Kim Dotcom is in jail because he thumbed his nose at the US entertainment/enforcement cartel.
It's absurd that his file sharing service (which functionally is no different than Dropbox or Google Drive) gets shut down, but start-ups like Uber and AirBnb - which actually endanger people's lives and cause very real damage to property, are allowed to continue operating because their VCs are politically connected.
I used to be in the restaurant/hospitality business - you know how awesome it would be if I could just set up a restaurant, hotel or yes BnB in my house without going through the proper permits? In the part of Canada I live in, a BnB requires no fewer than 7 permits (3 municipal, 3 provincial, and 1 federal).
Here you have 2 US-based businesses thumbing their nose at local laws, as well as the laws of other countries, however because they're connected (and there's a lot of money invested) they get away with it (in the US anyway, and they try their luck elsewhere).
To say the Kim Dotcom debacle is anything but political is absurd...
The charge against Megaupload was not that they hosted copyrighted content but that they knowingly did so and encouraged it through their affiliate program.
Youtube actively does the same thing with people directly making money using 'pirated' content.
Note: They currently remove specific content when requested and even automate the process. But, you can still find plenty of 'pirated' content where the owner has yet to complain.
No, that's not the same thing. The law doesn't say that you can't have any pirated content on your service. It says you can't knowingly have pirated content. Once you learn about a stolen movie on your site, you have to take it down.
When, like Dotcom, you instead actively solicit pirated material, optimize the pirated material on your site for quality, and pay users to put more pirated material on your site using a sliding scale based essentially on how pirated the material is, the DOJ reasonably concludes that you are not a public video site like Youtube, but rather a criminal conspiracy.
Dotcom appeared to have been operating under the misconception that a "notice and takedown" system insulated him from that charge. Dotcom didn't actually read the DMCA, because notice and takedown is only ~half of the responsibility of an online service. The other half, written right into the DMCA, is operating without red flag knowledge of pirated content.
It's a little more nuanced than that. They are aware that for example much foreign TV content is going to be on their site without active intervention. However, they don’t actively protect this content without direct assistance.
Basically, unless you complain we are going to pirate the hell out of your content.
They aren't required to actively protect whole classes of content. They're simply required not to operate with specific knowledge of individual pirated videos on their service.
I don't think it's enough to simply never look at the contents of your database while massive piracy is going on. YouTube goes beyond a simple DMCA request by providing tools to keep content from showing up on their site. And I suspect that's what's deemed sufficient protection where simply complying with each DMCA request is not enough.
If you're curious what was "deemed sufficient" you can read the court opinions from when Viacom sued YouTube/Google (and lost). [1]
As I read it, the only additional "protection" that Google was required to implement was to have a policy of banning "repeat infringers." There is some additional statutory language about accommodating "standard technical measures" that are "used by copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works," but as far as I can tell no such measures were identified so that didn't constrain Google in any way.
In what way? This was true when YouTube first launched (I've heard stories that the founders uploaded copyrighted movies and tv shows themselves) but YouTube has a system in place now that removes copyrighted content automatically and it works pretty well (some say too well).
copyrighted means that the owner of the copyright is the only one with the right to decide when/where/how it gets shown. But if that owner is cool with it being on Youtube, there's no reason for it to be taken down.
You're not wrong, but it's only because that content hasn't been entered into their system or because the copyright holder isn't actively requesting content be removed.
They are protected under the safe harbor porvision of the DMCA which basically says that if someone says "That's my stuff, take it down" they have to take it down. However if no one complains, YouTube can argue that millions of videos are added everyday, they can't possibly screen them against every piece of copyrighted music/film ever made.
What's your source on Uber and AirBnB actually endagering life and causing damage? I get that you might not like their business plan, which is a totally legit opinion, but a claim like that do need a source.
Around here to run a taxi you need several things. One is a commercial vehicle driver's license, which requires training above and beyond the normal license. You also need commercial insurance, to protect yourself, your passengers, and the insurance company (else they would have to raise premiums for everyone to accommodate risky, illicit behaviour). Taxis are required to have cameras, to protect the drivers and passengers. From what I've seen of UberX's 'requirements', they violate in nearly every way, and I don't think I need a 'source' to state why a lack of training, insurance, and safety measures could harm people.
As for AirBnB, imagine you own a condo and someone across from you is running an illicit hotel. These kinds of things affect safety (random people who don't live there constantly coming and going), property value, and hurts legitimate businesses that actually employ people (say, the real BnB or Hotel nearby that follows all the regulations and thus has to pay higher costs). And of course, if you own a condo, are renting is, and your tenants are illegally subletting, the damage is more direct.
To be honest, I could (for lack of interest I didn't) find you sources which show that Uber could be safer than average taxi companies. The reasoning:
- After riding with Uber you get a map sent to you, this could help in proving that a taxi driver tried to rape a woman customer in a dark ally. (this has happened, driver got fired and charged) With a regular taxi it's your word against theirs.
- With Uber you are 100% sure the driver is working for Uber, since you ordered it through the app and the app shows you the license plate. With regular taxis you have to trust that the taxi license is real if you hail a cab on the street.
- With Uber you rate the driver after the ride, which makes sure that bad drivers get detected very quickly. With regular taxis you have to file a complaint, which most people don't because it's too much of a bother.
- With Uber you don't need to have anything representing money on you to get a ride. With regular taxis you need either cash or a credit card on you to pay for the ride, which is a safety issue before, during and after the ride.
I agree with you that there are some issues with a company like Uber just doing whatever they want. However, there are some pretty big issues with the current taxi industry and Uber is doing a prety good job at highlighting them and providing alternatives.
> After riding with Uber you get a map sent to you, this could help in proving that a taxi driver tried to rape a woman customer in a dark ally. (this has happened, driver got fired and charged) With a regular taxi it's your word against theirs.
stop hailing strange taxis. Call a dispatch. Boom, accountability.
>With Uber you are 100% sure the driver is working for Uber, since you ordered it through the app and the app shows you the license plate. With regular taxis you have to trust that the taxi license is real if you hail a cab on the street.
that's unfair as the comparison is simply outside the scope of what Uber offers. One could also argue that Uber drivers cannot pickup a person hailing them; but no one should make that argument, because Uber does not try to emulate that particular function of the taxi service.
> With Uber you don't need to have anything representing money on you to get a ride. With regular taxis you need either cash or a credit card on you to pay for the ride, which is a safety issue before, during and after the ride.
how is a credit card a risk? Give it to the perpetrator , ensure your safety, claim the losses. If you're talking about material worth, I hope you don't carry any devices with you.
>I agree with you that there are some issues with a company like Uber just doing whatever they want. However, there are some pretty big issues with the current taxi industry and Uber is doing a prety good job at highlighting them and providing alternatives.
A third party hopping and skipping over established transportation safety regulation is not doing a good job at providing alternatives; it's simply trying to make money before government regulation radically changes the market or the IPO occurs (which will in turn cause a sudden relaxation of 'boundary-pushing' on Uber's part, relaxing government legal worries and providing customers with a worse product after brand establishment and customers begin to rely on earlier iterations)
You've argued that they're breaking the law, not that they cause significant damage. It's a fair point in and of itself but it's not the one you made two posts earlier and it's not the one you need to defend. Laws are notorious for inefficiently spending large amounts of resources to chase after marginal returns (which often go negative without anyone realizing).
For instance: cameras might not have nearly as good of a value proposition in a situation where the identity of the passenger is recorded up front. Extra training might not be necessary if customers have a functioning mechanism to share their intuitive judgements about dangerous drivers.
Uber and Lyft are not taxis. They are at most livery cabs.
They do not and should not operate under the same rules as taxis. They are much more like the airport shuttle services that have been operating without taxi licenses or medallions for decades. They simply have a novel way to summon the vehicle that does not involve placing a voice call to the company's scheduler and dispatcher.
There are more types of vehicle-for-hire services than just taxicabs, and they don't need to follow the same regulations.
Livery cabs around here do need to follow most of the same regulations. In fact, they apply to any situation where anyone is driving a vehicle for commercial reasons (say, a courier, moving service, any sort of taxi/cab, etc...).
Surely there is a reason these taxi regulations are in place. Or not. In any case, is it fair?
My opinion of Uber was something like "great for competition". But of course they can only compete because they're doing so not quite legally, and to great benefits compared to normal taxi drivers.
A normal taxi company might've gotten this large by releasing a good app with some funding, but I doubt it because of the huge advantage Uber has compared to everyone else.
I agree with what I think your point is. But I think you're getting downvoted because you did a lousy job of expressing it, and you did it in a rather disrespectful manner. We try to aim higher on HN.
You are correct. Selling other peoples work for pennies on the dollar, is a legitimate business model, and not a criminal enterprise.
This case had nothing to do with MU hosting other people's work and content, tricking the general public into signing up to a paid account to download it, and generating 400MM of revenue from it at the same time.
It had everything to do with the horse carriage industry trying to stop the automobile.
I can't tell if this is meant to be sarcastic or not. It looks like in taking the Devil's advocate position, you just drew a pretty close parallel between what the "other" "real" incumbent entertainment industry companies themselves actually do all day long masquerading as "legitimate enterprise" and what Mega-co the competition is doing.
Of course copyright is not actually licensed as FRAND like in the case of a patent accepted by some standards body, but I'm not sure why it shouldn't be when the alternative seems to be violent state-sponsored actions against foreign nationals like Kim Dotcom, protecting interests of incumbent super-companies and using various kinds of taxpayer dollars to invoke the police and para-military in the process.
Huh. I wonder why this is addressed as a fallacy. I was thinking this is poignant. To me it reads more like "can't have your cake and eat it too."
Like, if you are selling access to content, the producers are reasonably entitled to a share of your revenue. But if the producers sign their rights away (granting "entity" an exclusive license to sell reproductions) they are entitled to whatever you signed to pay at the dotted line, only. That's how the content industry was run since forever.
When those licenses are written as non-exclusive, you might have a gnarly mess of Guitarist and Singer authorize Band authorizes Agent authorizes Advertising Partner authorizes Radio Station authorizes Distribution Company authorizes Pandora/Netflix authorizes Partner, and Friends. If one of those contracts goes south (non-payment or expiration), are all of the subcontracting child parties suddenly violating criminal law and liable for jail time because they're now distributing copyrighted works without authorization?
Of course not, they are in breach of contract, or in a contract dispute, or a failure to achieve a meeting of the minds, or whatever. You don't go to jail. Not in any reasonable society, at least I would argue. Not before one of the entitled parties says "cease and desist," and after you fail to comply within a reasonable period of time, and even then certainly not before a judge says so.
Spotify is voluntary, any rights holder that wants to can not participate. See Taylor Swift.
A better example of make available for download and ask permission later, which in contrast to MU, was not shutdown by the courts, might be grooveshark.
Was in San Diego for RubyConf. While there, took 3 Ubers: 1 bad experience, 1 meh, 1 good. Asked good one about issues re airport pickups/dropoffs, which apparently require permit that almost no Uber don't have (and some cab drivers don't have). He explained to me it's only a few hundred dollars, and requires some classes and paperwork. Hardly a crisis of overbearing regulation.
My experience with Uber was that it's merely a way for those who want to be cab drivers to bypass the legal requirements to do so, while Uber turns a blind eye to who is really driving their cars.
>I guess I'm going back to court soon to get some of my assets unfrozen for legal fees and living expenses. To be continued...
He still have a bunch of assets that are outside his control.
He also tweeted that his rent is paid until halfway to next year.
His wife is suing him for 20+ million.
Dude still has money, he just can't get access to large amounts of it to stir stuff up.
Also, I imagine there is quite a bit this guy can do once he is able to move his focus away from fighting huge organizations (including the U.S. gov) to stay out of jail.
Actually it could be a smart way of getting money for his wife and kids while they appear to be apart.
When one gets dragged into courts its often advantageous to endup with whoever wants money from you to be at the end of a long list of people you owe money to.
Everytime I see a headline about Kim, I wonder why its interesting to people. Is it the equivalent of internet rubber-necking? He did some bad things, made a lot of money, then profited from redistribution of copyrighted material - why is he internet famous?
Ok, controversial opinion here: he made downloading/sharing files easy, Dropbox-style. Had his "startup" been in Silicon Valley, things would have turned out very differently; starting with less emphasis on copyrighted material piracy(maybe), but also more political weight (hello, VC connections), and probably not a raid at its house while its US competitors are safe.
Think of, uber, airbnb or dropbox. if they were non-SV and non-US they could face similar attacks of having illegal business practices and even end up in a raid of the founder's houses.
Silicon Valley is the strongest lobby for novelty and innovation. Even it struggles sometimes against the established laws and businesses.
I think you are not aware of the business model of MegaUpload.
1. John uploads a file and distributes the link.
2. Jane wants to download the file. She can do it freely (low speed, daily limits) or for a little fee (fast download, no limits).
3. Jane wants to download many files, so she signs up for a premium account.
4. John gets a comission from MegaUpload.
What happens if John uploads copyrighted material and drives sales for MegaUpload using pirated software and movies? Well...the file gets removed, but nothing else. He can continue doing it again and again, even uploading the same file again.
And this was going on on a massive scale, hundreds of people were earning several thousand dollars per month from this and -- according to court documents -- Kim was very much aware of this and even actively encouraged uploaders to supply copyrighted material to the system.
Plenty of the named SV startups - AirBnB or Uber - have their whole business model fundamentally based on encouraging people to violate laws (by renting out rooms in violation of local regulations, or by acting as a taxi driver in a car that isn't insured for it). Just as with MegaUpload, you don't have to break the law to use the service, but most people do, and they turn a very blind eye to it.
Even if people might think that freely sharing movies shouldn't be illegal, I think that most people feel that some random guy on the internet making money distributing camrips of The Dark Night is Not Cool(tm).
I think a lot less people have much of an opinion on unlicensed cabbies existing. AirBnB is a bit more controversial (anti-subletting clauses are there for neighbors more than for landlords, and NIMBY plays a role), but some people are cool with that so long as they trust their neighbor's judgement.
I do agree that the SV-ness of these two companies has helped immensely.
What people think is immaterial. With all three companies (Uber,Airbnb,MegaUpload) you have people breaking the law using the service. All three services turned a blind eye to this in the name of "disruption."
Kim's downfall is likely twofold:
1. Lack of Valley VCs with money saying what he's doing is good for the world.
2. The entertainment money lobby is very strong. I don't think there are taxi or anti-subletting lobbies of similar weight.
> I think a lot less people have much of an opinion on unlicensed cabbies existing.
No, it's just that the taxi lobby is less powerful than Hollywood, and is less used to spreading mass-propaganda. Have you ever seen ads shouting "Driving an unlicensed cab is A FELONY!" before every piece of entertainment you consume? That's why you think "most people feel" this or that about copyright infringement. It has nothing to do with the actual matter or the intensity of "natural feelings" of Joe Average about this or that topic. After all, before Napster was sued, the overwhelming majority of any population had no qualms whatsoever about copying anything digital (computer programs etc), not unlike we all had no qualms about using Uber until cabbies revolted.
Napster/Mega/Uber/AirBnB all shared the commonality of enabling illegal practices on a scale previously deemed impossible. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it depends on individual categories, but there is no denying that they all share a fundamental challenge/disobedience of established laws.
Please read what I said a bit more carefully. I don't think people had a problem with Napster because it was the logical extension of copying your friends' tapes. But I think some people have moral qualms about copying tapes and then selling them for more than cost.
Please read what I said more carefully. My point is that nobody was even thinking of digital duplication as an issue that required discerning between people doing it for love and people doing it for money. We were forced to develop an opinion, forced to draw this particular line by established interests crying foul ever since the '70s (and probably even before).
We weren't born with an innate sense that is wrong to pay for certain types of digital copies; our rational economic instinct is to try and get the best bang for our buck, not to investigate whether the seller is actually allowed to sell us that particular bang. That is why contraband is as old as the world.
It was a constant stream of threats and propaganda from established interests that taught us that there is a "good copy" and a "bad copy" and people selling "bad copies" are unworthy of getting our money. Now it's natural to think that there is a line to draw, regardless of where you actually draw it. That line wasn't there before "they" told us to look for it.
For taxis and hospitality, this process of education/indoctrination has not happened, because there was no real need -- these matters were settled in law decades ago through the (mostly democratic) process, and that was it. Established interests could draw the line at any time with a couple of phone calls, because you can't hide a hotel or a cab for long; there was no need to involve the public, no need to divulge the finer points of hospitality law or to develop in their customers a critical approach to doing business in these markets like the entertainment industry was doing.
Now Uber and AirBnB are simply bypassing these established systems by using scale. They make infringers small enough and numerous enough to make enforcement unpractical on the ground, and use that as a lever to remove established systems of control. Incumbents are forced to ask the public to do the enforcement themselves, like the entertainment industry started doing so many years ago. So now more and more people know that there is a line to draw in those industries as well, but in numbers nowhere near what the entertainment industry amassed in almost 50 years of continuous advertisement of "bad practices". That doesn't mean that they don't have the exact same reasons of the entertainment industry: "the law says X and these people are doing Y, please make them stop". (In fact, they probably have even more reasons, since regulation of these industries has some foundation in actual threats to the public -- hotels with no emergency exit, drunk unlicensed drivers etc. -- whereas nobody ever died because of an unlicensed tape.)
The real problem is the copyrighted material. I personally think it's perfectly OK to share revenue with your users if someone else signs up for your service and downloads something that you've share. MegaUpload makes a profit from people buying Premium because of a certain user and they reward them for that.
If the copyright-topic wasn't an issue, this would be quite a nice business model (at least a kind of fair one).
But this revenuesharing thing encourages people to upload files for a mass audience, and that's the reason why this doesn't work.
Doesn't YouTube have a mechanism to divert the revenue to the copyright holder, but still keep the video up? Some overlap in functionality -- sharing potentially copyrighted material -- but the attitude of the two companies seems pretty different.
Mega was really just a heavy-handed sales funnel [1] forcing people to pay to pirate and paying people to upload popular content.
Dropbox doesn't deserve the comparison, dropbox restrict sharing to make themselves unattractive for piracy. The similarities stop with "storing heaps of files".
[1] e.g. on the streaming video side megavideo they had a 72 minute per day limit on watching videos. On the download site you were throttled and made to jump through a bunch of hoops to download one file at a time for free. These were not nice sites.
Had his "startup" been in Sillicon Valley, he had been in jail a long time ago. I don't see how there would have been less emphasis on copyrighted material, as that is and has always been the focus of megaupload and mega.
What US competitors are safe? You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.
"Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future licensing royalties of $10 million"
Have you ever seen Kim engage in talks for a settlement? Would it even make sense for the industry to settle at this point? You think Sean Parker would still be a free man if he would just continued running Napster as it was?
(The Dread Pirate Roberts was also running an innovative business where users could exchange government restricted goods through a P2P system with a centralized registry, look where that got him)
> You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.
Actually, this is very common. It works in exactly the same way as MegaUpload did - Señora Pirata uploads her ripped movies to Dropbox, and distributes the public link to strangers.
You've probably never tried to watch YouTube videos from Germany. The most random incidental music in the background of a cat video can cause an upload that plays fine in the US to display something like, "This video is not available in your country because it contains music that the rights holder has not cleared through GEMA". Youtube goes to great lengths to follow all of the DMCA (not just notice and takedown), as well as the laws of other countries. Evidence indicates that MU did the opposite in many cases.
Youtube, who spent millions developing a state-of-the-art image and sound recognition system (ContentID) so that copyrighted content could be detected and blocked by its holders?
Youtube's copyrighted content recognition systems do not work that well - but now that these systems are a legal requirement they stop Youtube competitors from getting off the ground.
That's perfectly valid. Copyrighted data isn't illegal to distribute per se, only distributing it without a valid license. The same file can be illegally distributed by one Mega user and legally by another - it depends on who they are and what license they might have.
He's popular because he's an ambiguous figure that triggers so many of the conventional narrative patterns that the mass media love to sell (because they work on the target audience as wish-fulfillment): he's a risk-taker, rags to riches (to rags?), robin hood type figure, everyman gone good/bad, how the mighty have fallen, sleaze-sex-money, fast cars and model girl-friends, boy next door, david vs goliath taking on the might of the US copyright industry, dawn raids by shady corrupt government procedures, extreme -- not only in girth, persecuted for helping the common man etc etc.
Journalists' dream come true. They/we can project upon him and his actions whatever fits their/our agenda.
I used to follow Kim back in the late 90's early 2000's when he ran Kimble.org. At the time it was a Flash website that was pushing the boundaries of what you could do on the web. It incorporated 3D, particle emissions from your mouse, mouse pointer following and a few other Flash techniques that no one was doing at the time. He also had another site called Monkeybank which was another amazing Flash website. One of the first that I saw which used 3D models rotating with correct shadowing.
I was honestly more amazed by Kim's online persona, because I never had any idea what he did. To be honest, I just saw awesome websites and a guy that looked like he was having fun being a software engineer/hacker. Then he launched the Ultimate Rally, a competitor to the Gumball 3000 race, which was all about fast cars driving across different countries in the world (Another awesome website). I think that was in the early 2000's and after that I've been watching him. Since the internet was largely anonymous, I never knew who he was or that he was falsifying his lifestyle.
His websites have long since been taken down, but they are still vivid in my mind.
He's been making headlines since the 90s. Even before he got on the US radar, he was involved in inside trading, tearing up the roads of Europe, winning the Gumball Rally, getting involved in questionable financial schemes, went on the run, and God knows what else. He's a larger than life character with a long track record of media coverage and was Internet famous long before Megaupload. People are often interested in larger than life characters even when they claim not to like them; consider the reputations of Donald Trump, Justin Bieber, or the oft-misunderstood Larry Ellison.
You wonder, because you believe he is a criminal. Many others will disagree, and claim that file sharing site owner shall not be prosecuted for content people upload.
For some of us who remember, he is basically one of the first 'entrepreneur jerk's to rise during the Internet era. MegaCar was a sign of things to come - it really heralded the Internet-celebrity age, and that was some time ago.. For me, he's just another crazy caricature that the Internet brought to the table. I wouldn't know him from scratch if it wasn't for the Internet - like so many, many other things ..
For me I took an interest because he's flamboyant and a character, what with the videos with the yachts, girls, mansions, helicopters and Modern Warfare 3 stuff. He'd make a good movie villain. Apart from that not so much - he was an ok stock swindler and a major copyright infringer which I guess is mildly interesting.
with every dotcom headline i'm thinking back of his days during the '99 boom where he was a "prominent" figure in german television with his hacking skills and millionaire-lifestyle which was all just for show.
he's only really clever at self-promotion and this is just the latest chapter, either to hide money from governments/plaintiffs, his ex-wife or swindle some of his followers out of theirs.
can we not just ignore this guy finally; he's not some kind of internet robin hood / freedom fighter.
I'm seeing a re-occurring theme of big names talking about how much lawyers make. I guess you never really fully fathom the expense until you get really involved with a legal proceeding.
It's absurd that his file sharing service (which functionally is no different than Dropbox or Google Drive) gets shut down, but start-ups like Uber and AirBnb - which actually endanger people's lives and cause very real damage to property, are allowed to continue operating because their VCs are politically connected.
I used to be in the restaurant/hospitality business - you know how awesome it would be if I could just set up a restaurant, hotel or yes BnB in my house without going through the proper permits? In the part of Canada I live in, a BnB requires no fewer than 7 permits (3 municipal, 3 provincial, and 1 federal).
Edit - if you're in Canada, here's a useful tool to search for some of the permits and licenses your future business will require: http://www.canadabusiness.ca/eng/search/stp1
Here you have 2 US-based businesses thumbing their nose at local laws, as well as the laws of other countries, however because they're connected (and there's a lot of money invested) they get away with it (in the US anyway, and they try their luck elsewhere).
To say the Kim Dotcom debacle is anything but political is absurd...