What other options does he have? I really wish people wouldn't cheer when smallfolk like us get crushed by the state. Not saying he's perfect, but what him and others have to suffer seems vastly out of proportion to what they did
"Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the realm of dictators and drug lords.
A man's labor and intelligence can eventually earn him $10k to buy a car. Over a long career, one might eventually amass a fortune on the order of $1M. Kim might (hypothetically) have an IQ of 150 and be willing to work punishingly long hours where our analogous car buyer went home to be with his family. But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter or harder-working than a baseline human, that's absurd - it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately. And that's ignoring that it was $175M in cash, as if it was pocket change to him; there's no good explanation for him to have that much in investments much less in physical money lying around.
I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest. Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
I have no sympathy for Kim Dotcom, but he is not proven to be some drug cartel boss or criminal overlord. Reason he had so much cash is obvious - because back in 2012 crypto wasn't yet so successful. And the guy was US government target for a long time before arrest so he had good reason not to keep money in banks where it's easy to arrest them.
Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
That's not how it works. The majority of their wealth is in the stock of their companies. They don't earn anything until they sell their shares, and then the money comes from whoever wants to own the shares.
> But it's completely farcical to state that he's 10,000 times smarter
That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101 isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than some average shlob.
> it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's savings. He had a service that other people wanted to use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the US government, claiming they seized his own personal documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would consider legitimate.
> I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits,
Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is what happens when your economics education consisted of a dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth of many billions depending on share price on any given day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a bit less).
That's a lot of good information, and I'm no scholar of the various -isms, but are the above attributed directly to Marxism (and I'm not sure where the boundaries lie between Marxism, Communism and Socialism), or should they be attributed to malevolent dictatorships?
... My assumption is that you believe, and above is all evidence pointing in this direction, that Marxism leads to malevolent dictatorships.
Whilst the example of the actions above aren't literal examples of what Marx espouses, they're the end result of societies that have attempted to pursue Marxist ideals. Emergent behaviour.
To be ridiculously reductionist, if Capitalism gets us Epstein and Communism gets us the stats you've provided, I know what I'd choose for my family (hint: being alive beats any alternative).
It's not just emergent behaviour. Marxism encourages communists to rise up in violent revolution against their own countryman.
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." - communist manifesto
It's hard to directly quantify what causes what, but in general capitalism happens naturally when people's freedoms are protected, and on the contrary (Marxist) socialism must be forced on people with violence. It doesn't lead to, but requires a totalitarian authority to implement properly.
I don't think that all of them were malevolent either. Most of them probably thought that it would work, and that the end justifies whatever means, or that suffering is necessary for the reward in the end.
I'm going to noodle over that distinction of natural capitalism versus forced socialism.
I'm thinking along the lines of family-level (and maybe extended to friends and family / cooperative small village) socialism is natural, but on a societal level, of the scales we see today, capitalism is natural. Cooperation versus competition. Very interesting.
I don't think that way, at all. Capitalism at the core simply means that everyone can own stuff, and everyone gets to keep what they produce. Ownership means that the owner gets to decide how to use the things they own. Capitalism doesn't mean that things aren't shared, it just means that whoever owns the stuff can decide if they want to share. People naturally want to help each other, so they share stuff that they own. People share their things more readily with people they know. Maybe because they might get the favor returned, or they just want to make them happy.
Capitalism doesn't mean competition over co-operation. It simply means that you don't have to co-operate if you don't get equal rewards, or if you don't get rewards proportional to your effort. People hate to co-operate if someone else gets the rewards. People love to co-operate if they get a fair share of the rewards, which is what happens under capitalism.
Owning stuff leads to trading and markets, which leads to the law of supply and demand and the price system. Just by looking at prices of things, people can make rational decisions about what to produce and what to consume. People are pushed to produce things that are scarce and expensive, and they are pushed to consume things that are abundant and cheap. This is a form of self-organized co-operation, where everyone co-operates automatically by just acting rationally. By looking out for themselves, they help allocate resources for the whole community. The lack of this mechanism is one of the major reasons why totalitarian socialism fails. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
What does it have to do with capitalism? People like that or much worse thrive in non democratic states with no rule of law and absolutely no public transparency (e.g. Beria). It's just we don't really get to hear about them..
These weren’t true Marxism. When me and my communist buddies take over next time you will see a real people’s utopia. Not like the last 47 times. I promise. Word of honor. Everyone will get a pony.
I don’t think the money in question was forfeited in the sense that the US uses, only seized pending an investigation. The lack of a corrupting incentive alone makes the seizure less suspicious in my eyes.
I don't know about you, but where I come from this looks like punishment through process. Not even trying to defend this Kim dude, just pointing out just because the process is "fair" doesn't mean its fair. Yes that is not a very well articulated point, but this is something which many people should have a feeling for in their bones.
I agree that process can be used as punishment. But I don't see any evidence that Dotcom has been uniquely or unfaithfully subjected to processes, or that his treatment is unusual given the charges he's facing.
Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of money.
This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
I feel like I'm watching satire of what a 2000s mega rich nerd would be like but it's really him. He even has a basket/hanger on the wall for all of his ... canes. Didn't see the fedoras nearby, though.
"At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a single hit.
The thing about that word "smallfolk", is that there is a very heavy connotation that someone remains smallfolk no matter how positively fortune smiles upon them. No matter how wealthy they might become, not even if they can ride a dragon, do they suddenly become nobles.
The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.
The guy has a lot of money, so therefore it’s very tedious when people characterize him as a smol bean who just wanted to help people share their data. It’s a smokescreen for the real position (which I recognize some people do legitimately hold) that copying and selling movies without compensating the people who made them is a legitimate business model and it’s OK to make lots of money doing it.
How is Hollywood not compensating the people making the movies? Don’t they have contracts managing the payment? Taking a finished movie and just distributing it without consent is something different than making contracts with the creators. Or are you talking about something else?
The contracts aren't necessarily fair. As with gig work, people will take a bad deal that keeps them solvent in the short term, even if it ruins them long-term, if there isn't really any other way to put their assets to use. VFX crews have to work long hours, often for less than minimum wage, to meet ridiculous contractual requirements; the unfairness of the compensation has lead to several high-profile shutdowns of studios whose work helped secure 9-figure returns and Oscars. And even if the studio survives, workers can end up without a credit in the final product, if they had to leave the project early or there were simply too many people involved.
Maybe I’m too liberal here, but in my opinion, that’s how a job market works (and should work). As long as they get minimum wage, they can either do the job with the agreed upon conditions and payment or they can work somewhere else. And if they don’t get minimum wage like you claimed, they should sue. If the contract was broken, they should sue, too.
This is the argument always used to excuse abuse of labor, and I completely reject it. These are skilled artists and technicians with lives to live - minimum wage is far below the minimum they're owed. Just because powerful interests - who can manipulate the courts as much as they do their contracts - have found a reliable way to exploit workers, doesn't mean that it's how things should work. And it definitely doesn't oblige me to feel sorry for them when they get scammed themselves. Just deserts.
Well the film studio asks them if they want to work for a given rate (or they ask the studio) and both sides agree to the contract. If there is too much supply because many people want to work in the space, it lowers the prices. I don’t think they are owed anything just because they have a lot of skill or are creative.
How would you do it?
You don’t have to feel sorry for the film studios of course, I’m not crying for them either. But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
>I don’t think they are owed anything just because they have a lot of skill or are creative.
I do. What's indicated here is an overabundance of pricing power on the film studios' side, which is a direct result of laws and policies that were designed to benefit and advantage businesses over labor (for a variety of reasons, some justifiable and some not). You want to cast this as a natural and organic process when it's anything but; if it were, the skill ceiling involved in the trade and returns from movie sales would likely have topped out at a more appropriate point vis a vis wages. That is, the fact that these CG-heavy films are making more money than ever, and that VFX is incredibly difficult to break into because of the high skill required, and wages are still low, and VFX studios are still going under, suggests that wages are being artificially depressed.
>But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
Nah. It's a case of filthy-rich scammers getting scammed by a filthy rich scammer. Their bad behavior, at the very least, helps to legitimize exploitation (popularly, if not so much legally). But I think it goes further than that. The depressed wages of labor and concentration of capital in the hands of elite executives and business owners has helped to shape the socioeconomic status quo, where so many consumers simply can't afford to purchase film tickets and media the way that they used to be able to, but also where the pressure to participate in pop culture and consume content is stronger than ever. The result is that people are willing to access this content however they can, creating an opportunity for hustlers like Kim.
Obviously, the solution is to dismantle many of the policy benefits that let big businesses exploit workers, and to break up the capital accretion that allowed them to capture policy in the first place. Dismantle the economic distortions that led us here.
Can you explain some policy benefits that let studios exploit the workers? I’m genuinely not aware, I was under the impression that it’s just supply and demand driving down prices.
That's the wrong question. Paraphrasing Baldwin, one might expect from one person and not another, and only when that expectation is defeated in the former does a certain bitterness ensue. There's no reason to waste energy and emotion on a person from whom one expects nothing, and subsequently receives nothing.
But if Hollywood execs are scamming the people whose labor makes their whole venture possible in the first place, that's worth expending energy on. Hence, again, the strikes.
I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing. Anything under about 100” is going to cost more to seize than it’s worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do they seize the cookware?
At least with local departments, yes police will seize kitchen appliances if they are high dollar. Then it all goes up for auction. Maybe a cop likes the look of it, picks it up for pennies on the dollar at the auction. Maybe no one bids and it all gets junked. While the primary purpose of civil forfeiture is to seize valuables, there are sometimes secondary concerns... the cops like to fuck with certain people, and if they can just make them paupers by taking their belongings then that alone can be enough motivation. Paperwork's pretty light because jewelry or cash never has lawyers to defend itself.
Feds seem to be a bit more discriminating, tending towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and real estate. But I've seen more than a few news articles over the years where they seized property you might call petty.
I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?
They are. I suppose. I guess to know which police they are, one might have to see who they get their marching orders from. TVs were seized of course, and while an extraditing authority might request/demand evidence to be seized too, what were they hoping to find in the televisions do you think?
> I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US.
Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would point you at the many mainstream news articles of places that make road trips through where the local police shake people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the holding cell?
If someone's a weirdo and wants to stuff their millions into a mattress, that by itself should not be sufficient to presume them guilty of any illegal activity, or justify seizing their money.
Wait til you hear about this new startup called Google. They are going to launch yet another search engine. I doubt there's much money in it, though. They'll be lucky to make a few million.
Are you missing the point on purpose? The suspicious thing isn’t that he has money, it’s that he’s storing the money physically as cash in his home. You think Google has a safe at the HQ filled with dollar notes?
Sounds pretty logical in a world where banking secrecy doesn't exist and most banks are compliant with a single jurisdiction which doesn't respects other ones.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
I’m not even necessarily agreeing that it’s suspicious (ok, it is a bit suspicious but not so weird that I would immediately proclaim that he’s guilty), I just don’t think it’s productive to post sarcastic comments rebutting strawman arguments. If the commenter wanted to say that having a lot of cash isn’t suspicious, they should have just said that instead of making a point about google making a lot of money, too.
he got banned from banks before and he doesnt want his money seized. anyone with the slightest understand of how us government operates would understand why hes storing the money physically.. Even bitcoiners do it....
He's an example to be made of by rights-holders. People smarter than him decided to quit the business or go into becoming IP owners themselves: see Manwin -> MindGeek -> Aylo. It was a calculated risk.
it was. he chose freedom and trusting people. if you go to jail for that you can be sure that it already created a precedent that put into jail a lot of innocent people
But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for things they did while physically outside the US. Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes to its citizens.
Please. It fits his personality perfectly to do something like keep all his money in cash.
If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely connected to malicious security services he would have been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
Why is it so odd that an anti authoritarian individual would keep large sums of money in cash and distribute whatever cash he does keep in as many bank accounts as possible?
Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal case being prosecuted? If there was something there wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years ago?
I’m not interested in arguing for or against him because I don’t care about him or this case.
I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where you just assert that it was perfect in line with is character to have ALL is money in cash while literally the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all over the globe.
I’m just saying that this guy distrusts authority so it’s not surprising that he was caught with a lot of cash or that he has a web of accounts. My larger point is about the fact that these insinuations should be dismissed because it’s reasonable to assume that if there was major wrong doing in his finances (eg drug lord) they would have included the evidence in the extradition request.
He created a site where you can upload anything with complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh, too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ to build a case around so that they could get discovery and find out what they were really trying to get access to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes, the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy agreement/etc)" types.
Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it is in the public interest for him to be held accountable against his will.
I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
"needing to be saved from" is a far cry from the 'used as an excuse for disclosure' that I accused them of. But I do appreciate the irony in conspiracists accusing others of racketeering (or otherwise unduly influencing markets).
This is the clear-headed take. As a point of clarification, I don't believe Dotcom has anything to do with Mega anymore, and the service Mega has gone legit and provides quite a nice a service similar to Tresorit -- end-to-end encrypted cloud storage.
I'm not in a position to disclose anything, but there is plenty of information out there about who was storing data in what repositories and what those people were using other, less-protected, repositories for.
Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested, completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of data.
he did not and at least there is no written evidence that he did. something that OP could look up tho is the stats of the giant reduction of child trafficking/child abuse content posted on X since Musk took it under his wing. Why wasnt it adressed before? this could be a much bigger story but one OP will never address
Maybe I don't know the full story, but as far as I understand, it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time, was aware there was a ton of piracy on the site and didn't give any indication whatsoever that they were even trying to react to it by banning accounts that were uploading infringing content.
I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".
I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says, his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively, which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded directly, but in my experience commenters who start talking about things like "powerful people getting more power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about whether the claims they make are true.)
Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and legal arm wrestling.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
> it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time,
"Long time" is subjective.
> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that
New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
He kept breaking laws with large penalties (or provided others a platform to do so, depending on your point of view) knowingly and repeatedly on a massive scale for many years.
Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
I am not saying that's wrong. What's wrong is the way it's done. Especially the part where another country raids his residence, and has him shipped to said another country he's not even a citizen of, to be judged based on their law.
The original indictment put it at $25mm from ads and $150mm from subs, so my original statement is wrong.
But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.
Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.
I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?
Sounds exactly like a file sharing service. My Google documents are also downloaded much more than uploaded, very often by people who don't upload anything at all.
Because the real criminals are the publishers who keep publicly funded science behind a paywall. None of the people who actually conduct the science see any of the money. In fact, they typically have to pay a lot of money to get their findings published.
BTW she is as bad as Kim Dotcom in terms of being Putin shill and other crazy stuff. So people who dislike Dotcom for this would be surprised to learn that Elbakyan is as bad.
I mean she doing gods work on making science more open to everyone, but if she were living in New Zealand she would land in US prison for 10+ years long ago.
Is that going to be a trial by the laws of the land he resides in and not to a foreign country that the defendant is not a citizen nor a resident nor operates out of and that refuses to guarantee the same protections under the law to a non-citizen compared to a citizen[1]?
This same foreign country who passed laws for invading the hague if they came under trial for crimes in the ICC.
[1]: See assange's bid for first amendment's guarantees when the same foreign country was trying to extradite and "trial" him
He moved to New Zealand after much of the alleged criminal conduct, in a deal where he was pretty explicitly buying residency to the point that immigration authorities tried to keep it a secret. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/6547471/Secrecy-over-...)
IP holder damages should take in consideration what the actual buying power of pirates is, not just multiply downloads by dvd costs, and copyright laws need a huge reform.
He's a modern day robin hood, people would prefer him to win over eg. disney... and disney is not doing itself a favour these days :)
One of the arguments the government used against Kim and Mega was that they implemented tech to identify and remove CSAM therefore they could have (but chose not to) do the same for material that violated copyright.
I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
> I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
Yep, especially compared to other people, who did worse (pedophillia-wise), like Polansky, etc.
> He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for the better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on his fanbase.
Yeah and there is Logan Paul living in US running pump and dumps, scams and other things. But he look nice and popular so he'll continue to do it without any prosecution. As well as many other YouTube personalities. After all they pay taxes to US so they can do it freely.
Again, not protecting Dotcom or like him as person, but he is not some war criminal to justify this kind of effort US put into trying to get him.
There is no evidence anyone who used their services would of paid. The "theft" is propaganda. In fact from the article itself it even says Mega had a notice and takedown system available to the rights holders. So once again what is it that was stolen?
>Anyway, this system was bullocks. It was just a poor lip service which they stalled and ignored the whole time.
I can't unsubscribe easily in one click ? They don't get to complain easily in one click. I can't get easily an email address or phone number to contact them ? They won't get contact info too. They had a taste of their own medicine. It's unfair if it's easier for them to take down my content than for me to appeal the decision.
Please site source where it says theft, since apparently it's a judicial fact. Since last I checked, it says a right was infringed, not theft.[0]. Specifically
"copyright holders, industry representatives, and legislators have long characterized copyright infringement as piracy or theft – language which some U.S. courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise contentious."
And also I'm unsure there is evedence it was ignored, it just seems like you are spewing more copyright propaganda. Might I dare to say they might be in fact lying?
Well last I checked words have meanings. And you needing to resort to ad hominen when facts state otherwise is telling, especially since I am the Great Gatsby of parties.
While I don't disagree with the idea behind the post, Kim is not exactly small fry. He is not as big as he once was, but he seems to be doing well money-wise.
sad to see that kind of comments in HN. I feel that 10 years ago there was more room for accepting that a political opponent should be free to speak up. now our educated masses are pushing for prison and extradition because they don't belong to the axis of good.... you def cannot be for opensource and its values and say things like that
On the other hand, the straming/video 'services', are literally stealing stuff you bought from them. How is that better? If there's a "buy"/"purchase" button, the movie is yours... it's not a "rent" button, where they can take it away whenever they want.
Kim is a modern day robin hood. Illegal, criminal, yada yada? Sure. Is he "bad" for the people? Well... that's very debatable.
Have you read the indictment? It makes a pretty strong case that he knew copyright infringement was the cash cow of his business model, structuring the business and lying to copyright holders in order to make the infringement more effective. Deleting links without removing the infringing content from the server is the big smoking gun to me - there’s really no legitimate reason to do that.
Perhaps we're using terminology differently. When I say "honest question", I mean a question that someone wants a straightforward answer to, perhaps as a starting point for further discussion.
"What is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?" is not such a question. Having been in such conversations before, if I responded with an honest answer like "I generally think the US is a pretty good country" or "I feel that it's important for criminals to be caught and punished", I'm quite confident that the original commenter would respond with personal insults and invective.
You're arguing legality trumps morality. We're in the opposite camp.
Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all things!
The comment you're responding to just speculates that he will escape to Russia based on his (very consistent) views and activism, there's no suggestion that he should go to prison because of them.
The comment he's responding to speculates that he is being paid by russia to post on twitter, as if people couldn't come to their own conclusions based on their own views and their own biases, which are very very strong against the US if you're Kim Dotcom with good reason.
lol. please stop. we know what being on a russian payroll means. just like we knew irak didnt have weapons of mass destruction. you tell yourself the lies because you know once the truth will come out there will be other matters to tend
It isn't 'a difference of opinion'. Dotcom has relayed Russian disinformation to an impressionable mass audience and heartily cheerled an invasion. It's not surprising that people who disagree with him politically find themselves amused or glad at the prospect of due process being served in this individual's case - where they might otherwise have been indifferent or grudgingly sympathetic.
Russia's quite open about it, and figures involved boast about it (as Margarita Simonyan and Vladislav Surkov both have). It's also trivially easy to compare the heavily digested and sanitised information that Russian affiliates feed their western audiences with Russia's domestic information space and notice the contradictions, for example, in outrages dismissed by their foreign servants but celebrated at home.
Kim is not a political opponent, he is a convicted criminal who now very deep in fake news, conspiracy myths and other lies. This is not someone who has just a different opinion on some things, but one with a long history of seriously harmful behavior.
Those are services, not people. And what illegal stuff are they actually doing? Yes, people abuse them for illegal content, but it's not their normal modus operandi. The companies are removing content on proper request and do not actively aid in spreading it.
And BTW since when has Kim any legit political stance? It has always been about money and fame for Kim. Political topics were never a serious part of him.
they did the same original thing he was blamed for. having a platform where people can upload stuff. but like you said he should be jailed for his beliefs because he shouldnt be free to spread his conspiracy theories. how about religious people shoudl we jail them too?
> they did the same original thing he was blamed for.
No, they did not. User abused the platform, and the companies removed it when notified. Kim didn't do that, instead he even made a business of it. Youtube especially had a historical case about this, when they were sued by Viacom(?) for not removing content well enough, which then resulted in the creation of the contentId-system. This was BTW around 5 years before MegaUpload and Kim were raided.
And as you mentioned ChatGPT, AI and content-usage is a completely different story, and a recent problem around loopholes in the existing laws. Maybe the companies will also be sued for this, maybe not, we will see..
also to your point about services removing illegal stuff here the NYT : “ During the first full month of the new ownership, the company suspended nearly 300,000 accounts for violating “child sexual exploitation” policies, 57 percent more than usual, the company said. The effort accelerated in January, Twitter said, when it suspended 404,000 accounts”
how come musk did it with 80% people fired why wasnt it adressed before? would you send the previous twitter ceo to jail?
Ah yes, the classic. Everybody who opposes american foreign policy is labeled. Tweet about opposing the genocide in gaza? Oh dont listen to him -- he is pro khamas. Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll.
I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it? Why would normal people throw baseless accusations like this? What is your motivation? What skin do you have in this game? Is your argument really "Kim Dotcom is an agent because he is opposing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and he is against a forever war in Ukraine"?
He is presumably some guy that youve never met that happens to be fighting against the US government and its copyright laws so why are you making these comments? Are you so passionate about copyrights because you are an artist that has lost money because of mega? What motivates you?
>I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it?
Thanks for articulating this, similar idea behind my sibling comment. Sadly i think the conclusion is that the vast majority of people are small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative the empire feeds them. Wish it wasn't like this
I agree that Kim Dotcom is not likely to be on Russia's payroll, but, as you said, he's simply small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative that empire feeds them.
Most likely he just hate US for a good reason and gonna support anything anti-US. In his particular case he probably just needs a country that not gonna extradite him to US no matter how bad the country is.
I just seriously doubt that likes of Dotcom, Musk or Trump need to be on Putin payroll. They just all have their own agenda to sell "strong russia, good putin" narrative.
tribalism. Probably on the democrat side and probably because Kim has been active on X. propaganda and its effects are literally that dumb and predictable (thus the NPC label).
Eh. I'm far-left and also think that the way he's been treated has been out-of-proportion to his actual crimes, and mostly predicated on his having pissed off powerful donors and not being Chinese. And I'd argue that there are plenty of people on the right who support him primarily because of his edgelord-iness, and not so much out of concern for an ever-expanding carceral state that deals out "justice" capriciously and disproportionately to whoever the oligarchs point at.
The concept itself ("being on the payroll") is archetypical head-in-the-sand American. All countries have intelligence assets on the payroll, and that absolutely includes the US, probably on the #1 spot.
Its like Americans complaining about how Chinese or Indian hit movies are covertly pro-Chinese or pro-Indian propaganda pieces. Ever heard of Hollywood?
> Tweet about opposing war in ukraine arguing that NATO is outdated and not in the interest of Ukrainians? Oh pay no attention to him -- he is on the communist payroll.
Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll - just ignorant beyond measure.
Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now and I for one am happy that in my country it was the post-communists out of everyone who spearheaded the effort to have a deterrent in the form of NATO membership.
Finland and Sweden appear to agree, considering how they joined the alliance.
Why do people who oppose the war in Ukraine feel it's Ukraine's responsibility to roll over and die, instead of Russia's responsibility to turn around and go home?
This is usual tactics of Putins' shills. They all very much against war, but it's certainly must be stopped as is on the current frontline. So Ukraine not controlling part of it's territories and can't get into NATO, so Putin can prepare better for next invasion.
Unfortunately EU and US governments are not much better since they all put dumb limits on weapons usage and never supplied Ukraine enough weapons to actually get any superiority.
Is that truly what people who oppose the war believe? Or is that an easy strawman for you to dismiss the anti-war crowd in the eyes of those who dont know the history of this conflict?
What do people like you mean by "anti-war", exactly? Do you expect Ukraine to stop trying to liberate its people from a genocidal fascist invader who is holding them hostage? Do you want Ukraine to give up? Because, like, I suppose surrendering and being marched to the basement for your 9 grams of lead (that is, unless you accept being ethnically cleansed off your land and becoming a refugee) - well that also ends the war.
Do you deny that Ukraine has ethnic Russians in its territory? Do you deny that Ukraine has been crushing those Russians because of their dissent and their desire for self-determination?
I don’t expect them to stop fighting invaders. But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity. They didn’t. Why I wonder?
Do you deny that Ukraine has ethnic Russians in its territory?
This is a lot like asking, in regard to events of August 1939 -- "Do you deny that Poland has ethnic Germans in it territory"?
Of course it did, and in fact (though this is largely forgotten) Poland was abusing its German population somewhat (far more than anything Ukraine has ever done to its Russian-speaking population). But Hitler's claims of the extent of such abuses were wildly exaggerated and overdrawn. Just as the depiction above of Ukraine "crushing those Russians because of their dissent" (without providing specifics) is wildly out of touch with reality.
And his stated rationale of the need to to start a full-scale war in order "protect" this population was a big lie of course, created specifically to appeal to people gullible enough to believe such things. Putin's claims of the need to "protect" the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are equally baseless, and are designed with a similar intent in mind.
But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity.
Ukraine did engage with Russia on the issues -- they just weren't willing to bend over and give Putin everything he wanted. More specifically it definitely sounds like you were expecting the Ukrainians to agree to permanent large-scale territorial concessions. Because since 2014, that's been the bare minimum of Russia's terms for "avoiding war".
Why do we just dismiss what the Russians keep saying? They keep saying they don’t want US weapon systems on their border. I agree that there is lots of propaganda. And who knows if the elections in the autonomous regions were legit. But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
All I can say is we had similar situations in the past and decades after the fact we realized we were lied to. Too bad millions died I guess?
> Why do we just dismiss what the Russians keep saying? They keep saying they don’t want US weapon systems on their border.
If you listen to Russians, then you're left with an impression that they are being surrounded by US weapons on their borders. If you look at the numbers, then that turns out to be a blatant misrepresentation of truth. For example, the US fielded ~5000 main battle tanks in Europe at the end of the Cold War. In 2013, the last 10 were removed. The opposite is true: post-Cold War era has brought rapid disarmament to Europe, which has emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, because disarmament has limited how much and how quickly allies could help Ukraine.
> But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
Ironically, this is "obvious" only if you accept the premise that Russia is determined to violate the security of its neighbors.
I wasn't responding to what "the Russians" where saying; but rather to what you were saying. Which unfortunately was just plainly illogical and counterfactual (on that specific point, at least).
But to address one aspect of what you're saying now:
I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
This is broadly correct, and perfectly understandable.
However the war was never really about NATO expansion in the first place. And even if it were -- it definitely wasn't a rational response to that concern. And it certainly wasn't a response that the regime was "pushed" into taking.
The war was entirely optional for them - a failed gambit for enhanced "stature" and prestige on the global stage, basically[0]. Very much analogous to, and exactly as evil and stupid as the 2003 Iraq invasion, and supported by lies equally obvious and stupid. That unfortunately far too many otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent people were far to eager to believe.
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
I see plenty of room for debate on alternatives to the idea that Ukraine must keep fighting at the current pace until an unequivocal withdrawal (if that's what you mean by "supporting it endlessly"), and if you talk to Ukrainians directly you will very quickly find that they do as well.
However in order to even get there we first need to free ourselves of broken narratives in terms of what's actually been happening on the ground, and stop assuming that what the current regime says is interchangeable with what Russians in general say or think.
It would also be helpful to just completely forget about "mainstream media narratives", whatever those even supposedly are. When instead you can build your own far more reliable narratives from first principles (studying history, talking with people from there, or actually visiting the safer parts of the country if you like).
--
[0] Along with a desire on the part of the regime to promote and secure its longevity by keeping Ukraine out of Western economic and cultural influence, which it felt deeply threatened by, which is where the analogy breaks down somewhat (the US never had any specific obsession with Iraq in the way Putin has with Ukraine). And now that the initial gambit has clearly failed -- the war isn't about any of these initial motives; but rather a simple and desperate desire to save face, so that the regime can survive for a few more bloody years.
The main point being (as with the US in Iraq) its true aims were/are entirely different from its outwardly stated aims.
It's really upsetting to hear something so dehumanizing, have you ever interacted with russian people? would you say this about any other massive group of people?
Yeah but I don’t think that it is so simple. I would think nations are sufficiently deterred from establishing precedents which can later be used on them. Does Russia want to legitimize a recipe that could be used by Japan to snatch Russian territory? I don’t see them waving the Nuke card at all.
Look: the Russian invasion sucks for everybody involved and in particular the Russian and Ukrainian civilians. War might be good for many things but at the very least it is not obviously good for politics. I think it’s not controversial to expect that Russian leadership would have much preferred to develop influence through significant mutually beneficial relations with its neighbors.
What is to be done however if at some point a third party with infinite resources is those neighbors to an impasse on topics of national security to Russia? And after this those third parties start arming those neighbors with advanced weapon systems? Exactly what do you expect the US would do in a similar situation?
People wishing that the war would stop are not simply siding with an invader or a bully. They are being practical and recognizing a legitimate grievance of the Russians. Unless your position is that we live in a world where nations are unequal wrt security expectations you have to acknowledge the reality that the Russians have a legitimate claim to be upset about.
Why aren’t the other nations upset? There’s nothing legitimate about their grievances. Their super powers days are over, they just won’t believe it yet, and that delusion is costing Russia dearly. Instead of being a prosperous mid power, they insist on going for broke.
> How is it in the interest of the Ukrainians to trigger this invasion? Russia has always made it clear that Ukraine was a red line for what it sees as NATO encroachment on its borders.
This is completely false. "NATO encroachment" is a VERY recent talking point which is part of the neo-fascist narrative that Russia developed attempting to excuse its own inadequacies. You should google Foundations of Geopolitics which is basically a Russian version of Mein Kampf. This book is required reading for majority of Russian politicians, diplomats and high ranking military officials. Before Russia decided that it wanted to pursue a fascist state, NATO was not on its agenda at all.
Russia the fascist state? Russian citizens have greater free speech and expression rights than any E.U country, U.K, Australia, Canada or New Zealand.
In the U.K people are currently being jailed for years for mild social media posts. Hopefully the Axis of resistance will liberate the West. This American certainly hopes so.
>How dare you call Russia the fascist state when Russian citizens have greater free speech and expression rights than any E.U country, U.K, Australia and New Zealand.
So in Russia you can't support the country you're currently at war with. In the West you can't criticize a man who stabbed three children at a Taylor Swift concert.
Would you like to reconsider who has greater free speech rights?
American as apple pie. You're a hacker, see where the IP I'm commenting from is located. What hubris to think millions of Americans aren't completely fed up with this fascist empire. If you're still unsure, for 20 years now Congressional approval hasn't cracked 30%.
I'm sorry but the stats are readily available online. Far more people both in totality and per capita are arrested for saying things online in the non-U.S anglosphere than Russia.
Don't get me wrong, the United States wants the same for its citizens but our annoying Bill of Rights and Supreme Court have slowed the descent into tyranny.
Doesn’t even matter at this point? Do we have free speech when the boundaries of what is acceptable speech is defined by an oligarchy that is willing to suppress stories in all forms of media?
One thing seems certain to me: we were never free. Those in power will do as they please. Here or in Russia it’s all the same.
Right. Because we don’t have Snowden on the run. Because we don’t have a media empire that is suppressing every single Israeli war crime. Because we don’t have international bodies like the ICC being used against our enemies (eg Serbs) and being suppressed against our friends (eg Israelis).
Russia has its interests. It puts them above human rights. We have our interests and guess what we do the same.
Need I remind you that we fabricated reasons to invade Vietnam and Iraq and in the process we killed millions of civilians? Or do you need a list of all the governments we admit to have toppled over the years?
Our misguided belief that we occupy some moral high ground is objectively making the world a worse place. By our hands and by the fact that we are enabling other countries to act the same (eg Iran and Russia). How about instead we concretely define principles and standards that we apply uniformly? Why do we have to pretend like we are uniquely act with impunity on the global stage?
Russia is not a superpower if it can't even have air superiority on its own land and struggles to push beyond 150km from its own border, it's just a very nuclear armed nation thanks to the Soviet days.
As for the NATO enlargement narrative I don't know why people still try to push this when it's clear as water that Russia wants to annex more and more territory, even their conditions for ceasefire are mostly about Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.
So you believe Russia is simultaneously so weak that they can barely push out 150km beyond their borders and greedily eyeing their neighbors for annexation potential?
And are you saying NATO can’t be enlarging because Russia wants to annex territory so that means NATO hasn’t been enlarging?
So you believe Russia is simultaneously so weak that they can barely push out 150km beyond their borders and greedily eyeing their neighbors for annexation potential?
The way you speak about Russia is akin to the way an abuse victim would speak about their abuser - it's everyone's fault but Russia's that they invaded.
Also don't you dare make them lose their temper.
Russia isn't under threat from NATO, as it's a defensive alliance. They seem to understand that as well, as they pulled their air defense systems from the region bordering Finland.
> I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power.
The soviet union was a super power. If anything people realised that Russia's supposed power is mainly posturing.
And it was high time for that. In the past some western governments attempted a policy of appeasement - all it achieved was emboldening Russia.
It's useful to compare Russia with other countries.
Russia pop 145 million. GDP 2.24 Trillion.
Brazil, pop 205 million, GDP 1.92 Trillion.
Brazil isn't anyone's idea of a super power. Difference is Russia has or had a lot of Soviet cold war era weapons and weapons manufacturing. With the emphasis on the increasingly had.
So yes you are right. And I agree about the wife beater logic.
I see you've never seen Estonia or Latvia on a map. Nor realize NATO is already there. Why have they not been invaded while since 2008, Georgia and Ukraine have? Total mystery.
Sure. Or world hunger. Or building more schools and infrastructure in the developing world. Or generally investing in making technology accessible to improve outcomes for people.
> I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power.
Super power that cannot defend it's own borders during the hot war. I guess their superpower army too busy conquering Moon and Mars or far away galaxy.
And you know what's not happened when Ukraine started to capture Russia territory? Putin and his gang said nothing at all about nuclear weapons during last 10 days. Not even single hint even though he like to talk about them every time when his ass not in danger.
This is because they are criminals and bullies and these kind of people only understand force.
Good that Vietnamese did not realize US is a super power and will just nuclear bomb them when they get frustrated they are losing conventional war.
> A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are matters critical to its national security
If the "matters critical to its national security" involve unprovoked invading of other country, then it's good they don't care, even assuming your biased rhetoric has anything close to reality.
I forgot that Vietnam shares a border with the US, is very close to the US capital, and was in discussions with the US adversaries to stage their troops in Vietnamese territories.
Really? It’s absolutely not that Ukrainians are cooperating with western lunatics trying to undermine MAD by deploying nuclear capable weapon systems all over the Russian borders?
MAD prevented WW3. What do you think happens if the US thinks it can cause significantly more harm to China and Russia through first strikes?
Maybe you haven’t noticed recently how there already western weapon systems actively striking targets within Russia. Those same systems can deliver nuclear payloads.
So what your are saying is a falsehood based on the current realities on the ground.
I suppose any of the thousands of regular aircraft that Ukraine has "could" deliver a nuclear payload. But that would be a pretty stupid way to launch a first strike, and doesn't change the MAD equation in any way.
> if anything the story of Finland ascension into NATO supports the arguments that NATO is intentionally -- and aggressively -- pushing Russia to war
It's incredible the convoluted things people tell themselves to explain away the simple and obvious reality:
The only reason Finland and Sweden joined NATO was because Russia invaded Ukraine and started a genocide, while threatening Finland and Sweden with the same (and nukes).
> What would have been better for Ukraine? To find a way to make peace with Russia or to fight it for a decade? And please dont say this is for "democracy", "freedom", and "liberty".
The option is to let Russia freely commit genocide with rape, murder, and terrorism.
Only to then steer their target to the next country and do exactly the same.
I'm not a fan but do you have real proof of this conspiracy theory? It's very popular to accuse people of being on Russia's payroll now. Rather unfortunately it dumbs down the movement to hold Russia responsible for invading Ukraine.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The degree to which the propaganda works is alarming. They'll turn a blind eye to Ross Ulbricht, Snowden, the Patriot Act, etc. while wasting their time foaming at the mouth at made up stories about Russia. Unreal to see in this day and age, honestly - I mean you'd think the internet + a little critical thinking would have given these people a clue.
Which stories about Russia do you find made up, exactly? When my relative had to watch his neighbour being taken to a Russian torture chamber in Kherson, not to be seen for months, and then hearing his stories about daily beatings, electrocution, pulled fingernails and the like - was that made up? Are you one of those people who consider the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Ukrainians in Bucha "made up"?
Kim Dotcom, the Critical Thinker, does. But he curiously suspends critical thinking when pandering idiotic conspiracy theories about biolabs weaponizing birds. Gotta love these selective critical thinkers.
I have a hard time just convincing people in my company to buy a license for some software we arguably need. I literally can not convince them using any logic or facts, it's downright infuriating and I feel like I'm in a crazy world. You can't bring people to the watering hole, they have to get there on their own. And by that point, I've given up and have moved on. And even then, no amount of "I told you so" will have them listening to you next time around, they always just double-up on their own ideas and cope with the existence of any facts that contradict them. Oh and sometimes they forgot you even told them in the first place, and they make it seem like they thought of it first.
I know what you mean and I work with some smart people that also cannot be convinced with arguments unless they come from someone with a high social status. They have to fail to learn anything if they don't have someone around with a high social status to guide them.
Where in the article is Trump mentioned? The article is about extraditing a person, who could just fly to a USA country that doesn't have a extradition pact, such as Russia or China. Dotcom has been saying pro Russia war things on twitter, which is easy to read. So OPs comment is consistent with the theme of the article.
Equating it to possible Trump Russia connections however has nothing to do with the article.
what a bad stretch. You have no intellectual honesty. Kim has also said Trump things on twitter and we've spent literal billions on fake Russia-Trump in the last few years. And here is someone baselessly pushing Kim-Russia. Anyways, good luck on your weird mission to police any mentioning of Trump. Pretty dumb IMO
