its less of a trial these days and more about biblical retribution. In regard to Megaupload, Dotcom says he believes the company had actively tried to prevent copyright infringement – its terms of service forced users to agree they would not post copyrighted material to the website. Companies or individuals with concerns that their copyright material was being posted on Megaupload were given direct access to the website to delete infringing links. If it went to trial, im doubtful the RIAA has a slam-dunk case at all considering the bulk of their evidence was illegally collected. Justice Winkelmann ruled that the handing of hard drives seized by New Zealand police in the raid to the FBI was in breach of extradition legislation, and the FBI's removal from New Zealand of cloned data from them was unlawful.

in the past decade the RIAA/MPAA have increasingly gone after the idea of piracy instead of actual piracy. Tor and end-to-end encryption recently made their public shit list but theyve been wardrumming against any and all pushback against the DMCA for a long time.

The issue, as I remember it, was that Megaupload consolidated files with the same hash that were uploaded by multiple people, so that they only kept one copy with multiple links pointing to it.

When they received a copyright notice, they would immediately remove only the link that was referenced in the notice, but would leave the file with all the other links still pointing to it. Which was the difference between "running a file-hosting service" and "knowingly hosting copyrighted material".

Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the content?

Let’s say I buy and losslessly rip a DVD and upload it to Megaupload as a backup or to have access to it on the go. I don’t share the link with anyone and thus don’t infringe on the copyright by redistributing the content publicly.

Now someone else buys the same DVD, rips it the same way and ends up with the exact same file (so their link actually points to my file because of deduplication), however they then decide to infringe on the copyright by distributing the link publicly.

Their link should indeed be disabled, but the original file should stay (with its other links) as there is no way to tell whether those other links are used legitimately.

>Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the content?

IANAL so maybe the plausible deniability here is enough legal protection, but this is an argument that rings hollow to me from a technical perspective. Usually content ripped from physical media is not stored in its original format, especially during the timeline of MegaUpload's existence. The data is going to be encoded in a different format and therefore could have a variety of different potential hashes. A bunch of people having exactly the same version of this media indicates that it is a single encoding being repeatedly shared.

Media encoders are generally deterministic. If you use two different encoders or two different configurations you'll get two different outputs, but two people using a given popular encoder with its default settings on the same input are generally going to get identical output.

two things.

> Let’s say I buy and losslessly rip a DVD and upload it to Megaupload as a backup or to have access to it on the go. I don’t share the link with anyone and thus don’t infringe on the copyright by redistributing the content publicly.

this right here is (sadly) already a DMCA violation for the person who rips the DVD. I'm not sure whether or not that makes it a different situation for megaupload vs. a person uploading a rip of a DVD they didn't own in the first place.

second, the lawyers can probably argue that megaupload knew (or should have known) how widely each upload was being distributed. it's hard to argue you don't know that infringement is going on if you see hundreds/thousands of downloads through a link to a file whose hash matches a known illicit copy. maybe they were at least smart enough not to keep these kinds of logs, I dunno.

>this right here is (sadly) already a DMCA violation for the person who rips the DVD

Yes, because we all live in America... right? Megaupload wasn't even a US company, why should it “enforce” some foreign legislation on non-concerned parties?

> Yes, because we all live in America... right?

Pretty much. The US makes other countries adopt laws that are similar to their own via trade agreements. The whole purpose of doing that is to make it easier for american businesses to sell stuff in other countries. The whole world is economically forced to converge into the same set of general laws that just happen to be very friendly to the interests of american corporations. Intellectual property laws are included in the package.

There are countries in the world where governments struggle to provide basic infrastructure to their populations. Why would anyone in such a miserable situation even care about protecting american copyright industry interests by prosecuting copyright infringement?

An MPAA official once visited my country to lobby politicians and push their agenda. Journalists asked him point blank: do you think copyright is a priority in a country where people do not have basic sanitation? I wish I had saved the article where I read that...

> Megaupload wasn't even a US company, why should it “enforce” some foreign legislation on non-concerned parties?

Good question... The US can probably just do whatever it wants though. If they hate you enough, they'll just kidnap you and fly you to wherever it is they need you to be. They call it extraordinary rendition.

This is the key to this whole farce.

Nothing he or his company did was illegal in NZ.

Put it like this: if a Pakistani courts tried to extradite Zuckerburg for blasphemy because some of Facebook's users said bad things about islam, then they'd be rightfully laughed at.

But a US court trying to extradite a NZ CEO for something the company's users did... different story. Because America.

Extradition works on the principle of dual criminality: the act has to be a crime in both countries. This is why the US won't extradite Zuckerberg to Pakistan for blasphemy, and it's also why the Dotcom case has been tied up in courts for years, because it's not clear at all if what he did was illegal under NZ law or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_criminality

I dunno, that seems like a good question for the FBI...

> Which was the difference between "running a file-hosting service" and "knowingly hosting copyrighted material".

Every digital file is copyrighted (in practice). Some people are allowed to distribute some files, others aren't. You are claiming it's up to him to know who were allowed and who were not, but I don't thing that's clear in any way.

Two words unfortunately: parallel construction. [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

This seems so evil yet it's an accepted part of law?

It might be applied for good and evil. Sometimes, a government does not want to give details because they want to reuse the method. Consider, for example, the FBI found a vulnerability in Tor, and does not want to disclose it yet does want to prosecute the perpetrator behind Silk Road.

> Tor and end-to-end encryption recently made their public shit list

I think I missed this news. Can you please elaborate?

The unfortunate thing is they’re all coupled and non-separated: church, corporation, and state.

Church decoupled pretty well

How are the church and state coupled? A corporation can bribe politicians with money, but what can a religious institution do?

People vote based on their opinions. Their opinions can be influenced by many things. Sometimes their opinions are influenced by their religious affiliation. Sometimes their opinions are influenced by comments on HN. But HN has no actual leverage over the state and neither does the church.

One might argue that if a church trains its members to vote a certain way, they can wield significant influence, albeit indirectly. Similarly corporations have a great deal of indirect influence. True, there’s no formal, legal coupling, but perhaps there is merit to challenging concentrations of power, no matter how informal or indirect?

That can be said for literally any sort of organization of people

Church is different in that (as far as internal logic goes) adherence/non-adherence to their dictates involves a credible claim to the fate of your immortal soul. It's a little bit different from other book clubs.

That’s a pretty arbitrary distinction. The average union worker finds not being able to put food on the table an equally terrifying prospect as eternal damnation.

I don't know if that's self-evident, given that the average non-union worker votes quite often for the union-busters who promise to enshrine their sanctifying beliefs in law.

Church has much more members than other organizations.

In many countries, trade unions have more members than churches, and they donate, endorse, and directly outright tell their members who do vote for, unlike most churches, who do not donate, do not endorse, and in almost all cases, do not outright tell members who to vote for.

Are you referring to the Catholic church? Most religious organizations are relatively small and independent from one another.

But most Evangelical churches vote as a block.

LOL only if you group together every organized religion as "Church" and compare it to other, individual organizations.

Most organisations don't threaten you with eternal torture to coerce you though...

This is a little tricky. A church cannot voice a political opinion, if they want to keep their 501 tax exemption. They can voice their opinions (1st amendment) but they'd give up those specific tax exemptions and would need to move to a different charity type. (This is why the ACLU has two organizations, one you can donate to with tax exemption and the other you cannot because they lobby the government).

The way around this seems to be for politicians to voice religious opinions, which makes some things that churches say de facto political opinions.

Seems like it should be banned on their side too, but that's a bit thorny.

Exactly. A minister (etc) can certainly say "Dancing (or whatever) is a grave sin and so we must avoid it ourselves and work to keep it out of our community." Stuff like this is protected as Free (Religious) Exercise clause and it should be.

It may so happen that only one candidate vehemently opposes dancing, and as long as they don't make that connection out loud, it stays on the level.

Is there anything wrong with a church abandoning their 501 tax exemption and voicing a political opinion?

There isn't but unfortunately what has been happening lately is churches have been voicing political opinion and not losing their 501 tax exemption because the politicians they have been speaking in favor of protect them from losing their tax status.

Nothing wrong. They'd have to pay taxes. That would be a bummer for most organizations.

Check out the history of the influence of Evangelical Christianity on American politics starting in the 1980s. Church influencing state is a contemporary phenomenon.

Money is used to buy propaganda, churches have millennia old propaganda infrastructure financed by murder and pillage, and are mostly extremely wealthy.

Any interested individual or organization can fund political propaganda, but I certainly wouldn't say the state is coupled with BLM or the NRA.

It absolutely is, in the case of the latter. BLM no, or not yet, because they are not yet an entrenched reliable source of campaign funding.

Why not? Aren't all BLM donations going to the democrats?

Maybe a notable chunk, but I'd say more accurately "to anyone but the Republicans".

>now more than ever it feels like we need separation of corporation and state

What a weird meme to appear twice on this page.

Corporations don't exist as an entity except via the authorisation from government.

Separating corporation and state really means giving corporations autonomous powers. That's not the conclusion that you are hoping for.

You're willfully misinterpreting the GP.

"Separation of corporation of state" should be interpreted in the same light as separation of church and state - using the state to clearly define boundaries and avoid interference on the state from the church (or corporations), not to give them autonomous and unregulated powers.

Citizens United gives corporations leeway to spend as much as they want to help elect officials and influence citizens' electoral decisions, thus inverting the power structure and reinforcing the de facto oligarchy. To separate, we need to regulate.

> using the state to clearly define boundaries and avoid interference on the state from the church

There's also a clearly defined boundary where the church is immune from government influence.

So, if the government isn't allowed to regulate what churches preach, what's the equivalent for corporations? Not being allowed to regulate what they sell?

There is at least some regulation of what churches preach. Hate speech and incitements to violence can and has brought the attention of the FBI on various churches and sects. But I would say there's already a very similar light regulation on advertisements. Truth in advertising is a thing, but not much of one.

> There is at least some regulation of what churches preach. Hate speech and incitements to violence can and has brought the attention of the FBI on various churches and sects.

I'm a bit confused here. I think we're using the word regulation differently.

I don't tend to think of regulation as paying attention to people who do legal things that happen to correlate with doing illegal things. I don't particularly like this practice, but out of the many labels I could think of to apply to it, regulation isn't one of them.

I tend to think of regulation as making a specific behavior (or perhaps a specific way of doing something) illegal, especially if there are financial penalties applied to preforming said behavior.

Would you mind elaborating on what definition you were using here? I don't think I've ever run into this particular use of the word before.

Let's not be disingenuous. We know what he really means. Everyone wants to end the extreme influence and entanglement that corporations have over government officials and government processes.

And the government doesn't exist except via the authorization of the citizens, who own and work for corporations and run and belong to churches, which is why keeping these entities from influencing each other is a pipe dream.

Of course corporations can exist without a government, they predate the current system and the current type of governments.

In many ways they can't as it is the state that created the markets they operate in and it is the state who helps them maintain their monopolies.

>it is the state that created the markets

This is historically inaccurate.

The fact that the term "black market" exists is proof enough to demonstrate that claim.

That states have always tried their darndest (with varying degrees of success) to control markets to e.g. tax them is a better way of looking at things.

Black markets just operate on top of white markets, often using the same exact state-backed money. Hunter-gather groups and other social structures known to exist before states generally operated on gift economies. There's not really any anthropological evidence that markets existed prior to the formation of states. Read the first few chapters of Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber (RIP).

What I said is:

> it is the state that created the markets they operate in

There's many large corporations who are only still around because of the state, they wouldn't survive on the kind of market you're probably thinking of.

Without the state the big ones would turn into fiefdoms (and probably will anyway).

Markets form naturally from consensual interactions of goods and services for money.

I suppose you could argue the government creating the money allowed the market but alternatives currencies would be created like gold or now crypto.

Markets with particular rules that help keep monopolies in place don't form naturally. They require a state entity to enforce the rules.

Guess this means we should remove as many rules as possible to avoid monopolies.

Not at all, not conceptually and not historically.

You do realize there's many corporations today who only exist because of taxpayer bailouts or thanks to large government contracts, right?

There are humans that are being kept alive by medical machines, this doesn't mean humans can't live without machines.

> Corporations don't exist as an entity except via the authorisation from government.

Eliminate corporations from being legal entities. They shield employees from their illegal actions and provide a shield against lawsuits. Then we could avoid the extra litigation necessary for Peircing the corporate veil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

Lawyers saw that he was very rich so they predicted a decades long legal battle and made it happen. That's my guess.

I sometimes wonder if US prosecution of these "crimes" is more about attempting to drain the defendant of money through legal fees rather than trying to get any sort of conviction.

The way the US legal system works, a conviction is frequently only possible if a rich defendant is first drained of money.

This has nothing to do with innocence or guilt.

It is also a show of force intended to deter others from trying .

Its like the drug war- after the US went after Escobar and Noriega nothing changed. Someone will always step in to fill the void.