12 ms·

Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year

150 points by xyby 12y ago

KhalPanda 12y ago
This just seems ridiculous to me. I may well get downvoted, but it needs saying. Why do 99% of the world's governments seem completely retarded when it comes to copyright laws? How many tens of millions in legal resources were expended in bringing 'justice' here? And what does the outcome even matter? Good job, tens of millions down the drain for one year of an Estonian's time? The system would surely be better served if they just handed those millions to the actual copyright holders? The only real victory (if that's what they'd like to call it) is having taken the site down in the first place, not that that did a single thing to kerb 'illegal' filesharing... The industry has moved on and adapted just fine.
- tomp 12y ago
  Well, the idea of criminal justice, besides "fairness"/"retribution" (which I think is barbaric), is that it discourages future criminal action by others, who have more reason to believe they would be similarly punished if caught.
- ledzep2 12y ago
  They are not retarded. They are just money driven IMHO. And I bet the story behind this is no worse than the plot of House of Cards.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Some people buy a car to do whatever the hell they want with it. Others buy chunk of a nuclear superpower's government to do whatever the hell they want with it.
- RickS 12y ago
  My guess is that their strategy is to create a chilling effect by making an example of this guy. From their perspective, if smart people become more frightened to take on projects like this, their money was well spent. $10M is lunch money here.
  - Fuxy 12y ago
    It seems to infuriate me and make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law. But in no way will I cave to this mafia style behavior. Do I now risk going to jail if any of the people o worked with use my software for something illegal?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Xylakant 12y ago
      >It seems to [...] make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law. Money paid in cash still needs to show up in the books of the company and your tax statement. If it doesn't, you just handed them another opportunity to make you hang - tax fraud is nothing to trifle with.
      - Fuxy 12y ago
        It will be on the books but maybe as something else. I don't mind paying tax but I'd rather not get arrested for something a person I do business with did. This is the chilling effect this kind of behavior by the state has. It make people less willing to share real information with the government since it could potentially get them arrested just to make an example of them. It's all about trust and this kind of behavior makes me not trust the government or the law.
        Xylakant 12y ago
        If it's on the books then it's on the books as "y did work for x" which is about as much as they need.
  - omeid2 12y ago
    This is the most logical explanation that I know of, also considering what happened to PopcornTime.
- BlueAndroid 12y ago
  I work in Law Enforcement, so feel to disregard my opinion as biased , however, 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down. I used to find computers with lists and lists of megaupload urls. When that method died out a little beacon of happy shone for me. Now I understand that free movies trumps removing abusive material, and as rapidshare and others took a more reasoned approach the child abuse material slipped into TOR and then i2p (after we brought the house down repeatedly on lolitacity and similar places in TOR). So it was more of a temporary reprieve. But those still at it have to work a bit harder and I'm happy about that. It's all about the free movies right? Well if that's your world, you're lucky.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    If people are involved in the transmission of child abuse, I'm happy for them to be prosecuted for that. I'm not happy with the approach of prosecuting people for copyright infringement and then claiming they deserve it because of the child abuse material. That's a bait-and-switch.
  - goblin89 12y ago
    > 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down. However, this apparently did not serve as the grounds for punishment, and is not mentioned in statements quoted in the article—the whole deal seems to hinge on copyright infringement allegations.
  - fluffheadsr 12y ago
    Yep, lets arrest everyone.. FOR THE CHILDREN! Everytime a case comes up you law enforcement bring up the same big scarry bad men.. Drugs, Pedophiles, and Terrorists.. GET LOST
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't understand. They were using a service were everyone's IPs and other data were logged and could be subpoenaed, now they're using services that add many more barriers to discovering their identity, and you consider that an improvement? What am I missing?
ryan-allen 12y ago
... what the hell? And they're trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US as well! At the time of launch, I thought how cool it'd have been to work on the project, ouch.
Fuxy 12y ago
There's a lot of lip service but I still don't get why a programmer need to go to jail for this crap. Are they prosecuting everyone that ever worked for or did business with megaupload now? Because that seems a bit shady.
- Tharkun 12y ago
  Might as well jail every tobacco or arms producer as well.
  - bhayden 12y ago
    Pretty sure if an arms dealer promoted, even indirectly, the use of their firearms for illegal purposes, they'd also get some people going through the justice system.
- ReadThePost 12y ago
  A programmer's going to jail because, as the original posting says: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." So, if you're employer is providing some sort of illegal service, you probably shouldn't use it yourself either unless you're OK with going to jail for it.
jackjeff 12y ago
I really dislike the extra-territorial aspect of it. From what I understand the Netherlands copyright law is more lenient than the US law. For instance downloading copyrighted material was legal until very recently. So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there... http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-finally-becomes-illegal-in-the-netherlands/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fin... So you could do something which is legal, or illegal but not criminal offense (civil) in the country where you live, but if it displeases the US, then suddenly they can throw you in jail in a foreign country (the US) where you have no ties. I break Chinese laws on a daily basis (Tank Man!). Why should I care about US law, since I do not live there, nor am I a citizen? It's not like I can vote for these laws...
- gambiting 12y ago
  Imagine if it worked the other way around.....if one day a US court got a request from Saudi Arabia asking to jail one of US citizens because they broke Saudi law on the internet(even though they have never been to Saudi Arabia). US would politely tell them to fuck off. Yet, when US does this to another country,they comply? It's disgusting.
  - geon 12y ago
    I wish more countries had the balls to tell the US to fuck off. I wish MY country did; then we wouldn't have had the Pirate Bay Gate, where Swedish constitution was stepped all over.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - hellbanner 12y ago
      the US spends the most resources on military every year. "I wish my neighbors would tell the bully to fuck off when he demands their lunch money" Here's what happens to countries who tell the USA to fuck off (spoilers: they get economically and militarily invaded): http://www.amazon.com/Game-As-Old-Empire-Corruption/dp/1576753956 http://www.amazon.com/Game-As-Old-Empire-Corruption/dp/15767... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
SebKba 12y ago
Yet every single one of the bankers who brought the world economy to the brink of collapse walks free, enjoying the fruits of his labour. The system works.
- easytiger 12y ago
  Please, give it a rest on this "banker" polemic nonsense.
  - Raphael_Amiard 12y ago
    why ?
    - blowski 12y ago
      Because it makes the issue seem like it's only a concern of angry and ignorant teenagers. While I for one would love for the current corporate capitalist model of society to be fundamentally restructured, it's not going to happen by making snide remarks on Hacker News.
      - SebKba 12y ago
        It's the first thought that popped into my head... I don't exactly see how your comment helps any more than mine but that's fine.
        psykovsky 12y ago
        Bread and circus... Bread and circus...
kumarski 12y ago
Wells Fargo smuggled half a Trillion(with a T) dollars worth of drug cartel money. Zero Punishment.
- hellbanner 12y ago
  None at all huh? Please discuss, HN (see my other comments in this thread). This seems relevant to the idea of "Justice".
draugadrotten 12y ago
If the EU is willing to do this to a programmer, it makes it easy to understand why Julian Assange is refusing to leave the Embassy of Ecuador.
contingencies 12y ago
By that logic, authors of filesystems, ssh, TCP/IP should go to jail. Quick, let's sue the Oxford dictionary! Military style raid on DARPA for inventing the internet! Oh, wait ... that's the military. Can't we have our cake and eat it too? Talk about political sham oldboy network rent-a-justice. Legal systems need to be decentralized, their interpretation and processes transparent. Perhaps a forward thinking country like Ecuador might be up for the challenge? I exclude Estonia as they are embroiled too much in EU legalese to have much of a chance of a running escape.
- ReadThePost 12y ago
  Well, if you invent TCP/IP so that you can then use it to commit illegal activity, then yes, you should expect to have charges levied against you. If you don't, then you're probably fine. From the post: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." Not only did he use the service he ran to knowingly pirate things himself, but that also implies that he was aware of content illegally hosted there and did nothing to stop it. Prosecution likely proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he intentionally assisted piracy.
jcrei 12y ago
What if you are a programmer working for any major corporation that happens do be doing some illegal stuff (Banks, Oil, gambling, etc). Should you be afraid to go to jail?
- omeid2 12y ago
  Of course not, Banks, Oil, and basically all big corps are immune from law. The sad thing is, that is hardly an exaggeration.
- ReadThePost 12y ago
  You're probably safe if you don't partake in the illegal activity yourself. From the post: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." He got slapped with racketeering charges because they proved that he wasn't just "following orders" from higher-ups but actively assisting/committing criminal activity.
- pluma 12y ago
  Yes. At least if the illegal activity is well-known. Supporting a criminal activity makes you an accomplice. If you do so knowingly, you face similar consequences to the direct perpetrators. Three examples: Let's say you work for a bank. Your superior is involved in criminal activity using the bank's resources. The bank may profit from that activity. You do not make any attempts to bring attention to the criminal activity (neither internally nor to the police). You're an accomplice and will face legal consequences. Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, the bank is a money laundry front for a local organized crime group. A federal investigation busts the operation and defines the bank as a criminal organization. You're an accomplice, but having had no reason to suspect the bank is involved in illegal activities, you'll likely not face any consequences. Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, some members of senior management are engaging in illegal activities. They are caught and put on trial. You are not an accomplice and don't face any consequences. (IANAL, but that seems to be how it works in most jurisdictions I'm aware of)
choppaface 12y ago
Nice job DoJ. Now to raise the bar and serve the people some real justice, go get Jamie Dimon ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witn... ).
the100rabh 12y ago
Wonder what punishment is going to be given to HSBC and Well Fargo execs ?
tempodox 12y ago
Article quote: In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. Poppycock. How is a computer programmer qualified to estimate the pecuniary value of “harm caused” by the shop they're working at? What about the harm caused to Justice by farces and show trials like this?
- pluma 12y ago
  "Agreed" is also such a weasely claim. And of course the "harm caused to copyright holders" is a farcical concept to begin with. You can't just take, say, the total number of downloads and multiply that with some fictitious amount of lost revenue and then claim that as damage, yet that's exactly what the rights utilization industry has been doing for decades. This concept is based on the idea of physical theft. If I steal a truckload of soap and then sell it myself, the damage I'm doing to the legitimate owner is equivalent to the volume I stole multiplied by the original selling price minus regular shrinkage (e.g. lost sales because of faulty products, damage during regular handling or natural expiry). Digital goods don't work that way. The "theft" of digital goods does not result in you having less products to sell. Instead it's more similar to the damage done via the "theft" of trade secrets. If I steal the Coca Cola recipe and begin giving away knock-off cola for free, I arguably cause damages due to lost sales, but it'd be ridiculous to assume that every "sale" of my product is equivalent to one lost sale of the Coca Cola company. In fact, MegaUpload didn't even "steal" anything. If we want to use physical crimes as metaphors, it's simply dealing with stolen goods -- or more precisely: giving stolen goods away for free. And if one million users downloaded the same illegal content, they didn't give one million stolen goods away, they merely gave the same stolen goods away a million times. It's not that copyright violations can't cause damages, but the current system for valuation of those damages -- especially in the US -- is entirely ridiculous and only continues to exist because the courts are either too apathetic or too ignorant (or sometimes both) to dismiss it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jkot 12y ago
> Nomm agreed that the harm caused ... exceeded $400 million... group obtained at least $175 million ... Megaupload.com ... it accounted for four percent of total Internet traffic, having more than one billion total visits, 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors. > Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer ... from 2007 until his arrest in January 2012. ... he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites ... which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy” warning. > Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites. Replace megaupload with any website or service provider (Youtube, Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook) and it gets scary very quickly.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
That's Iran-grade justice. "Let's persecute a random programmer that touched thing we really dislike".
- tzs 12y ago
  He was Megaupload's head of software development, which is a bit more than just "a random programmer that touched thing".
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    This is another way of saying "he was a naughty boy". Yes he was, and no, you can't imprison someone for that. He downloaded some illegal files, he was a head of development and not just a developer, he saw some scare banners on content - all that facts help you sell a story to newspaper reader but for court it's all tangential.
    - throwawaykf05 12y ago
      Have you read the full charges against Mega? They actively uploaded, and encouraged others to upload, copyright infringing material to jack up their traffic. They very knowingly violated the law. That's quite a bit different from the garden variety "download a few files" piracy.
DigitalSea 12y ago
Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Lets jail the developers of uTorrent while we are at it, thanks to them, I am able to easily queue up a torrent of Game of Thrones. We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no actual harm to anyone all the while people committing actual crimes go unnoticed or repeatedly go in and out of the system. People slinging drugs in the streets probably get lesser sentences than Andrus got for helping develop Megaupload. "In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. He further acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through their conduct." Classic entertainment industry mathematics. How can a figure as large as $400 million be accurately proven? Seems like they just spun a massive wheel down at the law firm and chose whatever number sounded large, but not over the top. More specifically, how can a computer programmer who doesn't sound like had any involvement in the business side of things know how much Megaupload supposedly cost the industry? There are so many things about this story that don't sit right with me. They went after the low hanging fruit. They couldn't touch Kim Dotcom, so they're going for the vulnerable and lesser high profile people involved in hopes of building up a case for bringing down Dotcom. This is what it is all about: sending a message to Dotcom and trying to slowly try anyone even remotely involved in the Megaupload site. They know Kim won't go down without a fight, they'll basically say: Well one of the sites developers admitted there was copyrighted material on the site and he knew about it, he was sent to jail. As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement.
- tzs 12y ago
  > Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Neither Google nor Dropbox was set up with the intent of aiding copyright infringement. Neither Google nor Dropbox based their business model on aiding copyright infringement. The comparison is invalid. > As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement. He was the head of software development for Megaupload. It is hard to imagine that he did not have full knowledge of what they were doing and was not involved in planning it.
primitivesuave 12y ago
It's a real shame that millions of our tax dollars go to putting a single guy in prison for a year, when they could be much more effectively put towards prevention and prosecution of violent criminal activity.
jacquesm 12y ago
The programmers of the largest copyright infringing company on the planet (Google) are hopefully exempt from idiocy like this. Youtube contains massive amounts of copyright infringing videos, Google books brought it to a whole new level and the Google cache infringes on a very significant portion of the web.
- throwawaykf05 12y ago
  Youtube honors the DMCA (the spirit as well as the word of the law - something Mega was shown not to do). Google books did get sued, but were found exempt under fair use (and having used Google Books, I'd tend to agree with that decision, though IANAL.) And last I checked, caches are explicitly exempt from copyright considerations.
jpgvm 12y ago
Tbh he kinda fucked up. He waived his right to an extradition hearing in the Netherlands. I am fairly certain the Dutch court would not have let him be extradited over this bullshit. Case and point, he is the only one to be extradited successfully and only because he went of his own free will.
- pluma 12y ago
  I'm fairly certain he talked to a lawyer before waiving his right. I know that that's what I would have done in his situation -- it's not a decision you take lightly. I'm also fairly certain his lawyer told him that his hearing would be unlikely to result in a rejection and that complying with the US prosecution would be his best chance for the least bad outcome.
pluma 12y ago
Sidenote: it's so weird the English language uses the same word "justice" for the legal system and the moral concept. In German for example the two are different, making it easy to explain to people how the legal system is about equal application of the law, not personal closure. The domain "justice.gov" just sounds like propaganda (imagine "freedom.gov") to me as a non-native speaker who mostly hears the term used in that second (moral) meaning.
- lucb1e 12y ago
  I'm not sure which German words you are referring to, but as a Dutch person "justice.gov" sounds like propaganda to me too.
  - mrottenkolber 12y ago
    Die Gerechtigkeit und das Recht? Not sure but could be.
    - pluma 12y ago
      Gerechtigkeit (moral justice) and Justiz (the justice system). Recht is actually in a similar spot as justice: Recht can mean "law" (as in Rechtsstaat, "state of laws") or "right" (as in Menschenrechte, "human rights").
    - ptaipale 12y ago
      Or perhaps die Gerechtigkeit und die Justiz. But I must say that in my ear, "Department of Corrections" sounds perhaps even more like propaganda, or doublespeak...
- bhayden 12y ago
  I'm an American, when I think "justice system" I think of justice not on a personal level, but on a punishment level. Justice is having a punishment that fits the crime. If someone wanted personal justice, I think they usually qualify it with "personal" before "justice".
ommunist 12y ago
Why than the owners of Google are still free?
manish_gill 12y ago
This is such bullshit.
elcct 12y ago
Well, programmer is not a banker...
Galacticus 12y ago
It's 4 years. He's already been held for 3.
TylerH 12y ago
Wait, I can't tell if this is about the old Megaupload site or the new Megaupload site.
smutticus 12y ago
Can someone with more details on his involvement provide more information? I'm confused as to what exactly this guy did for Mega.

150 points by xyby 12y ago

This just seems ridiculous to me. I may well get downvoted, but it needs saying. Why do 99% of the world's governments seem completely retarded when it comes to copyright laws? How many tens of millions in legal resources were expended in bringing 'justice' here? And what does the outcome even matter? Good job, tens of millions down the drain for one year of an Estonian's time? The system would surely be better served if they just handed those millions to the actual copyright holders? The only real victory (if that's what they'd like to call it) is having taken the site down in the first place, not that that did a single thing to kerb 'illegal' filesharing... The industry has moved on and adapted just fine.

tomp 12y ago
Well, the idea of criminal justice, besides "fairness"/"retribution" (which I think is barbaric), is that it discourages future criminal action by others, who have more reason to believe they would be similarly punished if caught.
ledzep2 12y ago
They are not retarded. They are just money driven IMHO. And I bet the story behind this is no worse than the plot of House of Cards.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Some people buy a car to do whatever the hell they want with it. Others buy chunk of a nuclear superpower's government to do whatever the hell they want with it.
RickS 12y ago
My guess is that their strategy is to create a chilling effect by making an example of this guy. From their perspective, if smart people become more frightened to take on projects like this, their money was well spent. $10M is lunch money here.
- Fuxy 12y ago
  It seems to infuriate me and make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law. But in no way will I cave to this mafia style behavior. Do I now risk going to jail if any of the people o worked with use my software for something illegal?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    >It seems to [...] make me more likely to ask to be payed in cash when doing business with companies that seem to be in the gray area of the law. Money paid in cash still needs to show up in the books of the company and your tax statement. If it doesn't, you just handed them another opportunity to make you hang - tax fraud is nothing to trifle with.
    - Fuxy 12y ago
      It will be on the books but maybe as something else. I don't mind paying tax but I'd rather not get arrested for something a person I do business with did. This is the chilling effect this kind of behavior by the state has. It make people less willing to share real information with the government since it could potentially get them arrested just to make an example of them. It's all about trust and this kind of behavior makes me not trust the government or the law.
      - Xylakant 12y ago
        If it's on the books then it's on the books as "y did work for x" which is about as much as they need.
- omeid2 12y ago
  This is the most logical explanation that I know of, also considering what happened to PopcornTime.
BlueAndroid 12y ago
I work in Law Enforcement, so feel to disregard my opinion as biased , however, 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down. I used to find computers with lists and lists of megaupload urls. When that method died out a little beacon of happy shone for me. Now I understand that free movies trumps removing abusive material, and as rapidshare and others took a more reasoned approach the child abuse material slipped into TOR and then i2p (after we brought the house down repeatedly on lolitacity and similar places in TOR). So it was more of a temporary reprieve. But those still at it have to work a bit harder and I'm happy about that. It's all about the free movies right? Well if that's your world, you're lucky.
- pjc50 12y ago
  If people are involved in the transmission of child abuse, I'm happy for them to be prosecuted for that. I'm not happy with the approach of prosecuting people for copyright infringement and then claiming they deserve it because of the child abuse material. That's a bait-and-switch.
- goblin89 12y ago
  > 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when mega-upload went down. However, this apparently did not serve as the grounds for punishment, and is not mentioned in statements quoted in the article—the whole deal seems to hinge on copyright infringement allegations.
- fluffheadsr 12y ago
  Yep, lets arrest everyone.. FOR THE CHILDREN! Everytime a case comes up you law enforcement bring up the same big scarry bad men.. Drugs, Pedophiles, and Terrorists.. GET LOST
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't understand. They were using a service were everyone's IPs and other data were logged and could be subpoenaed, now they're using services that add many more barriers to discovering their identity, and you consider that an improvement? What am I missing?

ryan-allen 12y ago

... what the hell? And they're trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US as well! At the time of launch, I thought how cool it'd have been to work on the project, ouch.

Fuxy 12y ago

There's a lot of lip service but I still don't get why a programmer need to go to jail for this crap. Are they prosecuting everyone that ever worked for or did business with megaupload now? Because that seems a bit shady.

Tharkun 12y ago
Might as well jail every tobacco or arms producer as well.
- bhayden 12y ago
  Pretty sure if an arms dealer promoted, even indirectly, the use of their firearms for illegal purposes, they'd also get some people going through the justice system.
ReadThePost 12y ago
A programmer's going to jail because, as the original posting says: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." So, if you're employer is providing some sort of illegal service, you probably shouldn't use it yourself either unless you're OK with going to jail for it.

jackjeff 12y ago

I really dislike the extra-territorial aspect of it. From what I understand the Netherlands copyright law is more lenient than the US law. For instance downloading copyrighted material was legal until very recently. So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there... http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-finally-becomes-illegal-in-the-netherlands/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fin... So you could do something which is legal, or illegal but not criminal offense (civil) in the country where you live, but if it displeases the US, then suddenly they can throw you in jail in a foreign country (the US) where you have no ties. I break Chinese laws on a daily basis (Tank Man!). Why should I care about US law, since I do not live there, nor am I a citizen? It's not like I can vote for these laws...

gambiting 12y ago
Imagine if it worked the other way around.....if one day a US court got a request from Saudi Arabia asking to jail one of US citizens because they broke Saudi law on the internet(even though they have never been to Saudi Arabia). US would politely tell them to fuck off. Yet, when US does this to another country,they comply? It's disgusting.
- geon 12y ago
  I wish more countries had the balls to tell the US to fuck off. I wish MY country did; then we wouldn't have had the Pirate Bay Gate, where Swedish constitution was stepped all over.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - hellbanner 12y ago
    the US spends the most resources on military every year. "I wish my neighbors would tell the bully to fuck off when he demands their lunch money" Here's what happens to countries who tell the USA to fuck off (spoilers: they get economically and militarily invaded): http://www.amazon.com/Game-As-Old-Empire-Corruption/dp/1576753956 http://www.amazon.com/Game-As-Old-Empire-Corruption/dp/15767... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

SebKba 12y ago

Yet every single one of the bankers who brought the world economy to the brink of collapse walks free, enjoying the fruits of his labour. The system works.

easytiger 12y ago
Please, give it a rest on this "banker" polemic nonsense.
- Raphael_Amiard 12y ago
  why ?
  - blowski 12y ago
    Because it makes the issue seem like it's only a concern of angry and ignorant teenagers. While I for one would love for the current corporate capitalist model of society to be fundamentally restructured, it's not going to happen by making snide remarks on Hacker News.
    - SebKba 12y ago
      It's the first thought that popped into my head... I don't exactly see how your comment helps any more than mine but that's fine.
      - psykovsky 12y ago
        Bread and circus... Bread and circus...

kumarski 12y ago

Wells Fargo smuggled half a Trillion(with a T) dollars worth of drug cartel money. Zero Punishment.

hellbanner 12y ago
None at all huh? Please discuss, HN (see my other comments in this thread). This seems relevant to the idea of "Justice".

draugadrotten 12y ago

If the EU is willing to do this to a programmer, it makes it easy to understand why Julian Assange is refusing to leave the Embassy of Ecuador.

contingencies 12y ago

By that logic, authors of filesystems, ssh, TCP/IP should go to jail. Quick, let's sue the Oxford dictionary! Military style raid on DARPA for inventing the internet! Oh, wait ... that's the military. Can't we have our cake and eat it too? Talk about political sham oldboy network rent-a-justice. Legal systems need to be decentralized, their interpretation and processes transparent. Perhaps a forward thinking country like Ecuador might be up for the challenge? I exclude Estonia as they are embroiled too much in EU legalese to have much of a chance of a running escape.

ReadThePost 12y ago
Well, if you invent TCP/IP so that you can then use it to commit illegal activity, then yes, you should expect to have charges levied against you. If you don't, then you're probably fine. From the post: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." Not only did he use the service he ran to knowingly pirate things himself, but that also implies that he was aware of content illegally hosted there and did nothing to stop it. Prosecution likely proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he intentionally assisted piracy.

jcrei 12y ago

What if you are a programmer working for any major corporation that happens do be doing some illegal stuff (Banks, Oil, gambling, etc). Should you be afraid to go to jail?

omeid2 12y ago
Of course not, Banks, Oil, and basically all big corps are immune from law. The sad thing is, that is hardly an exaggeration.
ReadThePost 12y ago
You're probably safe if you don't partake in the illegal activity yourself. From the post: "Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites." He got slapped with racketeering charges because they proved that he wasn't just "following orders" from higher-ups but actively assisting/committing criminal activity.
pluma 12y ago
Yes. At least if the illegal activity is well-known. Supporting a criminal activity makes you an accomplice. If you do so knowingly, you face similar consequences to the direct perpetrators. Three examples: Let's say you work for a bank. Your superior is involved in criminal activity using the bank's resources. The bank may profit from that activity. You do not make any attempts to bring attention to the criminal activity (neither internally nor to the police). You're an accomplice and will face legal consequences. Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, the bank is a money laundry front for a local organized crime group. A federal investigation busts the operation and defines the bank as a criminal organization. You're an accomplice, but having had no reason to suspect the bank is involved in illegal activities, you'll likely not face any consequences. Let's say you work for a bank. Unknown to you, some members of senior management are engaging in illegal activities. They are caught and put on trial. You are not an accomplice and don't face any consequences. (IANAL, but that seems to be how it works in most jurisdictions I'm aware of)

choppaface 12y ago

Nice job DoJ. Now to raise the bar and serve the people some real justice, go get Jamie Dimon ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witn... ).

the100rabh 12y ago

Wonder what punishment is going to be given to HSBC and Well Fargo execs ?

tempodox 12y ago

Article quote: In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. Poppycock. How is a computer programmer qualified to estimate the pecuniary value of “harm caused” by the shop they're working at? What about the harm caused to Justice by farces and show trials like this?

pluma 12y ago
"Agreed" is also such a weasely claim. And of course the "harm caused to copyright holders" is a farcical concept to begin with. You can't just take, say, the total number of downloads and multiply that with some fictitious amount of lost revenue and then claim that as damage, yet that's exactly what the rights utilization industry has been doing for decades. This concept is based on the idea of physical theft. If I steal a truckload of soap and then sell it myself, the damage I'm doing to the legitimate owner is equivalent to the volume I stole multiplied by the original selling price minus regular shrinkage (e.g. lost sales because of faulty products, damage during regular handling or natural expiry). Digital goods don't work that way. The "theft" of digital goods does not result in you having less products to sell. Instead it's more similar to the damage done via the "theft" of trade secrets. If I steal the Coca Cola recipe and begin giving away knock-off cola for free, I arguably cause damages due to lost sales, but it'd be ridiculous to assume that every "sale" of my product is equivalent to one lost sale of the Coca Cola company. In fact, MegaUpload didn't even "steal" anything. If we want to use physical crimes as metaphors, it's simply dealing with stolen goods -- or more precisely: giving stolen goods away for free. And if one million users downloaded the same illegal content, they didn't give one million stolen goods away, they merely gave the same stolen goods away a million times. It's not that copyright violations can't cause damages, but the current system for valuation of those damages -- especially in the US -- is entirely ridiculous and only continues to exist because the courts are either too apathetic or too ignorant (or sometimes both) to dismiss it.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jkot 12y ago

> Nomm agreed that the harm caused ... exceeded $400 million... group obtained at least $175 million ... Megaupload.com ... it accounted for four percent of total Internet traffic, having more than one billion total visits, 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors. > Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer ... from 2007 until his arrest in January 2012. ... he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites ... which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy” warning. > Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites. Replace megaupload with any website or service provider (Youtube, Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook) and it gets scary very quickly.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

That's Iran-grade justice. "Let's persecute a random programmer that touched thing we really dislike".

tzs 12y ago
He was Megaupload's head of software development, which is a bit more than just "a random programmer that touched thing".
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  This is another way of saying "he was a naughty boy". Yes he was, and no, you can't imprison someone for that. He downloaded some illegal files, he was a head of development and not just a developer, he saw some scare banners on content - all that facts help you sell a story to newspaper reader but for court it's all tangential.
  - throwawaykf05 12y ago
    Have you read the full charges against Mega? They actively uploaded, and encouraged others to upload, copyright infringing material to jack up their traffic. They very knowingly violated the law. That's quite a bit different from the garden variety "download a few files" piracy.

DigitalSea 12y ago

Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Lets jail the developers of uTorrent while we are at it, thanks to them, I am able to easily queue up a torrent of Game of Thrones. We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no actual harm to anyone all the while people committing actual crimes go unnoticed or repeatedly go in and out of the system. People slinging drugs in the streets probably get lesser sentences than Andrus got for helping develop Megaupload. "In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. He further acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through their conduct." Classic entertainment industry mathematics. How can a figure as large as $400 million be accurately proven? Seems like they just spun a massive wheel down at the law firm and chose whatever number sounded large, but not over the top. More specifically, how can a computer programmer who doesn't sound like had any involvement in the business side of things know how much Megaupload supposedly cost the industry? There are so many things about this story that don't sit right with me. They went after the low hanging fruit. They couldn't touch Kim Dotcom, so they're going for the vulnerable and lesser high profile people involved in hopes of building up a case for bringing down Dotcom. This is what it is all about: sending a message to Dotcom and trying to slowly try anyone even remotely involved in the Megaupload site. They know Kim won't go down without a fight, they'll basically say: Well one of the sites developers admitted there was copyrighted material on the site and he knew about it, he was sent to jail. As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement.

tzs 12y ago
> Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Neither Google nor Dropbox was set up with the intent of aiding copyright infringement. Neither Google nor Dropbox based their business model on aiding copyright infringement. The comparison is invalid. > As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement. He was the head of software development for Megaupload. It is hard to imagine that he did not have full knowledge of what they were doing and was not involved in planning it.

primitivesuave 12y ago

It's a real shame that millions of our tax dollars go to putting a single guy in prison for a year, when they could be much more effectively put towards prevention and prosecution of violent criminal activity.

jacquesm 12y ago

The programmers of the largest copyright infringing company on the planet (Google) are hopefully exempt from idiocy like this. Youtube contains massive amounts of copyright infringing videos, Google books brought it to a whole new level and the Google cache infringes on a very significant portion of the web.

throwawaykf05 12y ago
Youtube honors the DMCA (the spirit as well as the word of the law - something Mega was shown not to do). Google books did get sued, but were found exempt under fair use (and having used Google Books, I'd tend to agree with that decision, though IANAL.) And last I checked, caches are explicitly exempt from copyright considerations.

jpgvm 12y ago

Tbh he kinda fucked up. He waived his right to an extradition hearing in the Netherlands. I am fairly certain the Dutch court would not have let him be extradited over this bullshit. Case and point, he is the only one to be extradited successfully and only because he went of his own free will.

pluma 12y ago
I'm fairly certain he talked to a lawyer before waiving his right. I know that that's what I would have done in his situation -- it's not a decision you take lightly. I'm also fairly certain his lawyer told him that his hearing would be unlikely to result in a rejection and that complying with the US prosecution would be his best chance for the least bad outcome.

pluma 12y ago

Sidenote: it's so weird the English language uses the same word "justice" for the legal system and the moral concept. In German for example the two are different, making it easy to explain to people how the legal system is about equal application of the law, not personal closure. The domain "justice.gov" just sounds like propaganda (imagine "freedom.gov") to me as a non-native speaker who mostly hears the term used in that second (moral) meaning.

lucb1e 12y ago
I'm not sure which German words you are referring to, but as a Dutch person "justice.gov" sounds like propaganda to me too.
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  Die Gerechtigkeit und das Recht? Not sure but could be.
  - pluma 12y ago
    Gerechtigkeit (moral justice) and Justiz (the justice system). Recht is actually in a similar spot as justice: Recht can mean "law" (as in Rechtsstaat, "state of laws") or "right" (as in Menschenrechte, "human rights").
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    Or perhaps die Gerechtigkeit und die Justiz. But I must say that in my ear, "Department of Corrections" sounds perhaps even more like propaganda, or doublespeak...
bhayden 12y ago
I'm an American, when I think "justice system" I think of justice not on a personal level, but on a punishment level. Justice is having a punishment that fits the crime. If someone wanted personal justice, I think they usually qualify it with "personal" before "justice".

ommunist 12y ago

Why than the owners of Google are still free?

manish_gill 12y ago

This is such bullshit.

elcct 12y ago

Well, programmer is not a banker...

Galacticus 12y ago

It's 4 years. He's already been held for 3.

TylerH 12y ago

Wait, I can't tell if this is about the old Megaupload site or the new Megaupload site.

smutticus 12y ago

Can someone with more details on his involvement provide more information? I'm confused as to what exactly this guy did for Mega.