He didn't "share songs on the internet".

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.

> with complete privacy and anonymity

Great, sounds like a dream to avoid dirty hands of USA/China/UK/... regimes

> And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts.

MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony

"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.

> But I'll never defend a human trafficker either

Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate human trafficking?

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".

He shared a lot of them. Still absolutely not something that should lead to this multiple-state sanctioned response.

Agree, disproportionate response for sure. Still, flagrantly ignoring the law will get you in trouble.

> disproportionate response for sure

Let's just call it how it is: USA dictatorship. Just imagine the comments if China/Russia did this stuff

Getting in the way of powerful people getting more power is always punished more harshly than anything else, including murder.

In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.

Your comment appears to have been downvoted for being inconvenient, despite its truth.

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.

This is not about justice, this is about power.

As far as I remember, not only aware, but activly uploading warez themself (not officially).

> 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.

So? If that's a crime under NZ law he can be prosecuted there. If it isn't then too bad for the US.

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.

Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?

Megaupload had lots of grey/dark patterns, namely people could upload whatever but downloading anything big, each Downloader had to buy credits.

Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software

> Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?

Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.

Nah, he built a file sharing service and people paid for that.

MegaUpload was primarily funded by ads displayed on download pages, not the small number of people paying for storage.

Can you provide some source for the claim about the volume of sales MU had?

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.

Why does it matter?