U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.
The whole megaupload ordeal was one of the first times I remember feeling ashamed of my government’s actions as a teenager. The cops used an illegal warrant to raid his home and illegally sent copies of his hard drives to the American FBI.
It was an abuse of NZ’s power in favour of a foreign government, I’m fine with him being charged thru a civil suit for profiting off piracy, but having the weight of the NZ government back foreign companies in a civil case was absurd.
I can’t actually find what these guys were actually guilty of. All media is sharing the same story that they pled guilty to something, and the charges “could have included racketeering if they were extradited to the US”, but they apparently weren’t.
AFAIK the whole story was that they specifically started Megaupload in NZ because it was not a crime there, yet the FBI raided their place in a foreign country. If I was a Kiwi, I’d be up in arms about it.
we were at the time. Note that it has been 11 years and Kin Dotcom still hasn’t been extradited to the us
What does NZ charge him or these guys with? I mean if they broke NZ laws, it’s fine, I know how this piracy thing works, but at the time it seemed made up.
It looks like they were charged in the US. I didn’t see with what specifically but the US sentenced them to prison for about a year and they elected to do their prison sentence in NZ (which is allowing one of them to wait until the birth of their child before beginning their sentence). It looks like NZ’s role in this isn’t harmful (besides allowing foreign search of their home)
undefined> (besides allowing foreign search of their home)
So it is harmful.
Even in the US there’s no law against hosting encrypted files. They could be liable if they knew a specific file was illegal/pirated and didn’t take it down but a recent SCOTUS case (think it was Twitter v Taamneh) set the precedent that general knowledge of illegal activity is not enough.
Thank you for that reference! I did think it was a poor reasoning for US to say “you’re distributing pirated material” versus their response of “it’s the users who are distributing it”. I’ll look more into the SCOTUS case
I was always wondering why this isn’t an obvious “gotchya” for pirated content. Wouldn’t even a very simple encryption make it impossible to prove that the content being shared is copyrighted/illegal? After all, there could be anything in these bytes?
I don’t think the original MegaUpload site hosted encrypted files, at least not in a zero-knowledge way. They also encouraged users to do things like upload their entire music libraries and had a searchable database of them called Megabox. They weren’t just a file hosting provider, they were in many instances encouraging their users to upload pirated content and had all of the tools to see what was being uploaded and what was infringing.
The crime of making rich people think they might be a little less rich than they could be.
Thanks!
I bet prison in NZ is like Mordor.
Why would you think that? New Zealand doesn’t have for-profit prisons AFAIK. I think the US has the worst prisons.
I think they were just making a Lord of the Rings joke because the movies were filmed in New Zealand. I don’t think they really believe that New Zealand prisons are bad.
What does LoTR have to do with prisons? The only “prison” featured was the Tower of Isengard. It had one prisoner who escaped because there were no walls.
Isn’t that where they filmed the Lord of the Rings movies?
…Yes.
And where they’re making smoking tobacco illegal. And where they lead a very successful COVID education campaign, better than probably any other country in the world.
I hope mega.io will survive. Its a good client-side encrypted service, and we need it for our server backups.
Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, is continuing to fight the U.S. charges and threat of extradition. He has said he expects his former colleagues to testify against him as part of the deal they struck.
His expectation there matches his past behaviour, hardly surprising he has it (and probably justified). It’s been a while but in the early 90s he ratted out pirates and fellow credit card fraudsters, still ended up with two years suspended sentence (tried as juvenile) for fraud, computer fraud, organised fencing (not the rapier kind), and misuse of titles.
Then there was that investment fraud thing, one and a half year suspended plus 100k Euro, early 2000s.
Generally speaking: Big brain, giant ego, complete lack of wisdom.
Now I’m sure Kiwis have plenty to gripe about about the behaviour of their government, but rest assured that it’s not hitting anyone innocent.
/c/piracy has entered the thead
it’s not hitting anyone innocent
Can you point to the person who is a victim here?
At the very least, everyone who had to suffer his inflated ego on IRC or usenet back in the days. In case you read German.
That’s not criminal.
It’s a crime against good character.
Let me put it this way: Noone, absolutely noone, who knew him before he started megaupload, and among those are what 90% privacy tinfoil hats very invested in all kinds of civil rights, were up in arms when his bullshit finally caught up with him.
That NZ fucked up doing it – well, so be it. Noone over here was doubting his guilt because grifting is all he’s ever done. Don’t confuse him for the TPB folks, people with an actual mission: Kim is a crook with attitude.
I still don’t see a victim. Being upset by someone speaking mean things on the Internet is not make you a victim.
I agree he’s a controversial figure and probably an egotistical ass. That doesn’t mean we have the right to use violence to lock him in a cage.
In fact, many would argue that he’s the victim. He was illegally raided. He had hard drives stolen at the hands of violent thugs. Making a copy of information isn’t theft. Physically stealing a hard drive is theft.
From where I stand he shouldn’t have gotten suspended sentences the first two times around so his current aggravated troubles are, well, karma.
The song was a banger… 😀
