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US Judge Say Kim Dotcom May Never Be Tried or Extradited
vik writes "As Megaupload's Kim Dotcom's megafarce trial continues, the New Zealand Herald reports that his alleged offense not only falls below the threshold for extradition, but also that the warrant may not be properly served. 'My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,' says Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken. Not surprisingly, Kim Dotcom has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."
He was put out of business and lost tens of millions of dollars from the raid. His punishment has already been served, without trial, and without due process.
This problem will not be corrected. Too many people neither understand nor care, and too many wealthy and powerful people are keenly interested in retaining this ability to eliminate competition though abuse of the legal system.
makes me embarrassed to be an American. I'll be voting Socialist come November and encouraging everyone I know to vote third party, not that it will make a difference. The unwashed masses will continue voting keep voting for Ds and Rs because "anything else is a wasted vote...", and the Ds and Rs will keep sucking corporate cock at every opportunity because they know where their bread is buttered.
"...having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."
Kim, you should be thankful that this attempt to bring democracy to your country ended with so few casualties. The United States is generally far more aggressive regarding its use of military forces to support economic (corporate) policies. You could have been picked up by a bounty hunter, or kidnapped by operatives. I wish I could say I was joking here -- several federal legislators and officials have stated that they consider filesharing and copyright infringement to be supporting terrorism.
On the upside, your sacrifice may bring additional business to New Zealand, as well as prompt a review of disaster recovery with an emphasis on protection against foreign governments. Again, I wish it was a joke -- ten years ago, disaster recovery plans centered around the damage backhoes and hurricanes could do. Today, those risks can be cheaply mitigated thanks to cloud architecture and data centers in almost every major city worldwide. The biggest threat which cannot be managed by a business anymore is the threat posed by a rogue foreign government such as the United States. Though I am hardly singling them out -- the UK, China, Iran, North Korea, India, Iraq, France, Germany and Egypt join them on the list of foreign governments who have attempted to destroy businesses extrajudicially.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Ah well, no harm done!
I wonder if he will be able to sue the US government for the millions/billions lost in buisiness.
"These days, the US legal system simply has so much cruft, overbearing laws and process hindrances that simply the threat of getting arrested is enough to make you think about complying with whatever they want, getting arrested will give you perpetual problems in your life and getting convicted even if overturned later will make you an outcast."
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
They will extradite him, he will be prosecuted in the USA, anyone who thinks otherwise should read the indictment it's damning.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
Fake take down notices, fake accounts to keep copyright material posted, instructions to ignore copyright takedowns not politically connected, money laundering. It's pretty damning stuff, so you can say "Megaupload wasn't given notice of server seizure" etc. but that won't stop a judge reading the indictment and extraditing him. 220 jobs lost? I'm wondering how many of those 220 will also end up behind bars after reading the indictment.
I don't feel sorry for him or his business. He was knowingly running a warez hub. On top of that, he was running it as a for-profit warez distribution website. What his external marketing showed is meaningless compared to what actually occurred behind the scenes.
I don't feel sorry for anyone who uploaded their only copy of their files to Megaupload, either. It's no one's issue but the uploader's if he was dumb enough to not have multiple physical backups of files that he definitely couldn't lose. Anyone dumb enough to also pay money to share their files on a site that is filled with ads also gets what's coming to him. There are at least 10 sites out there that provide you with a clean, easy to use and efficient service - even for free - for sharing files without any ads.
This whole situation is just children, Brazilians and the mentally challenged just whining about not being able to get their warez, or losing a couple of dollars to a company that shut down and didn't give them a refund. I didn't see any cries from the people who lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars when Etology scammed every advertiser and publisher, last summer.
The argument will always be that he merely offered a service that was in huge demand. What the users did with it cannot be blamed on the operator. At least, not when you stick to basic common sense and not U.S. protectionist copyright laws.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The IP Nazis know that fighting a battle against the entire internet is difficult, costly and unpopular (not that they care the least bit about that last point). So they resort to a much cheaper, age-old, yet highly effective scare-tactic instead: Making "examples" of people. They try to identify high-profile Super-Nodes amongst the filesharers - like the guy who ran MegaUpload dot com. They then put into effect a "America will fuck you up bad regardless of where you may be in the World, pirate-boy" tactic. The message it sends to ordinary people is clear: "We don't care who you are. We don't care where you are. If you pirate our corporate IPs, we will land some law enforcement muscle in your location, and fuck you in the ass with an electrified baton". --------- This is one - probably illegal - way to fight against piracy. Unfortunately, it will eventually backfire on the MAFIAA's asses, and with it also on America. Everybody who watches movies or plays games these days is pretty aware that the quality of said products is going in one direction with each year that passes - down, down, and down more. Everybody knows that the people who produce this stuff don't give a shit about anything but profit, and that they are crooked enough to buy good reviews for bad produce. So eventually, sales of the latter will collapse not because people were pirating so much of it, but rather because people don't want to spend their hard-earned money on it anymore. Its time for functional alternatives to Hollywood and GameWood to arise. I personally believe that will actually happen eventually, when people discover that there are viable alternatives to U.S. made movies and games. As for Kim Dotcom... even if he's not extradited and sentenced to hard prison, people who run operations similar to his are scared of becoming "the next Kim Dotcom". ------- But scare strategies rarely work sattisfactorily in the long run. In the long run, the Movie and game industries will have to try to create a better product sold at a fair price (not the case currently). Or they will eventually face the same fate as MegaUpload - here and thriving today, gone and bankrupt(ed) tomorrow.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Really? Millions of users who used megaupload for backups, or for distributing their own material and nothing else, _and_ who have no other copy of the data? Might the submitter be just slightly exaggerating?
Unlikely. Apparently, there were 15'000 premium accounts from the US army alone. Millions of legitimate users sounds quite reasonable. Also take into account that there is only so many movies and software that can be shared and music does not take a lot of space. Compare that with the size of the Megaupload storage and it sounds quite possible that the majority of data was actually legitimate. Of course, a major part of the Megaupload profits were from copyright infringement, but that is not the fault of the legitimate users.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
While the legality of the move raises questions, I have to admit, there seems something poetic about someone who earned a fortune on ill-gotten, pirated material complaining about having his business trashed and jobs lost.
Yet who was it that claimed that Megaupload's principle use was copyright infringement? Megaupload had large numbers of law-abiding users, including people within the Justice department and even more ironically, within the entertainment industry. You might as well claim that ISPs are built on "ill-gotten, pirated material" -- after all, practically all downloading activity takes place on the Internet.
An indictment is not a conviction, it is a preliminary accusation backed up with some amount of evidence. If indictments were conclusive, we would never need trials.
Palm trees and 8
Heroes of the fight against control of information on the www.
Legislators will use any excuse to put in place the mechanism of web censorship. Kiddie porn, terrorism, copyright theft; they are all excuses.
What they want is the power to censor negative comment about themselves...
I really doubt that millions of people were more than slightly inconvenienced. Smart people didn't put their only copy of any data they thought was important there. A service like that is for backups and exchange with other users. Unless either you were stupid or list your original due to a crash, you can just re-upload to another service.
Otherwise only Megaupload itself and Carpathian are really up a creek.
And why the "_and_ who have no other copy of the data"? If you used megaupload for backups, well, now you've lost access to your data for that purpose. If you used it to distribute your own material to others, well you've against lost access to your data for that purpose. Sure, you can setup a new backup service somewhere else, but that still means you've been inconvenienced and under questionable justification. Having said that...
And to this, I agree. I doubt megaupload itself had millions of users for backup and distribution (although I could be wrong). But, I don't doubt that megaupload and other similar services have lost millions of users for those purposes, due to the chilling knowledge that without even the ability to charge and extradite them under US law, they still can be shut down at will; hence, any free or semi-free service for file sharing or backup is now quick to tuck its tail and try to limit access and to make even legitimate access arduous enough that the pretext of "for the children^Wpiracy" will even be more clear, presuming that will protect them. So, there are those who are inconvenienced by the loss of megaupload directly and indirectly and further inconvenienced with the possible inability to find alternatives.
Now, one could argue that such services inherently have the property that they'll be used by pirates, their owners will inherently be enriched by them, and hence such a market for free/semi-free file sharing shouldn't commercial exist--meanwhile, fully commercial and well filtered sites can remain because they have the resources to monitor and block offenders*. I am not quick to argue for that, however, as the same logic could be used for all sorts of free/semi-free services like photo sharing sites, email, etc. It's already enough of a poison pill that other, non-legal speech can be used to shut down services without adding yet another arm when it's even harder to qualify or quantify. After all, both sides can say whatever numbers they like, but we have no third party with either the ability or the desire to track down the users (both uploaders and downloaders) of sites like Megaupload; nor, am I aware, of efforts to do the same for photo sharing sites, email, etc, to have some base of comparison. But, then again, maybe we do have the scholarly work to back up one side or both in their assertions. That, to me, would be much more interesting and informative than hearing lawyers squabble over something that there seems to be no evidence for currently and might not exist.
*Consider the situation with Youtube and Gema, and how difficult it is to reasonably find and block even repeat offenders, even if one wanted to. And consider the story of IOS being a safer market presumably because it's tied to accountability through credit cards; yet, Android has a similar setup with credit cards, so does that really help? Of course, that story is quite is unclear on what "policies that enforce accountability" mean and how viable it really is if you took credit cards or a similar cost/identification out of the equation; maybe they enforce accountability some other way. And for all we know, Megaupload had a similar policy in place as Apple. But even if they were "lax", even presuming that's how Google is, is there any real serious talk of legally holding Google as an accomplice in malware infections (or guilty of neglect) anymore than we could hold MS legally guilty for their platform being favored for the same? Of course, in the end, intent does enter into it. Ie, if Megaupload actually wanted for there to be copyright infringement... But, a policy of rewarding sharing on a site devoted to sharing being used to implicate Megaupload is absurd as seeing Youtube's (and hence Google's) po
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I actually would not be surprised if the number of "legitimate" (i.e. attempts at being law-abiding) users numbered in the millions. Megaupload provides a bunch of bandwidth and storage, so if you need to distribute gigabytes of data to multiple people it is a reasonable system to use. I have seen scientists using Megaupload and similar services to share data sets. The US Department of Justice used it, and there were members of the recording industry who used it. I have seen open source projects distributed on services like Megaupload, with links posted on forums to help provide more reliable downloads than the project's own servers (an ad-hoc sort of mirroring).
Millions seems like a reasonable estimate to me.
Palm trees and 8
Yet who was it that claimed that Megaupload's principle use was copyright infringement?
Anybody with an iota of common sense could tell that, long before they were raided.
Yeah, but it ultimately comes down to intellectual property nonsense. Even if it didn't, the US absolutely should not be involved.
completely cut off the flow of money to the entertainment industry
There's no need to cut off the flow completely - just reduce it sufficiently.
Doing that is simple. Here's the plan: It's not as tough as you believe.
True; they both are. And both houses of congress are stuck with silly games too. However, it is clear that one party wants to force their own religious mores onto everyone. Most people don't have any problem with people who hold differing views. But when they try to make those views into laws - yep, that's a problem. I can't vote for a party of religious thugs that want to control women, make birth control hard to obtain, make abortion illegal, and otherwise fuck things up. Other than that and the "small government" vs. "big government" the two parties are the same.
It may or may not. I don't know, and I can't tell because it hasn't gone to trial.
What has happened is that someone's had their business disrupted, and their customers have had their personal data stolen from them, all without due process of the law.
There has been a crime here, and even copyright infringers deserve a fair trial. Those trying to deny it to them need prosecuting.
They only paid cash to people to upload files if they couldn't prove those files were copyright infringing; that's why they had all those spreadsheets identifying what the members of their revenue sharing scheme were uploading. This saved them quite a bit of money.
While the legality of the move raises questions, I have to admit, there seems something poetic about someone who earned a fortune on ill-gotten, pirated material complaining about having his business trashed and jobs lost.
You really need to stop using that catchphrase.
I think it would be obvious by now that there are many many people who did not use Mega for things you did.
He earned his fortune by providing a really good service to customers. What the customers were doing, you can't know so stop assuming so much.
And Steve Jobs used to build telephone hacking equipment. The government should seize apple and give everyone free iPads!
But you have no requirement that they actually do prove it? the allegation is sufficient for you? you're ok with the mere allegation of a crime being enough to ruin someone's entire life?
Due process exists for a reason. If you don't care about it in one specific case, then you are willing to dismiss it in ALL cases, including ones you might find yourself in in the future.
When you're the subject of a raid like this, it doesn't matter if you have backups. They take those too.
If the above is the lesson learned, then anyone backing up their data needs to do it onto a server in a country which has no legal reciprocity with the US. In those cases, the US just uses the military instead of the judiciary.
Hopefully those "choice words" are only the beginning, and turn into an expensive lawsuit against the U.S. Government.
Liberty in your lifetime
In actual money terms. I'm sure it's done quite a bit to harm both theirs and the US' reputation. I can't believe they would attempt to do something that they should already know they legally can't do. At least the lawsuits that will likely result from this should be a little interesting.
I really wish the government was able to kick out incompetence before things got to the 'scandal' level. It always seems like they're reacting to the latest disaster instead of preventing it from happening.
Millions/Billions of $ lost, tens of thousands dead, all for the profit of the mega corporations that control the whores on Capitol Hill!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
They do not have proof, they just made claims and lies to sweeten the charges.
There is and has never been any proof other than false allegations and bullshit lies from the government to try and help sweeten the charges. RIAA has already been proven many many many times to falsify and even make up evidence to help their cause.
You're assuming facts not in evidence. In a free country everybody gets a fair trial before we hang them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Because your backups are always kept with the servers, right?
You're suppose to keep a set of backups locally, in case they need to be restored on the spot. Those would have been seized.
You're suppose to keep another set of backups off-site, somewhere safe. If that's with a 3rd party business (like Iron Mountain); a safety deposit box at a nearby bank; or even a safe in a secure warehouse, it doesn't really matter as long as it isn't close by. You have to keep it far enough away so if a catastrophic local event happens, you don't lose everything.
If I remember right, he lost control of the servers, and his bank accounts were frozen. He also had thousands of servers, and hundreds of people employed. So, he couldn't use his servers. He couldn't buy or lease new servers. He couldn't even pay the staff. I'm sure there were a few die-hard individuals who would have stayed to help, to ensure their future employment with him. The hard part is getting new servers setup and racked. That's far from an overnight proposition, and impossible with no funds.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Use your time to work on something meaningful, not whining about your tragic lost warez website.
I'd never heard of Megaupload before this brouhaha blew out into the open. Nor am I a "pirate" (I advocate boycotting **AA crap), nor do I think I actually like K. Dotcom. Regardless, even I can see lots of stink in this mess, and most of that's on the prosecution's side, not MU's.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I feel sorry for the crowd here when someone as sleazy as Kim gets lauded as a hero. The guy is a known crook, despised by everyone with a clue, and he is absolutely not the kind of sleazebag you want to root for. Don't fall into that trap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That would be a good counterargument if Steve Jobs was now selling boxes which were totally not for telephone hacking but everybody was using them for telephone hacking anyway.
You're talking about Hollywood, right?
http://www.punkerslut.com/articles/hollywood_the_worlds_greatest_pirates.html
Maybe the feds should think a little more carefully the next time the MPAA lawyers and investigators try to seduce them with a new case?
Because your backups are always kept with the servers, right?
In the case of evidentiary seizure, it is irrelevant where they're kept unless they're in a jurisdiction untouchable by the US judiciary. There aren't many of those, and using one to store backups is probably just this side of impossible to accomplish realistically with the scale of data we're talking about.
Neither party has given a shit about 'smaller government' for decades. Truth be told, they both love the idea of big government these days because they can stuff all their brothers in law into the bureaucracy and guarantee them jobs til they decide to take their bribes and retire. Plus, with compatible people in the bureaucracies, the regulations will be written to benefit the various party's plans. Course, it means regulation hell for the rest of us, but what the fuck, we ain't the 1%.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
in almost 39 years on this planet, I'm ashamed to be a New Zealander.
The fundamental problem with American politics is you can't get elected without big bags of money. Without the corporate payoff you can't play. You solve that problem and you eliminate big business buying off your government (because politicians won't take orders from anyone if they can avoid it).
Whoops
Just as then, Jews are now increasingly being blamed for all the ills caused by the political leaders of their own political parties & nations
Mel Gibson? Anyone who goes down that road quickly gets (rightfully) lambasted by the media. Now if you wanted to talk about Arabs instead of Jews, you might have a point about increased persecution and segregation.
Well, the "untouchable" portion is really up to how much he divulged.
In this case, I don't think they're goin gto try too hard to track down every backup that may be stored anywhere.
With the bandwidth that I'm sure he was using he could have used a system such as disk to disk over the Internet first, then disk to tape at each facility.
He was bringing in enough money to be able to afford all kinds of neat features, like redundant datacenters, and paying a guy to go collect the tapes from the jukebox once a week. Having a site in the US, Canada, Germany, Argentina, and China (random places off the top of my head), would have provided for the ability to get the site back up, regardless of what may be seized in any single country. Unless there was a massive coordinated effort for the shutdown, someone's going to walk away with the data, even if it's kept in some friend's garage in a box marked "1976 tax papers"
The difference between you, I, and him is that he was making a boatload of money at it, so it's a pretty good idea to pay for good precautions. I have to assume that he had at least one person mention "disaster recovery" to him...
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
well apple is now selling cloud storage.
come the next olympics there'll be lots of unauthorized pictures of the olympics shared through that, so it would be only fair that apple's entire premises would be raided, all accounts freezed and then tim cook could try to fight to keep the hardware from being trashed while the fbi tries to decide if they will actually try anyone in court.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you are going to argue, please do so like an adult.
Ever hear of something called "due process"? Even the Nazis got trials, and they were accused of things which few if any would dispute should actually *be* considered crimes.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Not at all. There are some parameters you are missing here. There are profits associated with upload, storage and download. It is quite obvious how to have the major part of the data be legitimate and still have the major part of the profits come from illegitimate data. If you are a student of economics, drop the subject, you suck at it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.