14 ms·

The case against Kim Dotcom, finally revealed

170 points by shawndumas 13y ago

digitalengineer 13y ago
I don't get it. If the evidence is so overwhelming (emails, chat logs, skype logs) why in the world didn't the US use all this to take them down? Why the drama? The breaking of international rules and the violence?
- shadowmint 13y ago
  This is a PR move, it has nothing to do with a trial. This is a better coverage: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/justice-department-releases-evidence-kim-667204 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/justice-department-... (and shame on your ars, for not bothering to link to or quote the source material for your article) That's what has happened. Someone ordered this material released to try to counter the massive pressure the NZ government is under locally not to do comply with US requests for extradition. "This sounds like 191 pages of a meritless criminal theory,” Rothken said. "The notion that they keep piling on more evidence to bolster civil claims of secondary copyright infringement, to us look like they’re desperately trying to mislead the public.” Exactly. I'm not arguing that he (.com) was (and almost certainly still is) a Bad Guy who deliberately built his business on selling other peoples work, but this... is just PR posturing to try to counter the thus-far terribly terribly botched efforts of the justice department.
  - bananacurve 13y ago
    >This is a PR move, it has nothing to do with a trial. I am not sure about your reading comprehension, it sounds like a slam dunk to me.
    - darkmarmot 13y ago
      Like Saddam's WMDs?
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      Perhaps, but breaking laws to get evidence usually results in it being inadmissible. And wow did they break laws, all the way up to the PM. And they still are with the tracking and bugging that is going on.
      - bananacurve 13y ago
        Yes. NZ's incompetence may save his dumb ass.
  - belluchan 13y ago
    If he is a bad guy it feels weird rooting for a bad guy. I feel like my perceptions about this entire thing are all backwards. If DotKom so bad why are they so bad at making him look bad. DotKom comes out looking like the martyr he wants to be seen as. Law enforcement look like they're private security for the entertainment industry. And yet it's clear this guy is possibly the worst kind of copyright infringer. He's not the individual who downloaded a song and is being sued for life and limb, this guy got unbelievable wealth of the work of others and still the whole thing feels wrong. Maybe we should be cheering law enforcement to bring this guy to justice but I can't help but root for the other side. The thing to blame is probably the decade of going after individuals and making them suffer has turned out to be such a huge public relations disaster that will last a generation. I just want the entertainment industry to fail and for copyright laws to fail as well.
    - josephlord 13y ago
      There can be more than one bad guy. Bad guys can also be mistreated. The world is not a movie with clearly delineated goodies and baddies.
    - Udo 13y ago
      That's because this notion of "bad guys" and "good guys" doesn't work in real life. It works in police and military situations where you take action against a declared enemy, but it's not a good tool for reasoning in a civilian setting. What you get there are not only different shades of bad, but also entirely different kinds of bad. To point, there is really no question that Dotcom is generally not a good guy. He is a shady business man at best. It just happens that many people consider his brand of evil to be absolutely dwarfed by the motives and tactics of his government adversaries.
    - vorg 13y ago
      > If DotKom so bad why are they so bad at making him look bad. To make Kim Dotcom look bad, just spell his surname with a K instead of a C in the middle. It evokes images of the German and Russian languages, rather than the French, and hence Nazi and Soviet undertones rather than romance and the Riviera. Imagery has more impact on public opinion than informed discussions.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    It's not clear to me, are you saying this was bitched by the US justice department? From the perspective of a New Zealander, I'd say it was well played. The dirty work was carried out over here by willing participants. The only down side has been that a few politicians who could not be more America friendly, mainly Banks and Key, have come out looking a touch dirty.
- bananacurve 13y ago
  If you had read the article you would know that much of the evidence was captured during the raid, which, contrary to popular belief, was carried out by NZ police, not the NSA.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    The NSA does not raid people, even in the US. It is not a law enforcement agency. However, the raid was conducted at the behest of the US DOJ.
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    I did read the article. I should articulate myself better: would it not have been easy for the us to use it's (nsa) powers to gather email and chatlogs?
    - beering 13y ago
      Because the NSA would rather use the data for more important things, like terrorism, war, and espionage of foreign governments. Even if just for public perception, I don't think anybody, NSA included, really wants the NSA to use its dragnet surveillance to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar.
      - digitalengineer 13y ago
        True, but this went all the way up to the vice-president. I don't think anybody, NSA included, really want the vice-president to use his powers to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar...
        snowwrestler 13y ago
        Federal agencies are limited by the scope of their mission. The scope of the NSA's mission is defense, not criminal investigation and prosecution. And even if the NSA did collect the info, it's not clear that they could do so in a way that would allow it to be admissible in a federal court--making it effectively useless.
salient 13y ago
Was Megaupload registered in US, too? Otherwise I think they have a very bogus case of "jurisdiction". Just having the data pass through US servers doesn't or shouldn't count, the way the Internet works, and how it's supposed to decentralize the data to keep it more localized. Otherwise you could argue that just by the nature of people using Megaupload from US would also give the US government the right to prosecute Megaupload. If that's the case, then Google could be prosecuted in countries where it doesn't have headquarters, too.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Megaupload was not just being used from the U.S., but it had servers in Virginia, was actively targeting U.S. customers, and dealt largely in the infringement of U.S. copyrights.
  - salient 13y ago
    Again, unless it was registered as a company in US, then I don't see the problem.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      If a foreign citizen commits a crime in the U.S., does the U.S. not have the ability to prosecute him just because he's not a U.S. citizen (= "registered as a company in the U.S.")?
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        > If a foreign citizen commits a crime in the U.S., does the U.S. not have the ability to prosecute him just because he's not a U.S. citizen If a foreign citizen commits a crime in a foreign country, the US can still prosecute him (and can even have him forcibly abducted outside of the existing extradition treaty of his country, violating the laws of that country, to bring him to court without reducing its ability to prosecute him.)
        13y ago
6d0debc071 13y ago
The main thing that keeps occurring to me is 'This is why you burn the evidence before you get arrested.' ^^;
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bradleysmith 13y ago
PDF of evidence here: http://www.nbr.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/Mega%20Evidence.pdf http://www.nbr.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/Mega%20Evide...
JunkDNA 13y ago
What's interesting to me about all of this is that there's this caricature of movie pirates as not wanting to pay for anything and just being general freeloaders. Yet this makes it clear that people were willing to pay for this stuff. The entertainment industry has just never really been able to get their heads around how to best develop a new, sustainable business model when it's so easy to replicate content.
- powertower 13y ago
  The way monetization of MU content worked, is they would send the average internet user to a page that mostly hid the download link and tricked that person into clicking on the 'sign-up to download it fast' area, selling them access. This was not a business model that proved something noble about pirates, it was a criminal enterprise that for the most part, took someone else work, and sold it pennies on the dollar.
  - beering 13y ago
    The download-link trickery was probably relatively ineffective, since most people only needed one download to figure out how it worked. There were a lot of people who paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download stuff faster and without limits. It was like the Amazon Prime of bootlegged content in some circles.
    - biggy31 13y ago
      There are billions of impressions being sold daily for advertising from hijacked users. Big $$$. Advertising revenue was secondary to premium memberships, but now paypal, visa/mc are shutting down file lockers payment processing and they are more reliant on ad revenue.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    Legit sites try to trick visitors like that too.
  - paulhauggis 13y ago
biggy31 13y ago
Just shows how flawed the laws are with respect to copyright holders. I doubt he is the only one setting up international businesses, to skirt the law for profit, and then claim the US doesn't have jurisdiction. The laws in Europe are very loose as well. Not only do you have people setting up businesses to profit off piracy, but you also have secondary businesses forming to monetize and indirectly profit. Browse over to thePiratebay and go look at the ads, what the products are, and who is serving those ads. These players know exactly what's going on, and how that traffic is derived and they will do anything for a "buck" - from install toolbars and hijack browsing experiences down. But technically, its all "legal", specifically if you aren't in the US. That shouldn't be the case imo and the book should get thrown at all these people, because when the copyright laws change eventually and people say the new ones stifle innovation, these are the guys that will be the reason for it, and rightfully so.
- scotty79 13y ago
  What's flawed is the whole concept of copyright holder.
  - biggy31 13y ago
    It's possible to build a business 100% built on piracy internationally, and still be "technically" legal or have no real recourse. You can DMCA them, but they are given a "reasonable" time to take it down, and per the article, they never even removed the actual content, but created duplicate URLs over and over again. You can build a wall of plausible deniability, even though you know what you are doing the whole way, and potentially even get away with it.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      >You can DMCA them, but they are given a "reasonable" time to take it down, and per the article, they never even removed the actual content, but created duplicate URLs over and over again. The article is failing to mention the actual reasoning behind that. The 'duplicate URLs' were people taking a file and making their own completely independent upload-instance, with an assertion that they had permission under copyright regardless of the first uploader. So megaupload argued, reasonably I think, that just because X file by Alice was a violation, that doesn't mean X file by Bob is a violation, so they only deleted Alice's copy.
lostlogin 13y ago
From the local rag a few days ago. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11176431 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=...
bassclef 13y ago
all he needs to do is look at what HSBC chiefs did to prevent from being prosecuted.. this is the messed up part.. kim dot com pirates a few files and gets a swat team.. HSBC launders BILLIONS and gets a party..
tptacek 13y ago
It doesn't sound like this stuff has "finally been revealed", since the highlights Ars points out were in the indictment, which has been public for most of the year.
belorn 13y ago
Please, oh please, let me get a copy of one of the larger movie publishers email server. How easy it would be to find a few incriminating sounding emails. I could take things out of context, and say "look, conspiracy to commit crime right there!". Or a police stations email server. Or any larger organization what so ever. I don't need six written lines from the most honest man. Just a few hundred thousands emails. Maybe ten millions to be sure. Surely, no content provider has anything wrong doing hinted in theirs? So for a short promotion, I would recommend anyone who runs a email server to have disk encryption ON. It doesn't matter if you are running a puppy hospital for orphans.
siliconc0w 13y ago
Due to intellectual property bullshit, we'll never see legal avenues of consuming IP keep up with the ability to disseminate data/information. We have the ability to create the biggest and most far reaching library man has even envisioned. A digital Alexandria that would be both the greatest and cheapest wonder the world has seen. And yet it will never exist and we will squabble amoungst ourselves to ensure the right middlemen get paid and fruitlessly try to enforce an artificial reality where information is a private good instead of a public ocean where all may splash in child-like wonder if only it were allowed. And one day we will be asked to answer for this barbarism. How could we allow so many of us to go without when they could have it all for free? How could we deny all to billions just to create an artificial marketplace for a few million? How could we possibly stand at beginnings of a profound shared global consciousness with all the tools and technology required to summit the mountain and breath in the glorious horizon and choose to instead stubbornly burrow our heads in the sand. History will ask us these questions and we will be found wanting.
- rajacombinator 13y ago
  Don't worry. People in the future will be doing stupid crap too.
aaronbrethorst 13y ago
I cannot believe the folks at MegaUpload were so dumb as to commit this sort of stuff to an email. Here's some advice: if you're doing something illegal, don't write about it. As Stringer Bell so astutely put it on The Wire: "[Are] you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"

170 points by shawndumas 13y ago

I don't get it. If the evidence is so overwhelming (emails, chat logs, skype logs) why in the world didn't the US use all this to take them down? Why the drama? The breaking of international rules and the violence?

shadowmint 13y ago
This is a PR move, it has nothing to do with a trial. This is a better coverage: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/justice-department-releases-evidence-kim-667204 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/justice-department-... (and shame on your ars, for not bothering to link to or quote the source material for your article) That's what has happened. Someone ordered this material released to try to counter the massive pressure the NZ government is under locally not to do comply with US requests for extradition. "This sounds like 191 pages of a meritless criminal theory,” Rothken said. "The notion that they keep piling on more evidence to bolster civil claims of secondary copyright infringement, to us look like they’re desperately trying to mislead the public.” Exactly. I'm not arguing that he (.com) was (and almost certainly still is) a Bad Guy who deliberately built his business on selling other peoples work, but this... is just PR posturing to try to counter the thus-far terribly terribly botched efforts of the justice department.
- bananacurve 13y ago
  >This is a PR move, it has nothing to do with a trial. I am not sure about your reading comprehension, it sounds like a slam dunk to me.
  - darkmarmot 13y ago
    Like Saddam's WMDs?
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Perhaps, but breaking laws to get evidence usually results in it being inadmissible. And wow did they break laws, all the way up to the PM. And they still are with the tracking and bugging that is going on.
    - bananacurve 13y ago
      Yes. NZ's incompetence may save his dumb ass.
- belluchan 13y ago
  If he is a bad guy it feels weird rooting for a bad guy. I feel like my perceptions about this entire thing are all backwards. If DotKom so bad why are they so bad at making him look bad. DotKom comes out looking like the martyr he wants to be seen as. Law enforcement look like they're private security for the entertainment industry. And yet it's clear this guy is possibly the worst kind of copyright infringer. He's not the individual who downloaded a song and is being sued for life and limb, this guy got unbelievable wealth of the work of others and still the whole thing feels wrong. Maybe we should be cheering law enforcement to bring this guy to justice but I can't help but root for the other side. The thing to blame is probably the decade of going after individuals and making them suffer has turned out to be such a huge public relations disaster that will last a generation. I just want the entertainment industry to fail and for copyright laws to fail as well.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    There can be more than one bad guy. Bad guys can also be mistreated. The world is not a movie with clearly delineated goodies and baddies.
  - Udo 13y ago
    That's because this notion of "bad guys" and "good guys" doesn't work in real life. It works in police and military situations where you take action against a declared enemy, but it's not a good tool for reasoning in a civilian setting. What you get there are not only different shades of bad, but also entirely different kinds of bad. To point, there is really no question that Dotcom is generally not a good guy. He is a shady business man at best. It just happens that many people consider his brand of evil to be absolutely dwarfed by the motives and tactics of his government adversaries.
  - vorg 13y ago
    > If DotKom so bad why are they so bad at making him look bad. To make Kim Dotcom look bad, just spell his surname with a K instead of a C in the middle. It evokes images of the German and Russian languages, rather than the French, and hence Nazi and Soviet undertones rather than romance and the Riviera. Imagery has more impact on public opinion than informed discussions.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  It's not clear to me, are you saying this was bitched by the US justice department? From the perspective of a New Zealander, I'd say it was well played. The dirty work was carried out over here by willing participants. The only down side has been that a few politicians who could not be more America friendly, mainly Banks and Key, have come out looking a touch dirty.
bananacurve 13y ago
If you had read the article you would know that much of the evidence was captured during the raid, which, contrary to popular belief, was carried out by NZ police, not the NSA.
- mercurial 13y ago
  The NSA does not raid people, even in the US. It is not a law enforcement agency. However, the raid was conducted at the behest of the US DOJ.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  I did read the article. I should articulate myself better: would it not have been easy for the us to use it's (nsa) powers to gather email and chatlogs?
  - beering 13y ago
    Because the NSA would rather use the data for more important things, like terrorism, war, and espionage of foreign governments. Even if just for public perception, I don't think anybody, NSA included, really wants the NSA to use its dragnet surveillance to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar.
    - digitalengineer 13y ago
      True, but this went all the way up to the vice-president. I don't think anybody, NSA included, really want the vice-president to use his powers to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar...
      - snowwrestler 13y ago
        Federal agencies are limited by the scope of their mission. The scope of the NSA's mission is defense, not criminal investigation and prosecution. And even if the NSA did collect the info, it's not clear that they could do so in a way that would allow it to be admissible in a federal court--making it effectively useless.

salient 13y ago

Was Megaupload registered in US, too? Otherwise I think they have a very bogus case of "jurisdiction". Just having the data pass through US servers doesn't or shouldn't count, the way the Internet works, and how it's supposed to decentralize the data to keep it more localized. Otherwise you could argue that just by the nature of people using Megaupload from US would also give the US government the right to prosecute Megaupload. If that's the case, then Google could be prosecuted in countries where it doesn't have headquarters, too.

rayiner 13y ago
Megaupload was not just being used from the U.S., but it had servers in Virginia, was actively targeting U.S. customers, and dealt largely in the infringement of U.S. copyrights.
- salient 13y ago
  Again, unless it was registered as a company in US, then I don't see the problem.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    If a foreign citizen commits a crime in the U.S., does the U.S. not have the ability to prosecute him just because he's not a U.S. citizen (= "registered as a company in the U.S.")?
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > If a foreign citizen commits a crime in the U.S., does the U.S. not have the ability to prosecute him just because he's not a U.S. citizen If a foreign citizen commits a crime in a foreign country, the US can still prosecute him (and can even have him forcibly abducted outside of the existing extradition treaty of his country, violating the laws of that country, to bring him to court without reducing its ability to prosecute him.)
      - 13y ago

6d0debc071 13y ago

The main thing that keeps occurring to me is 'This is why you burn the evidence before you get arrested.' ^^;

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bradleysmith 13y ago

PDF of evidence here: http://www.nbr.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/Mega%20Evidence.pdf http://www.nbr.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/Mega%20Evide...

JunkDNA 13y ago

What's interesting to me about all of this is that there's this caricature of movie pirates as not wanting to pay for anything and just being general freeloaders. Yet this makes it clear that people were willing to pay for this stuff. The entertainment industry has just never really been able to get their heads around how to best develop a new, sustainable business model when it's so easy to replicate content.

powertower 13y ago
The way monetization of MU content worked, is they would send the average internet user to a page that mostly hid the download link and tricked that person into clicking on the 'sign-up to download it fast' area, selling them access. This was not a business model that proved something noble about pirates, it was a criminal enterprise that for the most part, took someone else work, and sold it pennies on the dollar.
- beering 13y ago
  The download-link trickery was probably relatively ineffective, since most people only needed one download to figure out how it worked. There were a lot of people who paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download stuff faster and without limits. It was like the Amazon Prime of bootlegged content in some circles.
  - biggy31 13y ago
    There are billions of impressions being sold daily for advertising from hijacked users. Big $$$. Advertising revenue was secondary to premium memberships, but now paypal, visa/mc are shutting down file lockers payment processing and they are more reliant on ad revenue.
- scotty79 13y ago
  Legit sites try to trick visitors like that too.
- paulhauggis 13y ago

biggy31 13y ago

Just shows how flawed the laws are with respect to copyright holders. I doubt he is the only one setting up international businesses, to skirt the law for profit, and then claim the US doesn't have jurisdiction. The laws in Europe are very loose as well. Not only do you have people setting up businesses to profit off piracy, but you also have secondary businesses forming to monetize and indirectly profit. Browse over to thePiratebay and go look at the ads, what the products are, and who is serving those ads. These players know exactly what's going on, and how that traffic is derived and they will do anything for a "buck" - from install toolbars and hijack browsing experiences down. But technically, its all "legal", specifically if you aren't in the US. That shouldn't be the case imo and the book should get thrown at all these people, because when the copyright laws change eventually and people say the new ones stifle innovation, these are the guys that will be the reason for it, and rightfully so.

scotty79 13y ago
What's flawed is the whole concept of copyright holder.
- biggy31 13y ago
  It's possible to build a business 100% built on piracy internationally, and still be "technically" legal or have no real recourse. You can DMCA them, but they are given a "reasonable" time to take it down, and per the article, they never even removed the actual content, but created duplicate URLs over and over again. You can build a wall of plausible deniability, even though you know what you are doing the whole way, and potentially even get away with it.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    >You can DMCA them, but they are given a "reasonable" time to take it down, and per the article, they never even removed the actual content, but created duplicate URLs over and over again. The article is failing to mention the actual reasoning behind that. The 'duplicate URLs' were people taking a file and making their own completely independent upload-instance, with an assertion that they had permission under copyright regardless of the first uploader. So megaupload argued, reasonably I think, that just because X file by Alice was a violation, that doesn't mean X file by Bob is a violation, so they only deleted Alice's copy.

lostlogin 13y ago

From the local rag a few days ago. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11176431 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=...

bassclef 13y ago

all he needs to do is look at what HSBC chiefs did to prevent from being prosecuted.. this is the messed up part.. kim dot com pirates a few files and gets a swat team.. HSBC launders BILLIONS and gets a party..

tptacek 13y ago

It doesn't sound like this stuff has "finally been revealed", since the highlights Ars points out were in the indictment, which has been public for most of the year.

belorn 13y ago

Please, oh please, let me get a copy of one of the larger movie publishers email server. How easy it would be to find a few incriminating sounding emails. I could take things out of context, and say "look, conspiracy to commit crime right there!". Or a police stations email server. Or any larger organization what so ever. I don't need six written lines from the most honest man. Just a few hundred thousands emails. Maybe ten millions to be sure. Surely, no content provider has anything wrong doing hinted in theirs? So for a short promotion, I would recommend anyone who runs a email server to have disk encryption ON. It doesn't matter if you are running a puppy hospital for orphans.

siliconc0w 13y ago

Due to intellectual property bullshit, we'll never see legal avenues of consuming IP keep up with the ability to disseminate data/information. We have the ability to create the biggest and most far reaching library man has even envisioned. A digital Alexandria that would be both the greatest and cheapest wonder the world has seen. And yet it will never exist and we will squabble amoungst ourselves to ensure the right middlemen get paid and fruitlessly try to enforce an artificial reality where information is a private good instead of a public ocean where all may splash in child-like wonder if only it were allowed. And one day we will be asked to answer for this barbarism. How could we allow so many of us to go without when they could have it all for free? How could we deny all to billions just to create an artificial marketplace for a few million? How could we possibly stand at beginnings of a profound shared global consciousness with all the tools and technology required to summit the mountain and breath in the glorious horizon and choose to instead stubbornly burrow our heads in the sand. History will ask us these questions and we will be found wanting.

rajacombinator 13y ago
Don't worry. People in the future will be doing stupid crap too.

aaronbrethorst 13y ago

I cannot believe the folks at MegaUpload were so dumb as to commit this sort of stuff to an email. Here's some advice: if you're doing something illegal, don't write about it. As Stringer Bell so astutely put it on The Wire: "[Are] you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"