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.

disagree

So what? are you a record executive? why do you feel so strongly about this? what is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?

I don’t think this is an honest question and I’m not going to engage with it.

That's the mother of cop outs. It's an absolutely honest question.

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!