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I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobb

I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists). The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge/jury). Mis-using international racketeering laws and cooperation agreements between agencies to pursue online software pirates is not what these systems were created for. Another example is Kim Dotcom. He may indeed be liable for significant damages (I don't know) but the MPAA designed their attack knowing that the prosecution itself would inflict massive punishment (ending the company, incarcerating or confining the execs) before it ever got to court. It's a clear abuse of the global justice system and a waste of its resources. And all of that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs. Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. And it's also been shown that the majority of users will pay reasonable prices for convenient media access via subscription or purchase (Netflix, Spotify, ITunes, etc). Despite "crying poor", the music industry is now back to making more than it ever did in the era of $18 CDs, with more (and happier) customers.

SllX 6y ago
I’m not disagreeing in principle, but there are criminal statutes on the books put there by Congress for copyright infringement, and it is the Federal government’s job to enforce these laws.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I don't think New Zealand has a "Congress"? You're not trying to say USA has the right to make laws in other countries are you? I mean I know USA does this, but it seems indefensible?
  - jjcon 6y ago
    The US (like every other country) negotiates agreements with other countries to handle crimes committed against persons or entities in their jurisdiction. This is nothing new or unique.
  - unishark 6y ago
    According to the article, court documents list victims and crimes occurring in New York and New Jersey. Supposedly this group misled distributors there into giving them copies of movies which had not been released.
  - SllX 6y ago
    mrandish’s comment had three paragraphs, but I was mainly responding to the part of it that was concerned with US law, not the Kim Dotcom fiasco. New Zealand does however have a criminal statute on their books for copyright infringement for commercial gain, and an extradition treaty with the United States. If your concerns are the activities of the American Federal government, you take that up with the US Congress for writing the law. If your concerns are the activities of the New Zealand government, then take that up with the New Zealand Parliament; but today’s news largely concerned a Trans-Atlantic multi-country operation and an indictment filed in the US Southern District of New York in which the acting authority is the United States, not New Zealand.
tzs 6y ago
Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They actually reprimanded employees if they actually took something down for real. Go find the court papers for the indictment. They include a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other top executives that show how the place actually worked.
- toyg 6y ago
  mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal. I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotcom allegedly/apparently made.
  - Y_Y 6y ago
    You're absolutely right that these two things can be true at once. I commend you for your level-headed evaluation and I wish there were more comments like yours.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    Let me say as an artist who has watched his hard work being openly pirated, I disagree. Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. If these cretins want to distribute art for free, they can get off their butts and make their own. No one is stopping them. The world needs more voices, but piracy encourages these loafers to do nothing.
    - thatcat 6y ago
      Why do you think you’re entitled to a certain business model?
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
How about similar aggression towards arresting and pursuing the people doing ransomware.
- unishark 6y ago
  There was a big story a few months ago about the feds going after international phone scammer rings with a bunch of arrests. Also a big Nigerian scammer ring last year. They also include indictments of people mostly overseas.
rhino369 6y ago
I think you should be cautious about extending today’s pattern about piracy (ie they are already high consumers) to a scenario where piracy was easy and safe for distributors. The piracy wac-a-mole game makes piracy somewhat difficult for an average person. If it were as easy and safe as Netflix then everyone would pirate, and it would have a major impact on the entertainment industry. I imagine piracy enforcement is done to keep it in check, not prevent it from happening at all.
RandomBacon 6y ago
> frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. aka those customers have money (and the MPAA and RIAA want to bleed them dry).
scarface74 6y ago
These are criminal cases. If you owned a software company and someone broke into your git repo and started selling your software as their own, would you want the police to be involved?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It’s not the same. It’s like you shipped your software to people and someone took the copy you sold them and gave to it someone else.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    ...while keeping a copy for themselves. And then reselling that copy over and over. It’s not the same; It’s profiting off someone else’s work.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      But it is not breaking and entering.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        It’s still a criminal offense.
Karishma1234 6y ago
I fully agree with this assessment. With many of these agencies when they are created there is a "published objective" but with time invariably those agencies end up being using for entirely different purpose. DHS is a great example. An agency created to avoid 9/11 like scenarios seems to be busy scaring little girls and destitute refugees and asylum seekers.
bitwize 6y ago
Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.
- drtillberg 6y ago
  That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions, and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong. To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication. Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of objective reality including conflating a granted monopoly with physical property. There is a difference even if illustrations would have to be rather fantastic. If merpeople or aliens from Alpha Centuari were making copies of our goods they would not even be violating our laws because they wouldn't be party to any treaty with them and out of our jurisdiction. Not so with literal theft where a freight captain would be justified using force in self defense against sea people/aliens.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fxtentacle 6y ago
is alleged to have caused “tens of millions of dollars” in losses In short, a typical day for an investment banker. Odd how one is legal and the other one gets you an international secret police task force.
triceratops 6y ago
> Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. Copy that. I never pirate and I hardly ever spend money on media.
sjy 6y ago
> The cases are more properly pursued in civil court ... that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs I don’t think it is possible to defer the moral and ethical question about the activities of these groups. Copyright holders have tried the civil option and it does not work. It is too expensive to pursue casual pirates, and too difficult to identify hardcore pirates without the investigative powers of a law enforcement agency. If you’re not okay with the criminal investigation, then I think you need to be okay with these piracy groups continuing to exist, rather than offering the civil courts as a moderate alternative.
- pg_1234 6y ago
  Perhaps that should be taken as a sign that MPAA and RIAA are overstepping acceptable behaviour and should back off ... rather than abusing international laws intended for serious infractions The rest of the world should say "did they shoot innocent civilians in a foreign country? ... no, oh well then we'll put it at the bottom of the pile and get back to it when you , the USA, have cleaned house on REAL criminal activity." Just how screwed up does "justice" have to be to put corporate profits derived from rentseeking on digital goods over war crimes ... ?

SllX 6y ago

I’m not disagreeing in principle, but there are criminal statutes on the books put there by Congress for copyright infringement, and it is the Federal government’s job to enforce these laws.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I don't think New Zealand has a "Congress"? You're not trying to say USA has the right to make laws in other countries are you? I mean I know USA does this, but it seems indefensible?
- jjcon 6y ago
  The US (like every other country) negotiates agreements with other countries to handle crimes committed against persons or entities in their jurisdiction. This is nothing new or unique.
- unishark 6y ago
  According to the article, court documents list victims and crimes occurring in New York and New Jersey. Supposedly this group misled distributors there into giving them copies of movies which had not been released.
- SllX 6y ago
  mrandish’s comment had three paragraphs, but I was mainly responding to the part of it that was concerned with US law, not the Kim Dotcom fiasco. New Zealand does however have a criminal statute on their books for copyright infringement for commercial gain, and an extradition treaty with the United States. If your concerns are the activities of the American Federal government, you take that up with the US Congress for writing the law. If your concerns are the activities of the New Zealand government, then take that up with the New Zealand Parliament; but today’s news largely concerned a Trans-Atlantic multi-country operation and an indictment filed in the US Southern District of New York in which the acting authority is the United States, not New Zealand.

tzs 6y ago

Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They actually reprimanded employees if they actually took something down for real. Go find the court papers for the indictment. They include a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other top executives that show how the place actually worked.

toyg 6y ago
mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal. I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotcom allegedly/apparently made.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  You're absolutely right that these two things can be true at once. I commend you for your level-headed evaluation and I wish there were more comments like yours.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Let me say as an artist who has watched his hard work being openly pirated, I disagree. Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. If these cretins want to distribute art for free, they can get off their butts and make their own. No one is stopping them. The world needs more voices, but piracy encourages these loafers to do nothing.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    Why do you think you’re entitled to a certain business model?

NotSammyHagar 6y ago

How about similar aggression towards arresting and pursuing the people doing ransomware.

unishark 6y ago
There was a big story a few months ago about the feds going after international phone scammer rings with a bunch of arrests. Also a big Nigerian scammer ring last year. They also include indictments of people mostly overseas.

rhino369 6y ago

I think you should be cautious about extending today’s pattern about piracy (ie they are already high consumers) to a scenario where piracy was easy and safe for distributors. The piracy wac-a-mole game makes piracy somewhat difficult for an average person. If it were as easy and safe as Netflix then everyone would pirate, and it would have a major impact on the entertainment industry. I imagine piracy enforcement is done to keep it in check, not prevent it from happening at all.

RandomBacon 6y ago

> frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. aka those customers have money (and the MPAA and RIAA want to bleed them dry).

scarface74 6y ago

These are criminal cases. If you owned a software company and someone broke into your git repo and started selling your software as their own, would you want the police to be involved?

saagarjha 6y ago
It’s not the same. It’s like you shipped your software to people and someone took the copy you sold them and gave to it someone else.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  ...while keeping a copy for themselves. And then reselling that copy over and over. It’s not the same; It’s profiting off someone else’s work.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    But it is not breaking and entering.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      It’s still a criminal offense.

Karishma1234 6y ago

I fully agree with this assessment. With many of these agencies when they are created there is a "published objective" but with time invariably those agencies end up being using for entirely different purpose. DHS is a great example. An agency created to avoid 9/11 like scenarios seems to be busy scaring little girls and destitute refugees and asylum seekers.

bitwize 6y ago

Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.

drtillberg 6y ago
That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions, and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong. To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication. Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of objective reality including conflating a granted monopoly with physical property. There is a difference even if illustrations would have to be rather fantastic. If merpeople or aliens from Alpha Centuari were making copies of our goods they would not even be violating our laws because they wouldn't be party to any treaty with them and out of our jurisdiction. Not so with literal theft where a freight captain would be justified using force in self defense against sea people/aliens.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fxtentacle 6y ago

is alleged to have caused “tens of millions of dollars” in losses In short, a typical day for an investment banker. Odd how one is legal and the other one gets you an international secret police task force.

triceratops 6y ago

> Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. Copy that. I never pirate and I hardly ever spend money on media.

sjy 6y ago

> The cases are more properly pursued in civil court ... that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs I don’t think it is possible to defer the moral and ethical question about the activities of these groups. Copyright holders have tried the civil option and it does not work. It is too expensive to pursue casual pirates, and too difficult to identify hardcore pirates without the investigative powers of a law enforcement agency. If you’re not okay with the criminal investigation, then I think you need to be okay with these piracy groups continuing to exist, rather than offering the civil courts as a moderate alternative.

pg_1234 6y ago
Perhaps that should be taken as a sign that MPAA and RIAA are overstepping acceptable behaviour and should back off ... rather than abusing international laws intended for serious infractions The rest of the world should say "did they shoot innocent civilians in a foreign country? ... no, oh well then we'll put it at the bottom of the pile and get back to it when you , the USA, have cleaned house on REAL criminal activity." Just how screwed up does "justice" have to be to put corporate profits derived from rentseeking on digital goods over war crimes ... ?