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This probably goes against popular HN opinion, but good. I'm glad. He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyri

This probably goes against popular HN opinion, but good. I'm glad. He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyright infringing. He deserves prison time.

drdeca 11y ago
What are your views on how it relates to the sovereignty of a nation?
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  New Zealand is a sovereign nation. One that has laws which established residency for Kim Dotcom. And one that has signed international treaties with other sovereign nations. New Zealand has used their own judicial system to reach this decision. They are behaving in accordance to their own laws and agreements they were willing participants to. In short, there's nothing wrong here. Not in the slightest.
  - zorpner 11y ago
    Don't conflate lawful/unlawful with right/wrong -- it always leads to incoherent positions.
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      I've not.
      - it_learnses 11y ago
        Yes you have.
      - eliudnir 11y ago
        - I'm glad. He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyright infringing. He deserves prison time. Riiiiight.... Not conflating at all....
        forrestthewoods 11y ago
        It is my opinion that Kim Dotcom's actions are both unlawful and wrong. They could have been unlawful but not wrong. Or lawful but wrong. Or even lawful and not wrong. However it is my opinion that they are simultaneously unlawful and wrong. Both the unlawfulness and wrongness are arguable on their own terms and merits without reference to the other. You're free to disagree with me. You may hold a different opinion. That's perfectly fine. However a dissenting opinion does not mean I conflated the situation. It does not mean that I'm acting irrationally. It's simple a different opinion. I don't mind downvotes for disagreeing with the HN HiveMind.
        vacri 11y ago
        > I don't mind downvotes for disagreeing with the HN HiveMind. When you have to hedge your comments like this, it's generally because your arguments are weak.
        88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
        Your opinions by themselves are irrelevant. I care why I should agree with you. Convince me. Give it a try. That's the point of HN. If I just wanted to hear what strangers think without any discussion of the larger issues, I'd be on reddit. So NZ has laws and treaties. Great. Should they? What's the tradeoff? Is the prosecution of someone who is clearly guilty allowing a greater evil to occur? Is the copyright system and corporate influence of governments a problem? I would have loved to hear the answers to any of these questions, but what I got was essentially "he is a criminal" and "laws shouldn't be broken". Sure.
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      Most people would agree that profiting off somebody else's labor without their permission and without remuneration is wrong, and hence it is correct that it is unlawful. I see no incoherence in this particular case. Unfortunately, to many on HN, when people freely take the information created by content creators it's "disruption of outdated business models", but when the NSA freely takes their own information it's an "invasion of privacy". They simply don't realize that everybody would like to control the spread of information that is significant to themselves. This is why certain laws exist, yet they denounce some laws (such as copyright) as "wrong". The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
  - philliphaydon 11y ago
    As a kiwi. This entire case makes me sick. This should have been thrown out of court a long time ago. This is a political move and nothing else. It's NZ on its knees sucking off the United States. From day 1 it's been illegal. Hidden process, and laws changed to make the process more legal. I hate my country now.
    - craigds 11y ago
      This is exactly how I feel about it. It's not just this case obviously. I used to be proud to be a New Zealander, but the last 5-10 years have made it dreadfully obvious we're actually being operated by foreign and commercial interests, and local/national leaders have no interest in changing that. Sure, it's probably not as bad as certain other places, but it no longer fills me with pride. I'm tired of this country :(
      - vacri 11y ago
        I went to NZ in January, and I was a bit sad how much traction the LotR films had gained as 'proxy for kiwiness'. From the airline to the airport to posters and promotional material everywhere; on city streets, in supermarkets... it almost felt like LotR had become part of the national psyche, that LotR was NZ, rather than something cool that NZ had done. I imagine it's waned a bit by now, though.
    - feelix 11y ago
      As another kiwi I couldn't agree more. It has been sickening to watch NZ bend over backwards to serve the USA. This has nothing to do with copyright infringement, and everything to do with bending over for the USA to maintain its benefits.
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      Would you rather your country act as a safe haven to criminals in exchange for money?
      - philliphaydon 11y ago
  - xupybd 11y ago
    What he did should not be legal here. But he may have been clever enough to be at least in the grey area of the law. At least the law in NZ. From a strictly moral standpoint, he was ripping off the copyright holders no doubt and should not have been able to get away with it. The problem is he is getting extradited on these parts of the treaty: Receiving and transporting any money, valuable securities, or other property knowing the same to have been unlawfully obtained. … Obtaining property, money, or valuable securities by false pretenses or by conspiracy to defraud the public or any person by deceit or falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether such deceit or falsehood or any fraudulent means would or would not amount to a false pretense. I'm not sure you can argue that he did that, and if that is the case, you have to ask what is going on here? Of course, there is much to this that I don't know, but still it's a bit fishy.
- bmh_ca 11y ago
  The name for the concern about infringement upon sovereignty by arresting a citizen, in this case, in another state is "extraterritoriality". There is a presumption against extraterritoriality. In other words, it is presumed that in a sovereign state the laws of other sovereigns do not apply. The exception to the presumption against extraterritoriality is agreement among states or a reciprocal judicial respect. The agreement is usually a treaty. The reciprocal respect is called "comity". There are other exceptions to the presumption against extraterritoriality, but I do not think they apply here. I have not looked at the details, but New Zealand and the U.S.A. must have an extradition treaty or otherwise the judge determining extradition believes that the judicial system in the U.S.A. is "comparable" (i.e. comity applies). The case looks appealable. So long as the independence of the judiciary is not impugned, neither is the sovereignty of New Zealand, and they may extradite as they feel fit.
Mandatum 11y ago
I don't believe copyright infringement should be extraditable.
- philliphaydon 11y ago
  It's not. It's the other charges they slapped on top to justify it.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Ahh, so they're fraudulently charging him in order to justify it. Why haven't the US attorneys responsible for this been disbarred?
    - fixermark 11y ago
      Because the charges aren't fraudulent. They're dependent upon the secondary copyright infringement charge, but racketeering and money laundering are quite serious.
      - leereeves 11y ago
        Why should racketeering and money laundering be more serious than the underlying crimes? Those charges seem serious because they're associated with organized crime, but that's not the case here.
jay_kyburz 11y ago
Should be locked up next door to the guys that started YouTube.
colindean 11y ago
What was the method for determining the value of the loss?
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Considering there isn't a way to calculate the amount of money lost due to piracy in any accurate way it's essentially a made up number. Are the people who downloaded their content from mega likely to purchase the content if it isn't available from mega or is it more likely they'd use yet another piracy service?
- ikeboy 11y ago
  I believe they were referring to the profit by Megaupload, not the loss by infringed-upon rights-holders.
nawtacawp 11y ago
How does the prison term benefit those who were the victim of his crime? imho Seems more of a civil rather than criminal issue. I guess the threat of prison could be seen as a deterrent to others.
foxylad 11y ago
I must admit I'm surprised at this verdict. I agree he probably has broken US copyright law, but the crown also broke several laws while conducting the case - data from his servers was sent to the US without legal authorisation, for instance. From a non-legal perspective, many Kiwis are uneasy at the level of force that the police used in the raid, and also at just how far NZ police bent over backwards at the behest of an overseas commercial entity.
- xupybd 11y ago
  Yeah, that is the thing, as a Kiwi, I'm very uneasy about the influence of US law in NZ. I've got no problem with dot com going to Jail, but under the laws of the countries he does business in. They are stretching the extradition treaty pretty far on this one. No one is saying Kim is a saint, but I'd like to think as a New Zeland citizen my country would not give me up the US for breaking US laws, while on NZ soil.
specialp 11y ago
I think people here do not really remember or weren't around when Kim Dotcom was not internet hero of piracy, but he was "Kimble" with a website showing him in jets and with women. He has basically lived his whole life with schemes of dubious legality all to profit himself. He stole credit card information, and ran pump and dump schemes. I don't really like how the arm of US law is so long, but I also do not like Kimble very much either. He was too blatant and when you run a piracy scheme where everyone and their grandmothers can easily access it, it is going to be a matter of international diplomacy. The entertainment industry is a large export for the USA, so when it gets to a certain scale there will be diplomatic pressure. He was greedy and is now paying the price. Edit: In before the extolling the legitimate use of Megaupload... Let's face it, a vast majority of the business, traffic, and links there were for pirated content. If it were not for the proliferation of pirated content on there, he would have made a fraction of the money he made.
- murricaFsckYeah 11y ago
  Google (youtube) profits from "piracy", and yet they still are there. In fact, you could "pirate" anything and use cloud services to store illegal content. But no one is blaming the companies that provide "cloud" services for this piracy... All of this is what people call "hypocrisy".
downandout 11y ago
And Google has made billions from infringing content through YouTube. Are you going to say that Larry and Sergey should be arrested too?
- fixermark 11y ago
  There are significant differences. For starters, YouTube worked with the government to establish a framework for making copyright management even vaguely tractable online where it wasn't before. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en Kim Dotcom, in contrast, basically tried to thumb his nose at several hundred years of intellectual property law shared among the former members of the British Empire. That's not going to win you any friends among those who enforce those laws.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > Kim Dotcom, in contrast, basically tried to thumb his nose at several hundred years of intellectual property law shared among the former members of the British Empire. That's not going to win you any friends among those who enforce those laws. You would think not existing in the jurisdiction would be enough. Apparently not.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  Intent is a thing that exists in law. But then again, so is jurisdiction...
trhway 11y ago
>He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyright infringing. He deserves prison time. i'm sure that scumbag violated a lot of Saudi Arabia and Russian laws too (until of course he has all these years been a model Muslim as well as Russian patriot simultaneously). Why do you think infringement of US copyright takes precedence over violation of the Saudi Arabia or Russian laws? "He's scumbag who laughed at a caricature about prophet Mohammad. He deserves prison time." - does it sound ok to you?

drdeca 11y ago

What are your views on how it relates to the sovereignty of a nation?

forrestthewoods 11y ago
New Zealand is a sovereign nation. One that has laws which established residency for Kim Dotcom. And one that has signed international treaties with other sovereign nations. New Zealand has used their own judicial system to reach this decision. They are behaving in accordance to their own laws and agreements they were willing participants to. In short, there's nothing wrong here. Not in the slightest.
- zorpner 11y ago
  Don't conflate lawful/unlawful with right/wrong -- it always leads to incoherent positions.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    I've not.
    - it_learnses 11y ago
      Yes you have.
    - eliudnir 11y ago
      - I'm glad. He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyright infringing. He deserves prison time. Riiiiight.... Not conflating at all....
      - forrestthewoods 11y ago
        It is my opinion that Kim Dotcom's actions are both unlawful and wrong. They could have been unlawful but not wrong. Or lawful but wrong. Or even lawful and not wrong. However it is my opinion that they are simultaneously unlawful and wrong. Both the unlawfulness and wrongness are arguable on their own terms and merits without reference to the other. You're free to disagree with me. You may hold a different opinion. That's perfectly fine. However a dissenting opinion does not mean I conflated the situation. It does not mean that I'm acting irrationally. It's simple a different opinion. I don't mind downvotes for disagreeing with the HN HiveMind.
        vacri 11y ago
        > I don't mind downvotes for disagreeing with the HN HiveMind. When you have to hedge your comments like this, it's generally because your arguments are weak.
        88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
        Your opinions by themselves are irrelevant. I care why I should agree with you. Convince me. Give it a try. That's the point of HN. If I just wanted to hear what strangers think without any discussion of the larger issues, I'd be on reddit. So NZ has laws and treaties. Great. Should they? What's the tradeoff? Is the prosecution of someone who is clearly guilty allowing a greater evil to occur? Is the copyright system and corporate influence of governments a problem? I would have loved to hear the answers to any of these questions, but what I got was essentially "he is a criminal" and "laws shouldn't be broken". Sure.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    Most people would agree that profiting off somebody else's labor without their permission and without remuneration is wrong, and hence it is correct that it is unlawful. I see no incoherence in this particular case. Unfortunately, to many on HN, when people freely take the information created by content creators it's "disruption of outdated business models", but when the NSA freely takes their own information it's an "invasion of privacy". They simply don't realize that everybody would like to control the spread of information that is significant to themselves. This is why certain laws exist, yet they denounce some laws (such as copyright) as "wrong". The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
- philliphaydon 11y ago
  As a kiwi. This entire case makes me sick. This should have been thrown out of court a long time ago. This is a political move and nothing else. It's NZ on its knees sucking off the United States. From day 1 it's been illegal. Hidden process, and laws changed to make the process more legal. I hate my country now.
  - craigds 11y ago
    This is exactly how I feel about it. It's not just this case obviously. I used to be proud to be a New Zealander, but the last 5-10 years have made it dreadfully obvious we're actually being operated by foreign and commercial interests, and local/national leaders have no interest in changing that. Sure, it's probably not as bad as certain other places, but it no longer fills me with pride. I'm tired of this country :(
    - vacri 11y ago
      I went to NZ in January, and I was a bit sad how much traction the LotR films had gained as 'proxy for kiwiness'. From the airline to the airport to posters and promotional material everywhere; on city streets, in supermarkets... it almost felt like LotR had become part of the national psyche, that LotR was NZ, rather than something cool that NZ had done. I imagine it's waned a bit by now, though.
  - feelix 11y ago
    As another kiwi I couldn't agree more. It has been sickening to watch NZ bend over backwards to serve the USA. This has nothing to do with copyright infringement, and everything to do with bending over for the USA to maintain its benefits.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Would you rather your country act as a safe haven to criminals in exchange for money?
    - philliphaydon 11y ago
- xupybd 11y ago
  What he did should not be legal here. But he may have been clever enough to be at least in the grey area of the law. At least the law in NZ. From a strictly moral standpoint, he was ripping off the copyright holders no doubt and should not have been able to get away with it. The problem is he is getting extradited on these parts of the treaty: Receiving and transporting any money, valuable securities, or other property knowing the same to have been unlawfully obtained. … Obtaining property, money, or valuable securities by false pretenses or by conspiracy to defraud the public or any person by deceit or falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether such deceit or falsehood or any fraudulent means would or would not amount to a false pretense. I'm not sure you can argue that he did that, and if that is the case, you have to ask what is going on here? Of course, there is much to this that I don't know, but still it's a bit fishy.
bmh_ca 11y ago
The name for the concern about infringement upon sovereignty by arresting a citizen, in this case, in another state is "extraterritoriality". There is a presumption against extraterritoriality. In other words, it is presumed that in a sovereign state the laws of other sovereigns do not apply. The exception to the presumption against extraterritoriality is agreement among states or a reciprocal judicial respect. The agreement is usually a treaty. The reciprocal respect is called "comity". There are other exceptions to the presumption against extraterritoriality, but I do not think they apply here. I have not looked at the details, but New Zealand and the U.S.A. must have an extradition treaty or otherwise the judge determining extradition believes that the judicial system in the U.S.A. is "comparable" (i.e. comity applies). The case looks appealable. So long as the independence of the judiciary is not impugned, neither is the sovereignty of New Zealand, and they may extradite as they feel fit.

Mandatum 11y ago

I don't believe copyright infringement should be extraditable.

philliphaydon 11y ago
It's not. It's the other charges they slapped on top to justify it.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Ahh, so they're fraudulently charging him in order to justify it. Why haven't the US attorneys responsible for this been disbarred?
  - fixermark 11y ago
    Because the charges aren't fraudulent. They're dependent upon the secondary copyright infringement charge, but racketeering and money laundering are quite serious.
    - leereeves 11y ago
      Why should racketeering and money laundering be more serious than the underlying crimes? Those charges seem serious because they're associated with organized crime, but that's not the case here.

jay_kyburz 11y ago

Should be locked up next door to the guys that started YouTube.

colindean 11y ago

What was the method for determining the value of the loss?

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Considering there isn't a way to calculate the amount of money lost due to piracy in any accurate way it's essentially a made up number. Are the people who downloaded their content from mega likely to purchase the content if it isn't available from mega or is it more likely they'd use yet another piracy service?
ikeboy 11y ago
I believe they were referring to the profit by Megaupload, not the loss by infringed-upon rights-holders.

nawtacawp 11y ago

How does the prison term benefit those who were the victim of his crime? imho Seems more of a civil rather than criminal issue. I guess the threat of prison could be seen as a deterrent to others.

foxylad 11y ago

I must admit I'm surprised at this verdict. I agree he probably has broken US copyright law, but the crown also broke several laws while conducting the case - data from his servers was sent to the US without legal authorisation, for instance. From a non-legal perspective, many Kiwis are uneasy at the level of force that the police used in the raid, and also at just how far NZ police bent over backwards at the behest of an overseas commercial entity.

xupybd 11y ago
Yeah, that is the thing, as a Kiwi, I'm very uneasy about the influence of US law in NZ. I've got no problem with dot com going to Jail, but under the laws of the countries he does business in. They are stretching the extradition treaty pretty far on this one. No one is saying Kim is a saint, but I'd like to think as a New Zeland citizen my country would not give me up the US for breaking US laws, while on NZ soil.

specialp 11y ago

I think people here do not really remember or weren't around when Kim Dotcom was not internet hero of piracy, but he was "Kimble" with a website showing him in jets and with women. He has basically lived his whole life with schemes of dubious legality all to profit himself. He stole credit card information, and ran pump and dump schemes. I don't really like how the arm of US law is so long, but I also do not like Kimble very much either. He was too blatant and when you run a piracy scheme where everyone and their grandmothers can easily access it, it is going to be a matter of international diplomacy. The entertainment industry is a large export for the USA, so when it gets to a certain scale there will be diplomatic pressure. He was greedy and is now paying the price. Edit: In before the extolling the legitimate use of Megaupload... Let's face it, a vast majority of the business, traffic, and links there were for pirated content. If it were not for the proliferation of pirated content on there, he would have made a fraction of the money he made.

murricaFsckYeah 11y ago
Google (youtube) profits from "piracy", and yet they still are there. In fact, you could "pirate" anything and use cloud services to store illegal content. But no one is blaming the companies that provide "cloud" services for this piracy... All of this is what people call "hypocrisy".

downandout 11y ago

And Google has made billions from infringing content through YouTube. Are you going to say that Larry and Sergey should be arrested too?

fixermark 11y ago
There are significant differences. For starters, YouTube worked with the government to establish a framework for making copyright management even vaguely tractable online where it wasn't before. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en Kim Dotcom, in contrast, basically tried to thumb his nose at several hundred years of intellectual property law shared among the former members of the British Empire. That's not going to win you any friends among those who enforce those laws.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Kim Dotcom, in contrast, basically tried to thumb his nose at several hundred years of intellectual property law shared among the former members of the British Empire. That's not going to win you any friends among those who enforce those laws. You would think not existing in the jurisdiction would be enough. Apparently not.
lazaroclapp 11y ago
Intent is a thing that exists in law. But then again, so is jurisdiction...

trhway 11y ago

>He's a scumbag who profited TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS off content that he knew to be copyright infringing. He deserves prison time. i'm sure that scumbag violated a lot of Saudi Arabia and Russian laws too (until of course he has all these years been a model Muslim as well as Russian patriot simultaneously). Why do you think infringement of US copyright takes precedence over violation of the Saudi Arabia or Russian laws? "He's scumbag who laughed at a caricature about prophet Mohammad. He deserves prison time." - does it sound ok to you?