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Kim Dotcom Offers $5 Million Bounty To Defeat Extradition
heretic108 (454817) writes "Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom has posted a bounty of $5 million to anyone who can dig up any dirt which saves him from extradition to the U.S.. This bounty would be payable not only to government employees, but also to anyone who can retrieve documents clearly proving corruption in the whole prosecution process. 'We are asking for information that proves unlawful or corrupt conduct by the US government, the New Zealand government, spy agencies, law enforcement and Hollywood', Dotcom told website Torrentfreak.com."
The US Government is corrupt in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2. You needn't prove it to know it is true.
and the amscraying.
$5 million to anyone who assists substantially in getting this blowhard extradited?
His sort is the reason society is so far away from accepting the idea of abandoning intellectual property, and he is a far greater enemy than the copyright cartels.
and I won't be surprised when A LOT of dirt is dug up about the legal system.
Snowden did it to keep his oath and he's still getting prosecuted. Anyone doing it for money would have no leg to stand on in the view of the people who would go after them. Corruption in the US judiciary system is a very real problem and people who expose it are heroes but this reward is the worst possible way to get people to come forward.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
What about the film industry creating a cartel and using laws to enforce it, stuff like region coding DVD's and BluRay's, encryption, or adding unskippable bs like copyright notices on LEGIT bought products. The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product, but corrupt governments side on the media cartels who refuse to update their business models to the current real world - they are stuck in the last century.
The law has been bought and paid for by the corrupt media cartels. The law is a disgrace, as are our bought corrupt politicians.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Not sure where this comes from. This guy was just a Romkidz crook.
If simply being an asshole was just cause to terminate your civil rights, we'd all be behind bars.
Kimble ist ein schwul. Tod dem schwein.
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
Reminds me of pirate Jean LaFitte.
When the Louisiana governer put a bounty of $500 for LaFitte's head, LaFitte put a bounty of $5,000 on the governor's ear.
Actually that is the hollywood version.
The governor put a bounty of $750 for LaFitte's head and LaFitte doubled it for the governor's head. I like the Hollywood version better.
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
If it's not just yours, pay a corrupt legislature to make it exclusively yours, and to make anyone else using it a criminal offense, enforced by the threat of violence.
Fixed that for you.
Before you cheer on somebody like Kim Dotcom:
Kim Dotcom was born Kim Schmitz and has also called himself Kimble, King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire and Kim Tim Jim Vestor. Kim Schmitz has been convicted of insider trading during the Dotcom boom for his involvement with a struggling German company (through his company "Kimvestor AG"). While he lived in Hong Kong, he started a business ("Trendax") which was supposed to achieve guaranteed gains in stock trading by using artificial intelligence. In Germany however, the country where he was born and gained notoriety, he's mostly famous for ratting out his partners in crime to the lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth. Gravenreuth is a name-changer as well: He was born Günter Werner Dörr and later changed his surname to that of his mother. His claim to fame is his business of writing cease and desist letters, mostly regarding copyright and trademark violations. He posed as a teenage girl and solicited game swap partners: When teenage boys offered to trade games, he sent a cease and desist letter. Gravenreuth himself has been convicted for forgery. When he was later also convicted of fraud and had to go to jail (he had wrongfully claimed that he hadn't received a payment and used that to try and seize the domain name of a major German newspaper), he killed himself.
buy a nice boat an disappear and dont forget plenty of fishing gear and a shortwave radio-receiver, go find some abandoned Polynesian island with a fresh water source and just retire and forget modern civilization
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... Do you know absolutely ANYTHING about kim dot com? If he were JUST an asshole, I'd agree with you.
Let me guess, you know nothing about his history and you think megaupload was a legitimate file sharing site?
Being an asshole is one of his better traits.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If it's not just yours, pay a corrupt legislature to make it exclusively yours, and to make anyone else using it a criminal offense, enforced by the threat of violence.
Well, that's certainly why Kim's rich, yeah.
You're changing the topic. He stated: "Hundreds of millions of people _do_ do copyright infringement, because there are typically no adverse consequences." How does whining about not wanting people to infringe upon copyright challenge that statement?
I didn't take it. They still have all of it they ever had.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
.....is well understood and accounted for. It is a useful tool for all governments and corporations.
I am not sure where this idea came about that once upon a time, all people where honest and played by the rules. The only ones who actually play by the rules are the majority of the poor and middle class (aka not as poor as the bottom class), and mostly due to the threat of the gun (for those smart enough to figure out what is going on) or willful ignorance (for those either too fumb to figure it out or too busy trying to survive).
You know what people who are corruption resistant called? Idealists.....they generally have a very short life expectancy than the rest of us if ever they come to power.
Why do you have to pick one or the other?
He's guilty, everyone knows it, why would you willingly let him go? Why not take out both of the criminals instead of exchanging one for the other?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why doesn't he just go to some other country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA
EG North Korea, he'd fit right in with all the other Kim's there
The fact is, the fools screwed up in court numerous times and violated people's rights in an attempt to get evidence. Anything they collected in such ways should be null and void.
But you seem to support such thuggery. That's not a surprise, given that you're a prominent troll when it comes to copyright-related issues. You can't resist siding with authoritarians when it comes to copyright, and you even use their propaganda terms and inflammatory language when speaking about it.
You're not someone who can be taken seriously.
Kim DotTard....proving why he's a Tard...
Because our justice system is based upon the notion of due process. We've let murderers go because cops bungled far smaller things.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In what way does a somewhat detailed description of Disney's modus operandi describe Kim Dotcom? Are you a fucktard? Is that your problem? It seems like your problem.
For anyone who doesn't know, Kim Schmitz aka Kimble aka Kim Dotcom has a history of electronic theft, theft of trade secrets, insider trading, fraud, and has narrowly avoided prison in Germany a handful of times. He's was doing it before his "career" took off, hacking into banks from as early as 1995.
Go look into Kimvestor, a shoddy investment firm, and Data Protect. He made his "fortune" selling the latter off at the peak of the dot com bubble. Later he straight up pump-and-dump'd Letsbuyit.com, netting over â1.5m in profit.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
...I wouldn't count on him actually planning to pay a cent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Expose the corruption, donate the money to the EFF or one of the legal aid charities.
Are you the kind of asshole who runs around your neighborhood and rats out all your neighbors who don't mow often enough? Maybe you ought to add listening for loud music to your activities, so you can file a noise complaint too, and try to identify the songs while you're at it so you can go running to your pals in the MAFIAA to complain that because you overheard a copyrighted song, their rights were infringed. Even better if you have to trespass to get close enough to identify the songs.
File sharing IS a legitimate activity. In many cases the user doesn't know the copyright status. Shouldn't have to know. But even if it is copyrighted by someone else, and the user knows that and does not have their permission, so what? Last I heard, you can still trade books among your friends, and check out works from the public library. If this activity is illegal, that is reason to change the law, not blow the public's money on futile and damaging policing efforts. Copyright law is against the public interest, and needs drastic reform or abolishment.
Not having to do or help with policing is a basic right. The 4th Amendment has a bit to say on the subject of searches. The police can't just search your home, they have to have probable cause and a warrant. Equally, you shouldn't have to search your own home. The 3rd Amendment might even be applicable. You can't be forced to house a soldier in your home. Seems like you shouldn't have to allow a digital cop program on your servers either. A business based on file storage should not have to bear the burden of checking the copyright status of all the files stored on its servers. Cloud vendors don't have to do that, why should Megaupload?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What is your point? That he was guilty then, so whatever charges the government brings against him now are valid, and no matter how much the government violates standard procedures and illegally obtains evidence, it should be ignored?
1 + X = 2
ftfy.
Mathematics does prove it, BTW.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
obama just willingly let 5 criminals go free of charge so....
That's really only true in the United States and somewhat less so in Europe. In most of the rest of the world they don't really give a damn about copyright, at least in practice. Oh sure, foreign governments will sign the copyright conventions or promise to enforce local laws, but in practice they turn a blind eye.
First, film and music piracy is largely considered to be an American problem and it's hard to get people to care much about rich foreigners being less rich (and all Americans are rich by their standards). Second, in Mexico, Brazil and other South or Latin American countries, media piracy is looked upon with about the same seriousness as jaywalking if it's looked upon as a crime at all, which it's often not. The police down there largely couldn't care less and they look the other way in return for modest bribes. Third, in societies such as Mexico and Brazil, which are very unequal in terms of wealth and income, pirated or knock off goods are the only way that most people have any access to consumer items. Without pirated media and knock off goods, they largely wouldn't be able to afford any foreign things like DVDs, name brand fashions, music, video games and the like.
Lastly, the copyright business in Mexico especially is frequently under the control of the cartels (the drug cartels not the American media cartels). The two biggest are Los Zetas (who based their logo on the title card of The Godfather) and La Familia Michoacana. The pirated DVD business doesn't bring in as much scratch as drugs, but it does provide walking around money to pay cartel foot soldiers and helps the cartels maintain presence and better control territories in Mexico. Of course, it goes without saying that they're not very concerned about copyright laws being that they torture and kill as a matter of doing business. The Mexican government itself already doesn't have a large enough budget for their own internal needs, never mind enforcing foreign copyrights. So you see, copyright is essentially de-facto meaningless outside the United States and Europe.
Why do you have to pick one or the other?
He's guilty, everyone knows it...
This type of mentality needs to stop.
So it's okay to carjack a car as long as you return it the same condition it was taken, and fill gas to the level it was before the carjacking?
Is it also okay to watch a movie in the theater without paying for tickets, because according to you, nothing was lost by the theater when you watched their movie for free?
All these people complaiing about how "horribly corrupt" the US government are are just playing a huge round of "First World Problems". The US is #19 on the Transparency International list. That's not superb, but it's out of 177 countries... I mean, for crying out loud, Yanukovych in Ukraine had a personal zoo at his house - tens of billions of dolllars stolen from a country whose per-capita income is less than that of Mongolia's. And that sort of stuff is hardly unusual in the world. Have any of you complaining about evil "US corruption" ever lived in a country with *real* corruption, at all levels?
#FirstWorldProblems
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
What does it mean for a thing to be yours?
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
Oh, and please don't copy the car while I'm in it. That could get confusing, and my duplicate self will probably be just as attached to the duplicate car as I am to the original.
It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is, they went back to 1787 to bribe the founding fathers to include copyright in the constitution.
It's not just that Kim Dotcom pirated materials, it's that he knowingly did it and took huge sacks of cash in advertising revenue from the worst scumbags in online advertising.
It's not just piracy, piracy is a major issue, but the even bigger issue is the racketeering(Hint: Doing something illegal and making a LOT of money off of it is REALLY illegal). Megaupload wasn't just serving up files, it was implicitly advertising itself as a piracy haven.
Kim Dotcom can kiss my ass.
"Your honor, we find the defendant INCREDIBLY guilty."
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
For anyone who doesn't know... Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
Sure, he is. What's truly incredible is that a piece of lowlife scum such as that can come out looking like the good guy. He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
He might be bad, but the people pursuing him are much worse. The fact that they're doing it using your taxes and claims of legality makes it vastly worse still.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the /. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
Suckers, all of you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No, because the owner was denied use of the car while it was gone. That's the thing I don't get about some copyright freaks: they don't even understand what stealing is, and why it's undesirable. How anyone could ever be able to trust you people, is downright weird.
Yes, it could be. A very realistic analogy is that you go to the box office, and say "I'd like to buy at ticket," and the person there throws a temper tamtrum. "FUCK YOU!! HOW ARE YOU OFFER ME MONEY!!?!?!" In shock, you mutter, "What's the problem?" and he explains, "You're one of those people who wears red shirts!!"
As it happens, you are wearing a red shirt. But it's a total non-sequitur. "Why do you care about my shirt?"
"EVERYONE KNOWS THAT RED-SHIRT WEARERS ARE FUCKING THIEVES! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!"
"No, I'm not a thief, I want to pay you money."
"FUCK YOU!!! WE ARE CLOSING!!"
And the box office person lowers the window blind, and turns on a closed sign. Then in the distance, you hear the gunfire, as the box office person has walked into the theater with their AK-47 and shot everyone in there, and then shot themselves.
You shrug and walk into the theater, sit down next to a bloody corpse, and watch the movie.
While it can be argued that maybe you might not really want to be present in such a theater, and maybe you should have called the cops when you heard the gunfire (i.e. you should have written your congresscritter to repeal DMCA), I don't really see any problem with people watching the movie without paying, in those circumstances. That's especially true after the tenth time it has happened, when this is a recurring thing that happens at every single theater and the populace has started to accept all the "fuck you"s and gunfire as totally normal and routine. Every single time you offer to buy a ticket, the answer is some form of "no, we're not open for business."
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
Are you seriously arguing that ideas can be owned to the exclusion of others?
> It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is, they went back to 1787 to bribe the founding fathers to include copyright in the constitution [...]
How long was copyright protection then? How long is it today? Was infringement a criminal offence then? Today?
Ah, and BTW: it is actually amazing how much corruption Hollywood can get away with. And deepressing.
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
And this is how sleazy fraudsters survive. It's called misdirection. They're exploiting the weak minds of good people who don't realize that the other thing he's pointing at is simply the same thing in a different place. Politicians and sleazy fraudsters are of the same kind. By constantly pointing at each other, they prevent us from taking them down, because we can never decide which one to get rid of, focus and finally do it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Fine, the thief can take it when you're sleeping and return it before you wake up. Your car is now a public taxi when you're not using it. Is that fair, and are you okay with that?
The point being, there are many intangible products and services (like movies, trains, restaurants and copyrighted products) you pay for where you don't get a physical product for your money. The service provider is completely within his rights to charge you for benefiting from his intangible service.
The only difference is you can't copy those intangible products/services for free, therefore you don't steal/copy them. But once you figure out how to copy those products/services, piracy begins, and a small segment of the population will start using that service for free.
What does copyright infringement have to do with the color of shirts?
OF all the countries in the world, the US should be #1, because of things like the DoI, and Constitution. Our history and the stories we tell, are all about "Give me Liberty or Give Me Death" type liberty, and yet, here we are talking about how corrupt our government is and how it acts illegally, from Snowden to Dotcom..
The problem is that we have too much power accumulated in too few hands, because we don't like the decentralized form of government because it doesn't offer the support for Government Criminality that we desire.
Remember, we keep voting for the same set of people expecting different results. IF you vote (D) or (R), you ARE the problem you hate.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually he went back to 1703 to bribe the House of Lords to force the new copyright law to be limited to 14+14 years and then have everything go into the public domain "for the advancement of learning" as even then the elected representatives were corrupt and were going to follow the publishers advice and make copyright forever "for the authours" who would get a one time small payment from the publishers.
The "for the starving artists" argument goes back a ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to defraud telephone companies with custom made electronic boxes that let people cheat the established system, making long distance calls for free. That was before their careers took off, building and selling computers. Please elaborate on how that activity done as teenagers for kicks invalidates Apple as a legitimate business today?
Woosh. It was actually a joke.
No one seemed to get that he was referencing his parent that took the grandparent without quotes.
Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
What a misleading edit.
He's a career criminal, fraudster and basically the exact same of professional fraud as the corrupt politicians he's now trying to "expose". If you think his motivations are anything but 100% selfish, I have a few bridges at really good prices.
He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
In this class of sleazebags, there is no small and big or better and worse. They are all the same type of scum, and making us believe we should go after one but not the other is exactly how they thrive - because the good people are easily distracted. Scum A wants you to hate scum B. If you think scum B cares, you're stupid, because scum B is already preparing his own distracting making you hate scum C, who will distract you with scum D...
It's all a big game to make sure we never focus long enough on any of the scumbags to finally get rid of them for good.
The fact that they're doing it using your taxes
Because scum Kimble isn't using your money, yes? He grew it himself in his backyard, yes? OMG, wake up, fool. They are all using our money, because not one of these scumbags has had one honest job in their lives. The only difference is what label the money has attached, but in the end, it is all money that honest people worked honest hours for and that scumbags swindled them out of, one way or the other.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is just want prisoners are asking for....more assholes behind bars.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
pump-and-dump'd Letsbuyit.com
That's comedy gold right there.
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Because it's not once. Your counterexample doesn't apply.
Kimble is a career criminal. He's shown again and again and again that he doesn't like honest work and prefers to trick people out of their money instead. He's shown that he changes his methods, but not his ways. He's shown it so often that only a complete moron would believe a single word out of his mouth.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.
The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports, and you did it, but you were angry at your boss so you passive-aggressively wrote all the TPS reports in Swahili, and your boss doesn't know Swahili. The boss somehow got an unpaid volunteer with a weird sexual fetish to translate the reports into English. (Somehow, this person gets off by translating Swahili to English, and is quite happy to do it for pleasure or glory or whatever the hell is going on there. People are weird!)
On the surface, the process appears to work so perfectly (the boss is actually very happy with his unobfuscated TPS reports) that he fires you, because he forgot that the new guy was really just repairing the deliberately-sabotaged TPS reports, not actually providing the reports' content. All because you insisted on being a total dick, and also all because there are some really weird people out there who are happy to clean up after you.
Long-term this looks like a bad situation. OTOH, it seems that eventually someone else comes along and writes more TPS reports (but in enciphered Swahili) for a single pay period. Then they get fired too. So you report-writers are making money, but a lot less than if you could just stop being a dick and hold a steady job. And the bosses are sort of happy because they're getting their reports, but they can't help but think that if they could find employees worth keeping who weren't dicks, the company would be more productive. Everyone is losing (except the fetishists), and things aren't working well, but somehow we're all getting by.
(Further complication and analogy-repair: There are really two bosses, in different departments, and there's a broken accounting system. Only one of the bosses' budgets are actually having to pay the paychecks for the high-turnover dick TPS report-writers, but the other boss whose budget never gets hit, also gets to read the repaired TPS reports from the volunteers. So we're not all paying evenly for this broken system. The "pirate boss" get a free ride and the "chump boss" who keep hiring dicks, is getting visciously shafted. Some people think the pirate boss or the volunteer translators are the problem here, but I think the dick report-writer is the problem, and yet, solving the problem requires that we all start talking to the chump bosses, explaining "Stop being a chump, and stop paying those dicks. Let's just put 'reports must be in English' into the hiring contract, and so the dicks don't get even a single paycheck." If we can all agree to stop being chump bosses, the dicks will get selected out of the job market and either starve to death or change their behavior, and we can start hiring employees who write unobfuscated TPS reports. That seems to be the everyone-wins scenario, though I'm not sure how the fetishist translators will occupy their time, after that.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Kim Dotcom steals from the rich? Kim Dotcom facilitates acquisition of 'protected' material to the poor? Sounds like my kind of scum.
The fact that he's taking on government corruption is a nice bonus.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
if he can return the car in the same condition (no wear on the components or engine, no mileage change) then i would have no issue with the car going for a joyride at night when i am asleep.
any other frivolous arguments you want to come up with ?
You have fallen for the ruse that the US Constitution is the supremely best legal foundation a nation can have. Do you have any knowledge of what other countries have in place to protect the rights of their citizens, or do you just accept the claims that the US framework of freedom and democracy is superior as fact?
Irrelevant. His rights are immutable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Fine, the thief can take it when you're sleeping and return it before you wake up. Your car is now a public taxi when you're not using it. Is that fair, and are you okay with that?
The point being, there are many intangible products and services (like movies, trains, restaurants and copyrighted products) you pay for where you don't get a physical product for your money. The service provider is completely within his rights to charge you for benefiting from his intangible service.
The only difference is you can't copy those intangible products/services for free, therefore you don't steal/copy them. But once you figure out how to copy those products/services, piracy begins, and a small segment of the population will start using that service for free.
funny if he did not want people to watch it, he should not have created it? ... they should have license for any and all words used, and colours and soundwaves ...
the service provider is using tools created by others for free, right? like words, ideas
What does copyright infringement have to do with the color of shirts?
the same thing theft has to do with copyrigth infringement
Uh, if X is 1 in your little equation, it's not true.
Well, slashdot removed the greater than or less than signs from my comment.. So my comment is, If X is less than or greater than 1 in your little equation, it's not true.
But Little Cat Z will clean it all right up!
#FirstWorldProblems
Which IRC network are you on?
Go learn some fucking Algebra and when you finally can solve for X in an equation as simple as 1 + X = 2, you'll find out that the only X value that is possible is 1.
If the car exists in some sort of groundhog day-esque universe where in the morning, every atom of the car is in the place it was originally, then I wouldn't really give a shit. In fact that would be pretty sweet, because then I could clone other people's vehicles too.
Copyright infringement is not stealing. Don't try to argue like it is.
Are you seriously arguing that the latest copy of "The Lego Movie" or "Non-Stop" are ideas?
No, I'm making no such assumption about the "Ruse" about anything. The ruse I'm falling for, is liberty, defined in such a way that it values INDIVIDUAL rights above that of the group. The moment the group has more and better protected "rights" than an individual is the point where we can start locking up or killing people because they are an inconvenience or worse, a scapegoat. The DoI and the Constitution are outlines for this line of thinking, and the goal of both (D) and (R) parties ever since was to limit the liberties of the people.
Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Religion or any other "classification" is, by definition, the attempt to create groups (artificial) that divide people and start creating preferences of groups over the individual. We call these groups "Minority", "disadvantaged", and "protected", and that is the moment it fucks with Liberty. Guess what, I am a member of a disadvantaged group of one, ME. The smallest group is that of one.
As for the DoI and Constitution, they are the best we have. That is my opinion. However, if you have a better set of documents defining what is Liberty, by all means break it out. Until then simply saying we can do better, or there are better is not good enough. Trying to fix these documents is impossible, for we have failed to live up to even THESE ideals. What makes anyone, especially you, think we can do better? THAT is the Ruse of the tyrants, that create laws under the guise of "do it for the children" and "people will starve", and "pushing grandma over the cliff" that sell out liberty for security.
To the point we now have neither.
Have a great day!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Just to play devil's advocate, was any evidence presented against those 5 men? Did they have any sort of trial, or were they even formally charged with any crimes?
As far as I can tell, they were POWs. We did a POW exchange. That's been an accepted practice for a very long time now.
"NZ political corruption-buster" .. as the Aussie's say, "you must be dreamin...".
.
???
It bears thinking about, that a conspiracy might well exist between Kim Dotcom and Hollywood in order to frighten the plebs into paying tribute to their one god of money. This is not the first time in NZ that similar tribal comers have been Vector'd into the public arena. All the while, the erstwhile sore loser gets his comeback in a role that flushes out even more whistleblowers. Dotcom, like the aforementioned power player don't even have to initially be party to such an algorithmic conspiracy, as it's in their blood to buckle under until the inevitable shekel is recompensed.
He also ratted out the users of his BBS "House of Coolness" to an intellectual property lawyer. If that's your kind of scum, perhaps you're an asshole too?
I don't know. I'm kinda of the thought that we're all selfish assholes. The only difference is between those who realize it and those who don't. Your a selfish asshole because you think your kids deserve my money to school them. You don't feel at all responsible for paying for that education, yet you brought them into this world.
Yea- I'd agree that kids should have a right to an education and I'm not against everybody paying toward it (regardless of the number of kids anybody has or doesn't have).
However that said I think the above makes a point about the fact we're all selfish assholes at the end of the day. I use to do some pretty criminal-minded stuff as a youngster out of self-interest, but that doesn't mean my actions today are totally selfish. Whereas I wasn't content with what I had back then I am content today. I have no problem donating substantial sums of money to good causes I believe in. However it all goes back to that selfish thing. I donate to causes that I feel could in some way potentially benefit me or a person like me in the future. Even my altruistic deeds are selfish.
Off topic. Your post is irrelevant. The topic at hand has nothing to do with Dotcom's character or lack thereof.
I don't know. I'm kinda of the thought that we're all selfish assholes.
To some degree.
There's still a difference between being a human being and being a scumbag who'd sell his grandma and thinks nothing about ruining others for his personal gain.
Some of us have ethics and a feeling of belonging to the society we are a part of, and then there are some people who have only themselves and a strong feeling that society exists to be exploited.
It's a matter of degrees, but it's usually fairly easy to spot those who've passed a certain threshold. We call them psychopaths, btw. and many top-level business people show characteristics of it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is not even need for a conspiracy.
We foolishly assume that the government and media cartels dislike what he's doing, but they may just as well consider him a useful pawn and play him. The same way we think casinos don't like it when someone actually wins the jackpot, while the opposite is true.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Seriously, if he was breaking US law in the US and then fled, sure, go ahead and extradite. Anything else is completely fucked up and probably should be illegal. Does anyone with a brain realize that this would completely justify the obverse?
...
Changing the topic slightly...
Kim Dotcom's extradition hearings are being held in a country that's first equal on that list. And whose courts are not automatically bending over to take the various government agencies purely on their word. He's getting plenty of opportunity to defend himself.
If he does still get extradited, he's going to have a hard time claiming it was due to corruption. No doubt he will try though.
...that our federosaurus is going to seize the money as soon as it actually gets transferred to some winner. But if the incriminating information can be gotten out to the Internet, Dotcom's point will still have been proven.
If you sneak into a movie without paying, are you under any sort of impression that you've done nothing wrong?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I love the description of "political corruption-buster". He testified that he had given money to an MP. It takes a very special pair of cojones to spin that as "busting corruption".
Kimble was a fraudulent investor in the past. What evidence is there to show that he has been fraudulent since he moved to New Zealand? Megaupload was a legitimate file trading website.
If you want the entertainment business to leave you alone just make sure you have enough evidence against enough of their people for doing the unlawful things that we all know that they do.
$5 million would purchase a lot of private investigation work, time to sink a few of their ships Kim?
We already are
"obama just willingly let 5 PEOPLE go free of charge so...."
FTFY
This "guilty till proven innocent" mentality HAS to stop!!
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
You should have a copy of your car that you use for driving, and a copy that you leave on your front lawn for other people to copy as you please. Really, lawn space these days isn't as restrictive as it once was.
Uh... yeah... right.
"fraudulent investor". Sure. That and a dozen other crimes, several narrow escapes from the law, and the list goes on.
"legitimate file trading"... err... suuuure. You've never read a thing about what police uncovered in internal communications, it seems.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As it happens, you are wearing a red shirt. But it's a total non-sequitur. "Why do you care about my shirt?"
What does copyright infringement have to do with the color of shirts?
I would like to watch Game of Thrones, here is a reasonable amount of money. To watch Game of Thrones you need an HBO subscription, go buy a HBO subscription. Ok that is a bit pricey, but fine, I would like a HBO subscription, I currently live in Germany. Sorry, you must live in the US to get an HBO subscription. Ok, is there a different way to watch Game of Thrones? You can buy the DVDs. OK do you have region 2 DVDs? No we only have region 1 DVDs. Ok so my options are paying you money and circumvent the region coding, aka "copy protection" and potentially get 3 years jail time and not paying you money and torrenting / downloading the movies and potentially get 3 years jail time. You know there are occasionally situations where people will outright refuse to sell you a legal copy.
You don't make any more sense than the ftfy guy did.
"[statement] in the same way that 1+X=2" hasn't quite the meaning of the original text. It's almost everywhere false (when 1+1=2 is always true), and your explanation relies on the implicit condition "when 1+X=2". This is so much bullshit I'd very much like to subscribe to your mailing list.
What a misleading edit.
How so? You restated it as:
He's a career criminal, fraudster and basically the exact same of professional fraud as the corrupt politicians he's now trying to "expose".
Which in my book makes him a massive asshat. But whatever.
In this class of sleazebags, there is no small and big or better and worse.
No, I disagree.
Once those asshats can operate under the colour of law there is no way of avoiding them. That makes them much, much worse.
The only difference is ...
I'd rather that there were a thousand Kim Dotcoms running around trying to scam the crap out of me than having a pair of corrupt governments ignoring their own laws and procedures in order to "get the ad guy", becuse the latter is a pit with no bottom.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If someone can drive by my car, do a scan of it that I don't even notice and doesn't affect me, then generate a perfect copy of it, minus the license plates and registration and also me and my passengers, then drive away in this duplicate of my car, why would I care?
Ah, so he's a Bill Gates.... gotcha.
As far as I can tell, they were POWs. We did a POW exchange. That's been an accepted practice for a very long time now.
To use that sort of twisted logic you just have to be a fscking Seppo(or fellow traveler).
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Good point. As soon as someone demonstrates a 3d xerox machine, I'll do that. Of course, you'd be better off copying something nicer...
You didn't answer the question.
I think you missed my point. Whether he's an asshole, or how big an asshole he is, or whatever, he still ought to get due process, just like any other asshole. The Keystone Kops bent over backwards to fuck this one up, as if rule of law were a nicety that only applies to people they don't want to prosecute (yet). This kind of behavior deserves only one reward: due process, the same thing Mr. Dotcom is entitled to.
Someone who buys the government and then uses the power they have bought to get the government to come down like a ton of bricks on whomever they designate is an entirely different class of sleazebag than someone who violates copyright, no matter how egregiously.
Rather than sharecropping a parcel of land for generations at the whim of a noble, my family is able to pour their hard work into the acquisition of land and a home, and the security those things provide. In exchange for the individual right to ownership, each person is obliged to respect the ownership rights of others.
I am aware the folks at the patent office appear to have warm crack pipes in their possession much of the time, of late. Ownership, the privilege, is exploited by the wealthiest within the system like virtually all freedoms are. The "mine and yours" statistical model is still eminently fair as long as the poorest maintain their right to inclusion within the system.
What does it mean to be "yours?" Why hell, that I can have something that is "mine".
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Sounds pretty one-sided. So you want to have something that is "yours" that I can't have even though possession of it is non-rivalrous. What do I get in exchange for giving up the (implicit) right to have an instance of this thing?
Being as stupid as you are must be painful, surely? If not, it certainly should be.