the same file) and to provide good data retention (don't delete users' data). Now they are seen as evil for favoring that model instead of favoring heavy-handed DMCA takedowns.
The problem you have with them is that they sided with their customers instead of copyright holders, doing what they believed the bare minimum to comply with the law.
I'm not saying that is not an immoral practice, or that Megaupload was completely following the law. I just want to make the distinction clear.
There are three parties:
1. Megaupload
2. Users
3. Copyright holders
What has happened is that copyright holders had a dispute with users, and demanded Megaupload handle that dispute in a way benefiting only the copyright holders.
Since when are data hosting services police? We have seen the problems caused by that mentality at YouTube, where fair use content is censored. My opinion is that it should not be the burden of a data hosting service to police copyright infringement.
[1] 25(3)(b) http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1999/0055/latest/D... [2] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/1999/0370/l...
Where are you going to find a boat? How will you buy it?
Where are you going to sail to? There are exceedingly few countries with no extradition to the USA.
Who's going to sail the boat? It would be a foolish idea to try and sail across the ocean with no experience, especially if you have the physique of Kim Dotcom.
How are you going to access your money, most of which has been frozen?
How are you going to get into the country when you have no passport as it's been confiscated?
And yes, someone like Kim Dotcom has the resources to try.
As an onlooker, it is very hard to understand how exactly this is “justice”, given that he hasn’t been to the US and the US has not been able to prosecute him under other country’s laws - these are not lawless countries but countries with robust legal codes and systems.
Every time this goes to court, the US just looks like a bully trying to throw their weight around.
Either he still has faith in the legal system, or he’s trying to show how corrupt it is - none of those reflect well on the other parties involved.
He still seems to be living comfortably. I see him driving around in various G Wagons on a regular basis.
Not sure why you even typed that, honestly.
One could argue they avoid breakup by virtue of influence, but that's long after the fact of 'being successful'.
https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/799275467266105344?lang...
The plan has been hatched.
If it were some hacker or kid in a basement, then yes, it would be more nuanced.
I respect the fact we still need ongoing discussion about the meaning of copyright beyond our era ... but this guy I think was breaking the law.
I hope he doesn't get one of those 4000-year American style sentences, you know, where they give you '10 years' for each movie downloaded though ... that stuff the American prosecutors do is ridiculous.
Dropbox does not specifically encourage, promote or support the sharing of licensed content, moreover, they work with authorities where there is a problem. And of course, their 'boxes' tend not to designed for widespread public use. They are not hiding out in a jurisdiction wherein they can evade legal issues.
Obviously the definition for 'the line' that is crossed is going to be difficult, but it has to be somewhere.
I don't have huge faith that the American legal system is going to do well on this issue for thus single case, however, it's going to have to work it out over time.
As cases make it to the Supreme Court, hopefully there will be more clarity.
Kim Dotcom may have chosen New Zealand for to evade legal issues, but I see nothing wrong with that. If you don't agree with one nation's laws, that is a perfectly valid reason to live elsewhere. He didn't just run his business there, he lives there.
Some highlights:
* The DMCA takedown tool didn't remove copyright content but rather only shortcode links to that content. The copyright content remained on the servers and uploaders could generate new links without re-uploading the content
* On the other hand when child porn or terrorism material were reported, they were correctly removed
* Megaupload knew and could see most of their referral traffic was from warez sites and talked about it internally
* They incentivized copyright content uploaders with payments and poached them from other warez file lockers
* They removed uploader names of copyright files from public pages to make it harder for investigators to track upload groups
* Employees of Megaupload would share warez/music/movies in internal emails with each other by searching Megaupload (a tool only available internally)
* In emails to uploaders that were part of their rewards program (where you get paid more the more your content is downloaded or viewed) they used scene release file sizes to describe reward steps
* In large payments to uploaders they'd leave internal comments like "lots of popular DVD rips", "keygens", "loads of pdfs - looks like scanned magazines" etc.
* Internal emails would ask about finding particular releases and ask someone to use the internal search to locate them - ex. “the sopranos is in French :((( fuck.. can u pls find me some again ?"
* Internal emails openly talked about which warez linking sites they liked the most - problems with viewing copyright content, fulfilling requests for copyright content, etc.
* They were booted from AdSense, other ad networks and multiple payment gateways/providers for knowingly provided paid access to copyright content
There is a lot more there - a lot of these aren't one off incidents. I come away from reading the indictement wondering how Megaupload and Dotcom ever thought they were going to get away with what they were doing - their attempts at protecting themselves, including their legal arguments at establishing plausible deniability and discussing the conspiracy so openly on plaintext emails on a US based server, were amateurish
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/meg...
...made me chuckle.
Can't say I like the guy but as a society we have learned a fair bit from making him an example thus far. With Netflix and Spotify people don't need to be downloading dodgy MP3 files and whatnot, we have moved on from that era.
Prosecuting him is a bit like if the Police came after me now for routinely riding my bike down a one-way street ten years ago when the street has been subsequently updated to have a bike lane with the on-street parking removed and a Boris bike dock added. Yes I was wrong to have broken the law but things have changed.
I think they should go fully petty on him, take all his stuff and insist that he shed a few pounds for his own health. Make the conditions of his parole dependent on him not being 'plus plus size'.
I think MegaUpload and Napster were important in getting us to where we are now, which is not the wild west it was.
All the links to megaupload could be reported by copyright holders and taken down if I remember, I don't see any facilitation of piracy.
I mean that's technically exactly what the law says, isn't it? But I'm saying, by any other objective standard, MegaUpload was nothing but a great big den of facilitation of piracy. But if they followed the guidelines for Online Service Providers, why aren't they entitled to Safe Harbor?
That's how many rightsholders see it, but that isn't the only perspective.
Megaupload promoted consolidation by promoting download count. If a file is being downloaded more often, it must be more unique. Consolidation is one of the best ways to save on data storage.
When they received takedown requests, they didn't just delete user data; they removed the link. This way they could brag about their data retention: users don't want to use a site that deleted their data because of alleged copyright infringement.
Those two features weren't really provided anywhere outside Megaupload and BitTorrent, so naturally Megaupload was very successful.
The copyright infringement was done by users, not Megaupload. Megaupload was taken down, and is fighting court battles because people want to compel it - and similar services - to police and enforce copyright.