That may very well be true, but he made sure MegaUpload was a useful service to a lot of people, and paid people for providing content to it (both pirated and original). It wasn't just the 12 jobs in the company itself, it was also the artists who used MegaUpload to get paid for their music.
I agreed with the last paragraph - "Extradition laws don't matter when one country is a very large bully and the other is tiny". The first paragraph is an exaggeration.
That may be true, but the judges reasoned as if it were on the books.
Los Angeles Times: "Assange says the sex was consensual. His lawyers also contend that, even if the allegations were true, the behavior would not necessarily constitute crimes under British law. Swedish laws on sexual assault are more sweeping than those here.
But British prosecutors, acting on behalf of their Swedish counterparts, said the allegations were sufficiently serious because they involved some physical force. One of the women accuses Assange of using his body weight to keep her pinned beneath him while he had sex with her."
No, they boil down to "Promoting copyright infringement isn't a crime" and "Promoting copyright infringement with an intent to do so may be a crime, but that's very hard to prove."
Some of the servers were located in the United States. Others were located in the Netherlands, and probably other places too, likely to improve performance.
Even if we grant that USA had jurisdiction over everything that happened on the American servers, they have no business to ask MegaUpload to delete files globally.
It's rather arrogant to claim jurisdition over a whole company just because they have servers in your country. It's as if Sweden claimed jurisdiction over Microsoft, and demanded that Microsoft's American operations conformed to Sweden's copyright laws, just because Microsoft has servers in Sweden.
MegaUpload signed up artists to put up their songs on the site and get paid for free downloads. I'd say MegaUpload worked pretty hard to get revenue from legal material. Which, I suspect, is the very reason they started to become a threat to Universal.
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place. Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
I agree. Obviously, the purpose is to allow people to exercise their fair use rights.
For example, in my country I'm allowed to make a limited number of copies and share them with close friends and family, and services like Filesoniq allow me to do that easily.
It also allows me to listen to / view the files anywhere there's a good Internet connection (format shifting).
If you go to reddit's r/jailbaitarchive (I only know about them because someone linked to my site in one of their posts), you'll see how the child molesters prefer using MediaFire.
You're right. Let's all go to MediaFire and download the pics without paying. That way, there won't be any incentive to produce them, and production will cease. That'll teach those child molesters!
Freenet is more than TOR + P2P. Freenet also stores the files in the network (each file is divided into redundant parts and distributed across all the machines running Freenet).
At least Kim Schmitz / Kim Dotcom provides a useful service to his customers and creates jobs. Universal and the other media corporations just lobby the government to prevent competition, so they can continue to offer mediocre services at a high price.
Have you actually read the indictment? No, I didn't think so. They paid people to upload pirated material,
The indictment is based on Universal's claims which are very, very misleading. They paid for popular uploads, some of which happened to be pirated material. That doesn't mean they knowingly encouraged pirated material.
they knew they were hosting pirated material,
Yes, just like every broadband providers knows they're transmitting pirated material to their customers. It's only illegal if you have an intent to promote piracy, or fail to take down specific files when you're made aware of them.
they didn't take down the pirated material when notified that it was there,
No, but they removed access to the pirated material, as the DMCA requires. Remember that if several users upload the same file, it may be illegal for some users but not others. For example, I can upload my CDs to MegaUpload and listen to them anywhere I want, since my country's fair use laws allow it, but if an American user does the same thing, it's a copyright violation. It's right of MegaUpload to only remove the violating user's access. I shouldn't have my files deleted just because they happen to be illegal in the USA. I'm not in the USA.
and they communicated internally and externally about the existence of and links to that pirated material.
Individual staff members shared infringing material. That doesn't make the company or its leadership criminally responsible.
YouTube contains huge amounts of infringing material. If two YouTube staffers send links to copyrighted clips to each other, does that mean you can shut down the whole of YouTube and arrest the CEO?
Because you want free stuff, and are trying to change the topic and hope nobody notices the reality of the situation.
I'm not the poster you're referring to, but I want to exercise my fair use rights. I want to rip my films and songs, put them up on MegaUpload, and share them with my close friends and family, which is perfectly legal where I live.
It doesn't matter if it's evil or not, it's still technically censorship. Censorship can be both legal and justified, for example, when a newspaper is prevented from printing libel. Censorship can also be completely private, like when a newspaper owner decides to block a negative article about a politician he/she supports.
What Universal did is technically censorship. They took down something because they didn't like the contents, not because they had a valid copyright claim.
Remember, it's invariably legal to make a copy of copyrighted material for backup purposes, which means that it's also presumably legal to keep that backup on a shared server somewhere.
Not only that, outside the US it may be legal to make a limited number of copies and share them with close friends and family, if you have a licensed original. That's what some people in Sweden used MegaUpload for.
And more absurdly, the age for what constitutes CP may not be the same as the age of consent. Here in Sweden, the age of consent is 15, but nudes of anyone under 18 is "child pornography". It's legal for a 40-year-old to hump a 15-year-old, but not to take pictures of it.
Furthermore, if the age of the model is unknown, it's enough that he/she *appears to be* under 18 to be convicted of child pornography.
Not that the law necessarily is clear on this point (wouldn't be the first time a law had unintended consequences), and IANAL anyway, but it's possible they have a valid case on this point.
They definitely have a valid case, if you consider that the fair use provisions are very different in different countries. In many countries it's legal to copy your media to an MP3 player, a hard drive or a server if you have a licensed original.
DMCA provided a mechanism for people to complain about copyright problems to the site owners in a reasonable and calm fashion. in the 'rest of the world', there is the rule of the fist, and copyright violations mean nothing - which by the way, means the GPL means nothing, because its entire existence is based on copyright law.
the only people who complain about the 'draconian DMCA' are fucktards who never actually create or build anything themselves.
You're probably a troll, but it never hurts to explain the issue yet another time.
Here in Sweden, owners of electronic bulletin boards have been required to take down illegal material upon notice ever since people used 14400 bps modems. That's half a decade before the DMCA. However, the copyright lobby here has decided it's more efficient to prosecute infringing sites (such as the Pirate Bay) so they can be closed down.
The main problem for the copyright lobby here is that the standards of proof are relatively high. I believe it's more accurate to describe a system where the side with the most money can bully people into giving in as "the rule of the fist".
I also create things myself and put them up on the Internet under Creative Commons.
That's different - that's about requiring one's own citizens to follow certain laws while travelling abroad. For example, to combat child prostitution, some countries prosecute their own citizens if they had sex with a child even if they did it in another country.
In the MegaUpload case, the United States is trying to make citizens of New Zealand, Hong Kong, etc, follow American law, even when they've been in their home countries all the time.
Do you have any actual evidence for that? For all the bitching on/. about the various extraditions from these knuckleheads to Gary McKinnon the crimes they were alleged to have committed were arguably on US soil and until international law is changed to clearly state otherwise, which it had better not be, they're all eligible for trial and potential prison time in the US.
The problem is that international crimes are arguably committed on the soil of several different countries (the country where the victim resides, the country where the perpetrator resides, the country where the servers reside, the country where the perpetrator's business is based, etc), so why should American jurisdiction win every time?
And no, there's no set international law regarding this. It's outlined in treaties between the individual countries.
With the ton of information about the multi-year investigation about MegaUpload and all the evidence gathered they practically have zero possibility of winning the case. They really got it handed down on them and are most likely looking for a long time in jail.
Really? When I look closer at the indictment, I see a lot of innuendo but little actual evidence. See below.
Not only did MegaUpload not delete the actual files when sent DMCA notices (but did when sent abuse letters about illegal content like child porn), they also paid the uploaders cash in exchange to send downloaders to their site.
A lot of those files were legitimately uploaded by people outside the USA. The rules for fair use is different in different countries - a file which is illegal for an American to upload, may be perfectly legal for a Swede or Vietnamese. For example, I'm legally allowed to rip a film or song and put it on MegaUpload so I can listen to it anywhere, but if an american does the same thing, it's illegal. I'd be pretty pissed if MegaUpload deleted my legal files just because they're illegal for Americans.
And what exactly is wrong with offering cash for popular uploads? That has nothing to do with piracy, as long as you don't specifically encourage pirated files. In this case, the cash-for-downloads system was in place for musicians who spread their songs via MegaUpload. Those musicians have now been deprived of their income - thanks to the American media corporations.
This was almost all the times used for spreading copyright infringing material and MegaUpload was notoriously known for being good site for such use. As the internal emails show they were also fully aware of this fact.
That may very well be true, but there's nothing illegal about it. Broadband providers also provide services which are notoriously good for pirating - almost no one gets 100 Mbit/s just to download legal files, and the broadband providers are aware of this fact. But as long as you're just a neutral service provider, the legal responsibility lies with the user, not the provider.
It also seems like the feds are now in possession of the top affiliates on the site which most likely will lead to more arrests for criminal copyright infringement, as they made lots of money by doing it.
There's nothing illegal about making money. It's not even immoral, as long as you provide a valuable service.
Also another fact: not only did MegaUpload staff know about this activity and try to get around DMCA notices and laws, they did copyright infringement themselves. For example they used to populate their MegaVideo site by downloading and adding videos from YouTube. This was also videos created by people like you, not only mega-corps. This and much more was revealed in the arrest and their internal emails.
The leadership is not responsible for what individual staff members did, unless they knew about about it or showed criminal neglect. And it doesn't seem like the DOJ has any evidence of that.
Most of this can't even be called "circumstantial evidence", it's just innuendo.
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That may very well be true, but he made sure MegaUpload was a useful service to a lot of people, and paid people for providing content to it (both pirated and original). It wasn't just the 12 jobs in the company itself, it was also the artists who used MegaUpload to get paid for their music.
I agreed with the last paragraph - "Extradition laws don't matter when one country is a very large bully and the other is tiny". The first paragraph is an exaggeration.
Sorry, should have been clearer.
Kim Dotcom is German and Finnish (and working in Souutheast Asia).
That may be true, but the judges reasoned as if it were on the books.
Los Angeles Times:
"Assange says the sex was consensual. His lawyers also contend that, even if the allegations were true, the behavior would not necessarily constitute crimes under British law. Swedish laws on sexual assault are more sweeping than those here.
But British prosecutors, acting on behalf of their Swedish counterparts, said the allegations were sufficiently serious because they involved some physical force. One of the women accuses Assange of using his body weight to keep her pinned beneath him while he had sex with her."
No, they boil down to "Promoting copyright infringement isn't a crime" and "Promoting copyright infringement with an intent to do so may be a crime, but that's very hard to prove."
Some of the servers were located in the United States. Others were located in the Netherlands, and probably other places too, likely to improve performance.
Even if we grant that USA had jurisdiction over everything that happened on the American servers, they have no business to ask MegaUpload to delete files globally.
It's rather arrogant to claim jurisdition over a whole company just because they have servers in your country. It's as if Sweden claimed jurisdiction over Microsoft, and demanded that Microsoft's American operations conformed to Sweden's copyright laws, just because Microsoft has servers in Sweden.
MegaUpload signed up artists to put up their songs on the site and get paid for free downloads. I'd say MegaUpload worked pretty hard to get revenue from legal material. Which, I suspect, is the very reason they started to become a threat to Universal.
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
I agree. Obviously, the purpose is to allow people to exercise their fair use rights.
For example, in my country I'm allowed to make a limited number of copies and share them with close friends and family, and services like Filesoniq allow me to do that easily.
It also allows me to listen to / view the files anywhere there's a good Internet connection (format shifting).
If you go to reddit's r/jailbaitarchive (I only know about them because someone linked to my site in one of their posts), you'll see how the child molesters prefer using MediaFire.
You're right. Let's all go to MediaFire and download the pics without paying. That way, there won't be any incentive to produce them, and production will cease. That'll teach those child molesters!
Downloading music or film is illegal in Sweden since a few years back, even if you don't upload.
On the other hand, you're allowed to make a limited number of copies and share them with close friends and family if you have a licensed original.
Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful.
It is, if you seed.
Freenet is more than TOR + P2P. Freenet also stores the files in the network (each file is divided into redundant parts and distributed across all the machines running Freenet).
TOR + P2P is roughly equal to OneSwarm.
Not to mention the musicians who put their own music on MegaUpload and got paid for the downloads. Wasn't copyright supposed to protect the artists?
At least Kim Schmitz / Kim Dotcom provides a useful service to his customers and creates jobs. Universal and the other media corporations just lobby the government to prevent competition, so they can continue to offer mediocre services at a high price.
Have you actually read the indictment? No, I didn't think so. They paid people to upload pirated material,
The indictment is based on Universal's claims which are very, very misleading. They paid for popular uploads, some of which happened to be pirated material. That doesn't mean they knowingly encouraged pirated material.
they knew they were hosting pirated material,
Yes, just like every broadband providers knows they're transmitting pirated material to their customers. It's only illegal if you have an intent to promote piracy, or fail to take down specific files when you're made aware of them.
they didn't take down the pirated material when notified that it was there,
No, but they removed access to the pirated material, as the DMCA requires. Remember that if several users upload the same file, it may be illegal for some users but not others. For example, I can upload my CDs to MegaUpload and listen to them anywhere I want, since my country's fair use laws allow it, but if an American user does the same thing, it's a copyright violation. It's right of MegaUpload to only remove the violating user's access. I shouldn't have my files deleted just because they happen to be illegal in the USA. I'm not in the USA.
and they communicated internally and externally about the existence of and links to that pirated material.
Individual staff members shared infringing material. That doesn't make the company or its leadership criminally responsible.
YouTube contains huge amounts of infringing material. If two YouTube staffers send links to copyrighted clips to each other, does that mean you can shut down the whole of YouTube and arrest the CEO?
Because you want free stuff, and are trying to change the topic and hope nobody notices the reality of the situation.
I'm not the poster you're referring to, but I want to exercise my fair use rights. I want to rip my films and songs, put them up on MegaUpload, and share them with my close friends and family, which is perfectly legal where I live.
It doesn't matter if it's evil or not, it's still technically censorship. Censorship can be both legal and justified, for example, when a newspaper is prevented from printing libel. Censorship can also be completely private, like when a newspaper owner decides to block a negative article about a politician he/she supports.
What Universal did is technically censorship. They took down something because they didn't like the contents, not because they had a valid copyright claim.
Remember, it's invariably legal to make a copy of copyrighted material for backup purposes, which means that it's also presumably legal to keep that backup on a shared server somewhere.
Not only that, outside the US it may be legal to make a limited number of copies and share them with close friends and family, if you have a licensed original. That's what some people in Sweden used MegaUpload for.
And more absurdly, the age for what constitutes CP may not be the same as the age of consent. Here in Sweden, the age of consent is 15, but nudes of anyone under 18 is "child pornography". It's legal for a 40-year-old to hump a 15-year-old, but not to take pictures of it.
Furthermore, if the age of the model is unknown, it's enough that he/she *appears to be* under 18 to be convicted of child pornography.
Not that the law necessarily is clear on this point (wouldn't be the first time a law had unintended consequences), and IANAL anyway, but it's possible they have a valid case on this point.
They definitely have a valid case, if you consider that the fair use provisions are very different in different countries. In many countries it's legal to copy your media to an MP3 player, a hard drive or a server if you have a licensed original.
DMCA provided a mechanism for people to complain about copyright problems to the site owners in a reasonable and calm fashion. in the 'rest of the world', there is the rule of the fist, and copyright violations mean nothing - which by the way, means the GPL means nothing, because its entire existence is based on copyright law.
the only people who complain about the 'draconian DMCA' are fucktards who never actually create or build anything themselves.
You're probably a troll, but it never hurts to explain the issue yet another time.
Here in Sweden, owners of electronic bulletin boards have been required to take down illegal material upon notice ever since people used 14400 bps modems. That's half a decade before the DMCA. However, the copyright lobby here has decided it's more efficient to prosecute infringing sites (such as the Pirate Bay) so they can be closed down.
The main problem for the copyright lobby here is that the standards of proof are relatively high. I believe it's more accurate to describe a system where the side with the most money can bully people into giving in as "the rule of the fist".
I also create things myself and put them up on the Internet under Creative Commons.
MegaUpload most likely served more than a hundred different countries, so all these countries would have a claim on jurisdiction.
They're risking extradition because the alleged victim (Universal) is based in the USA.
That's different - that's about requiring one's own citizens to follow certain laws while travelling abroad. For example, to combat child prostitution, some countries prosecute their own citizens if they had sex with a child even if they did it in another country.
In the MegaUpload case, the United States is trying to make citizens of New Zealand, Hong Kong, etc, follow American law, even when they've been in their home countries all the time.
Do you have any actual evidence for that? For all the bitching on /. about the various extraditions from these knuckleheads to Gary McKinnon the crimes they were alleged to have committed were arguably on US soil and until international law is changed to clearly state otherwise, which it had better not be, they're all eligible for trial and potential prison time in the US.
The problem is that international crimes are arguably committed on the soil of several different countries (the country where the victim resides, the country where the perpetrator resides, the country where the servers reside, the country where the perpetrator's business is based, etc), so why should American jurisdiction win every time?
And no, there's no set international law regarding this. It's outlined in treaties between the individual countries.
With the ton of information about the multi-year investigation about MegaUpload and all the evidence gathered they practically have zero possibility of winning the case. They really got it handed down on them and are most likely looking for a long time in jail.
Really? When I look closer at the indictment, I see a lot of innuendo but little actual evidence. See below.
Not only did MegaUpload not delete the actual files when sent DMCA notices (but did when sent abuse letters about illegal content like child porn), they also paid the uploaders cash in exchange to send downloaders to their site.
A lot of those files were legitimately uploaded by people outside the USA. The rules for fair use is different in different countries - a file which is illegal for an American to upload, may be perfectly legal for a Swede or Vietnamese. For example, I'm legally allowed to rip a film or song and put it on MegaUpload so I can listen to it anywhere, but if an american does the same thing, it's illegal. I'd be pretty pissed if MegaUpload deleted my legal files just because they're illegal for Americans.
And what exactly is wrong with offering cash for popular uploads? That has nothing to do with piracy, as long as you don't specifically encourage pirated files. In this case, the cash-for-downloads system was in place for musicians who spread their songs via MegaUpload. Those musicians have now been deprived of their income - thanks to the American media corporations.
This was almost all the times used for spreading copyright infringing material and MegaUpload was notoriously known for being good site for such use. As the internal emails show they were also fully aware of this fact.
That may very well be true, but there's nothing illegal about it. Broadband providers also provide services which are notoriously good for pirating - almost no one gets 100 Mbit/s just to download legal files, and the broadband providers are aware of this fact. But as long as you're just a neutral service provider, the legal responsibility lies with the user, not the provider.
It also seems like the feds are now in possession of the top affiliates on the site which most likely will lead to more arrests for criminal copyright infringement, as they made lots of money by doing it.
There's nothing illegal about making money. It's not even immoral, as long as you provide a valuable service.
Also another fact: not only did MegaUpload staff know about this activity and try to get around DMCA notices and laws, they did copyright infringement themselves. For example they used to populate their MegaVideo site by downloading and adding videos from YouTube. This was also videos created by people like you, not only mega-corps. This and much more was revealed in the arrest and their internal emails.
The leadership is not responsible for what individual staff members did, unless they knew about about it or showed criminal neglect. And it doesn't seem like the DOJ has any evidence of that.
Most of this can't even be called "circumstantial evidence", it's just innuendo.