6 ms·

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

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.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> 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.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  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.
  - earthnail 2y ago
    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.
    - CaptWillard 2y ago
      "either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market" I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
      - throwway_278314 2y ago
        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.
i80and 2y ago
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.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Thanks, you’re right — MEGA was the relaunch.
- codetrotter 2y ago
  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.
agpl3141592 2y ago
You do know that they pushed it left and right as 'dropbox' share everything platform targeting pirate groups with referral money right? He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows
- BowBun 2y ago
  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.
  - ric2b 2y ago
    Plex and GPM never distributed pirated content, they just allowed users to host or upload their own content. Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks about that but images online are constantly breaking copyright law.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    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
    - dangus 2y ago
      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.
Xen9 2y ago
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.
- veidelis 2y ago
  Why was he a failure politically?
  - EionRobb 2y ago
    Maybe in reference to his political party which failed to gain any seats in parliament? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand)
    - Xen9 2y ago
      I'd consider not getting seats a failure overall, though he managed to get attention and the first elections werent that bad (if I recall correctly).
jokethrowaway 2y ago
The government enforcing IP laws is certainly not a public good, in my book. I also don't think you can be held responsible for what your users do with your service, especially if you are complying with DMCA requests. They're shooting the postal service just because it bothered some powerful people. This is happening because Media is a powerful lobby in the USA and Mega is a nobody. Just another example of government corruption, move along.
dansitu 2y ago
> MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.
- Timber-6539 2y ago
  Spotify didn't launch in the US market until 2011. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launches-in-the-u-s/ https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...
zeofig 2y ago
Yeah it's totally fine. No uncomfortable thoughts bubbling below the surface here.
philippejara 2y ago
> 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. [1]:https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o
- fluoridation 2y ago
  It's a mockery of jurisdiction. It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like that.
  - zaSmilingIdiot 2y ago
    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.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      I wonder if the same would have happened if the roles had been reversed. Somehow I doubt it.
      - vizzier 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn Pretty much.
        fluoridation 2y ago
        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.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Pagers created a new business model for drug dealers. It didn't change the criminality of drug dealing.
kome 2y ago
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.
vasco 2y ago
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.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  >> 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.
  - t-3 2y ago
    > 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.
    - 7jjjjjjj 2y ago
      P2P is still where you go if you don't want potato quality video.
greenthrow 2y ago
He was not early at all.
EGreg 2y ago
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!”
aimazon 2y ago
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.
darby_nine 2y ago
> It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly. In a way that makes it much easier to argue against the idea that IP protects creators and not their pimps.
kwanbix 2y ago
Politicians steal, make horrible decisions, and worst things and nothing happens. But you share movies and go to prison!
lossolo 2y ago
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.
- nadermx 2y ago
  Is this proven? Is it possible someone else uploaded the content after it was deleted?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 2y ago
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.

giancarlostoro 2y ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> 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.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
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.
- earthnail 2y ago
  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.
  - CaptWillard 2y ago
    "either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market" I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
    - throwway_278314 2y ago
      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.

i80and 2y ago

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.

vessenes 2y ago
Thanks, you’re right — MEGA was the relaunch.
codetrotter 2y ago
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.

agpl3141592 2y ago

You do know that they pushed it left and right as 'dropbox' share everything platform targeting pirate groups with referral money right? He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows

BowBun 2y ago
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.
- ric2b 2y ago
  Plex and GPM never distributed pirated content, they just allowed users to host or upload their own content. Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks about that but images online are constantly breaking copyright law.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  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
  - dangus 2y ago
    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.

Xen9 2y ago

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.

veidelis 2y ago
Why was he a failure politically?
- EionRobb 2y ago
  Maybe in reference to his political party which failed to gain any seats in parliament? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand)
  - Xen9 2y ago
    I'd consider not getting seats a failure overall, though he managed to get attention and the first elections werent that bad (if I recall correctly).

jokethrowaway 2y ago

The government enforcing IP laws is certainly not a public good, in my book. I also don't think you can be held responsible for what your users do with your service, especially if you are complying with DMCA requests. They're shooting the postal service just because it bothered some powerful people. This is happening because Media is a powerful lobby in the USA and Mega is a nobody. Just another example of government corruption, move along.

dansitu 2y ago

> MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.

Timber-6539 2y ago
Spotify didn't launch in the US market until 2011. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launches-in-the-u-s/ https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...

zeofig 2y ago

Yeah it's totally fine. No uncomfortable thoughts bubbling below the surface here.

philippejara 2y ago

> 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. [1]:https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o

fluoridation 2y ago
It's a mockery of jurisdiction. It's a joke that NZ would sell out its own citizens like that.
- zaSmilingIdiot 2y ago
  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.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    I wonder if the same would have happened if the roles had been reversed. Somehow I doubt it.
    - vizzier 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn Pretty much.
      - fluoridation 2y ago
        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.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

Pagers created a new business model for drug dealers. It didn't change the criminality of drug dealing.

kome 2y ago

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.

vasco 2y ago

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.

sandworm101 2y ago
>> 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.
- t-3 2y ago
  > 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.
  - 7jjjjjjj 2y ago
    P2P is still where you go if you don't want potato quality video.

greenthrow 2y ago

He was not early at all.

EGreg 2y ago

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!”

aimazon 2y ago

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.

darby_nine 2y ago

> It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly. In a way that makes it much easier to argue against the idea that IP protects creators and not their pimps.

kwanbix 2y ago

Politicians steal, make horrible decisions, and worst things and nothing happens. But you share movies and go to prison!

lossolo 2y ago

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.

nadermx 2y ago
Is this proven? Is it possible someone else uploaded the content after it was deleted?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 2y ago

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.