The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor crimes will not get them in hot water because other people do worse but keep on the low down, but time and again you see these guys being made an example of, probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.
So I guess like, don't behave like an asshole generally, but specially if you're also committing crimes. Kinda like not breaking traffic laws if you have a dead body in the trunk.
I'd still be more likely to say the officer is making their situation worse. Take away the false dichotomy of loud and obnoxious vs calm and compliant and consider someone who doesn't answer irrelevant questions and is waiting for the officer to do their job (calm and not compliant). That person might have their situation worsened by the officer who thinks the person they're talking to is obligated to answer to the officer's whims.
(Based on what I've seen of police body camera footage.)
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with Kim Dotcom's case. It sounds like he's been more on the "loud and obnoxious" side and the authorities involved are not city response officers; it's hard to draw a parallel. Just pointing out that "you're just making it worse for yourself" is something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
> Something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
Yeah, probably right. But, also, yeah, easier sometimes to just appease the bully and move on with life.
I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our society that needs to be eradicated.
Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this composure the entire time.
Growing up or re-evaluating ideas you got when you were 14 is also not against the rules.
What are you doing to justify feeling like this? Is it just out of abundance of caution? When I interact with police it's usually for boring reasons - like I broke some petty law and they justifiably question me about it (and more often than not just let it slide, but they don't have to -after all they're just doing their job).
The tricky thing about a principled stand in favour of civil liberties is that you spend a lot of your time defending scoundrels, because it's their civil liberties that are most in danger from the mob and government. And once their rights go, yours are sure to follow.
[0] If you disagree, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi...
More likely because those people remain naïve about the real world. In a past career I had some interaction with IP enforcement lawyers. They were stuck in the past then and have not really evolved. Their understanding of "the internet" extends only to those things discoverable via google search. Megaupload was knocked down because it was so visible. Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA cannot see it.
How so? Google is a major distributor of most pirated material through YouTube and their search engine still makes finding stuff easy. I'd argue that p2p is nearly irrelevant nowadays and server-oriented distribution is the main model.
At that point, I had gotten really good at spotting counterfeits, so I really doubt we were selling any counterfeits, especially when they couldn't come up with a single instance. The publishing companies continue to do this because used books cut into their profits.
I just sent my lawyer after them and they never came back.
Amazon and the publishers eventually came to an agreement that there were certain textbooks they just won't allow to be sold as used on their platform.
My wife asked me last week to help her get a textbook in a format that could be viewed on a reMarkable tablet, which can read PDFs but won't work with arbitrary DRM schemes. I checked my options and found the publisher selling some DRM crap, and some clearly illegal sites selling DRM-free PDFs. Since I found plenty of people vouching that they'd received what they bought, I chose to (using a Privacy card number) willingly buy from the criminals, since they were the only ones willing to provide me what I needed: an unencrypted PDF that we can actually use on the device we want.
I know publishers are afraid someone will email the PDF to the whole class, so that's why college textbooks probably ought to be folded into tuition, that way (1) publishers can get paid for the correct number of copies and (2) someone who actually has to pay the money (the school) is somewhat in the loop on textbook selection. It's broken now since those actually paying (students) have no say in book selection.
I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the consequences, then there is no rule."
E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket, so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)
> [1] On August 4, 2017, the trial jury found Shkreli guilty on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty on five other counts which included wire fraud.
Granted, the case started in 2015 probably in response to him hiking the prices in 2014 but the thing he was being an edge lord about isn't what directly did him in. However, Capone didn't go to prison for murder either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Criminal_convic...
You're referring to Megaupload, which is entirely different despite the name similarity.
MegaUpload existed as a file hosting service. It was widely used by pirates, and MegaUpload earned a lot of money off of hosting pirated files because users would buy subscriptions to MegaUpload specifically because of the pirated content that they could download, without the limitations that are placed on the users of the free tier.
With a paid subscription you got:
- Multiple parallel downloads
- Much faster speed
- No waiting time between downloads
A similar service was RapidShare, also popular with pirates.
Pirate sites would typically split downloads into multiple parts due to restrictions on upload size on MegaUpload, RapidShare and other file hosts like that. They would then upload these parts to MegaUpload and RapidShare and one or two other file hosts so that:
- If files were taken down from one host they might remain available for a bit more time from one of the other hosts
- Free users could speed up download times by simultaneously downloading the different part files from different hosts. So you’d start a download for part 1 from MegaUpload, part 2 from RapidShare and part 3 from some other host. Then you’d occasionally check on the slow progress and the countdowns from each sites before they allowed you to download another part, and continuing downloading parts from each as soon as they allowed you to again after you finished downloading a previous part from them.
The connection to Mega is that after MegaUpload was shut down, they started Mega and they made it so that all uploaded files were encrypted client side during upload and the URL contains a fragment with the encryption key so that it’s decrypted client side and the key is not shared with the server (unless of course the JS served by the server is modified to explicitly send the key to them either during upload or download).
This solved a problem for the pirates and it solved a problem for Mega.
Previously when a file was taken down, the host would usually make note of the hash of the file that was taken down and not allow that file to be uploaded and shared again.
Now, with encryption users could reupload the exact same parts without having to do anything on their end. And the users downloading did not have to do any extra steps either on their end either.
This benefits the pirates greatly. When you’ve spent 3 days downloading a bunch of part files and suddenly the remaining parts are all taken down and their hashes banned it sucked to be a pirate. But with this automatic encryption the same parts could be reuploaded and new links could be posted to pirate forums and the users could pick right up again where they were in the progress of downloading all the parts.
Less work for users uploading. Less work for users downloading. Happier users. More paying customers.
And in addition to more money, Mega also have less work to do as now when someone argues that they should police the uploads better they can point to the files all being encrypted and then not having the keys to decrypt the files there is no way that they actually can inspect the files they are storing for their users. (Again unless they modify the JS they serve to their users so that they intentionally send the key to the server.)
Of course, encryption benefits everyone. Not just pirates.
But at least to me it appeared strongly that the main motivation for building Mega and having it use this client side automatic encryption and decryption was very specifically because of the experience they had with takedown requests for intellectual property hosted on MegaUpload. It’s a neat way to cater to the pirates and encourages them to become paying customers of Mega.
One of the complaints the US case had was that MegaUpload specifically did not do this. They de-duplicated uploads by hash internally, but when one download URL was DMCA'd, they only disabled that one URL and left other URLs with the same hash accessible.
I still find it surprising that so many people use Mega (at least enough that it can stay in business) when BitTorrent can easily saturate a downlink and is free.
It's up to the courts and to them to decide. Perhaps they are doing it already, but just keeping it low-profile, so the "real" dangerous people get attracted to the service and caught.
Like VPNs.
Magnet links are also hashes, so when you retrieve torrent metadata from your peers from a magnet link that data will also be verified for integrity.
However, if the original torrent itself was made from malicious data then it’s still gonna result in malicious code on your system.
Interestingly though, it is probably far more likely that a torrent with a very low number of seeders is malicious, than that a popular torrent contains malicious data in the files you download.
I suppose it could still be possible that the malicious code sent by a peer was targeting a weakness in your torrent client itself though. And that they could get remote code execution on your computer that way.
The main thing I would worry about with torrents is that your IP could be seen in the swarm by one of the companies that monitor torrent peers on behalf of rights holders and send you a nasty demand for money and threats of legal action.
If you are connected to a server, the server is the only connection(and only one with a log) but with a torrent, there are multiple connections so multiple parties could be keeping logs.
Depending on how a file is split in the torrent, it could be possible to add malice data with a collision: https://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/
I'd say it would be a a reasonable perspective if his case was being tried where the offences actually took place and/or where he was a citizen of and not a country who refuses to give the same rights to non-citizens being tried there compared to citizens[1] and wasn't even where the offense took place. This is absolutely chilling for anyone who isn't an US citizen honestly.
An applicable case would be someone being extradited from the US to the UK to be tried for a crime that happened while they were in a different country.
DotCom is not a NZ citizen, he's a resident.
Considering the number of countries that extradite their own citizens, the bar for "selling out" and "mockery" must be quite low.
And most extradited people don't have the luxury of being able to delay their trial by 12 years.
No. What I said was that this is a mockery of jurisdiction. I seem to recall that DotCom lived in South Korea when what he's being accused of happened. Whether he's a citizen of NZ or not, this is a joke. The US has no legal right to demand his extradition just because the servers were in the US. It's just using political power to get its way. Like I said in a different sub-thread, what, it now has jurisdiction over the entire planet and can require anyone anywhere to follow its laws?
The general rule is that a crime takes place where the victim stands. Where the perpetrator stand is a potential secondary location. The alleged victims here were "standing" in the US and so the US is proceeding with the case.
Trials in a third location are extraordinarily rare. Only things like the ICC or some admiralty proceedings involve trials in a third location.
I also think it's odd to talk about this being the "general rule" when there's plenty of crimes/infractions with no victim.
May be worth to compare the usual tactics of IP owning companies to what happened to Kim. I have a feeling that it could be shown that the kind of treatment he got was not very probable for a normal piracy case, even after accounting for his eccentric behabiour.
ALSO politically he was a failure but not so much that it was not worth paying attention to him as challenger of establishment. Even those normally ignorant of related topics but active in politics may have seen him as an agent eating their votes.
Megaupload was founded in 2005 and Spotify was founded in 2006, so it's unlikely that being too early was a factor.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/spotify-finally-launche...
He was not early or anything he was literally pushing pirated movies and TV shows
They even paid people to upload high demand popular copyrighted files. They crossed a number of lines that other companies of the era didn’t dare cross.
As far as equating Kim Dotcom to Assange and Snowden, if it isn’t clear by now that Assange and especially Snowden are Russian assets by now idk how to convince you. Like, Snowden tried to travel to Ecuador via Moscow and Hong Kong? Coincidentally just stopping by at the number one and number two intelligence agency adversaries of the United States? He could have just flown from Miami to Ecuador directly. Why didn’t his original plan involve flying to South America? It’s so obviously suspect in retrospect.
But Kim Dotcom isn’t a political retribution target on that same level anyway, he’s just an egotistical idiot who thought he could play with law enforcement and get away with running a for-profit piracy website.
The one thing Kim has in common with Assange and Snowden is that he could have avoided a decade of self-imposed house arrest and/or exile by facing justice in court and taking the L. But Kim is attached to his ideals so much that it he’s wasted a good chunk of his life with this issue hanging over him, all because he doesn’t want to give in to the pragmatic reality that he brought upon himself.
Every social media allows image uploads and no one thinks about that but images online are constantly breaking copyright law.
except they did a bad job by replacing tracks that sounded similar and then deleting the original.
From the beginning, Kim's company put itself front and center in the piracy world. It was advertised as an alternative to BitTorrent and you were meant to share links with others.
When licensors and eventually authorities asked him to stop, he laughed at them and doubled down.
He's played the pirate the whole time, and he's hated authority and venture capital and IP every step of the way.
There's a reason he would up where he is versus the other IP grey area companies and products that became wildly successful. He deliberately chose this path.
Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.
Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.
Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.
Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.
Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
I believe that's incorrect. See Plex Pass, and Plex shares are a common form of sharing pirated content.
Of course not, but they had no moderation for a long time so that that's what people were using it for. At that scale it's not an oversight, it's a customer acquisition strategy.
Once they hit critical mass they killed the feature as one would expect before negotiating lucrative deals with distributors via Google Play Music and eventually Youtube Music.
I think the line is very blurry, the only difference is one side is doing it very quietly and strategically, while the other was blustering their way through.
In a way that makes it much easier to argue against the idea that IP protects creators and not their pimps.
That's the killer, right there.
"existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been ignored by tech bros for a long time.
As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse).
If we take that away, guess what happens?
No one wants to do it, anymore.
This may be an issue, with AI-generated creative content. Unless the AI is truly better than human talent (and "better" is in the eye of the beholder), it has the very real prospect of turning the commercial creative industry into gray goo.
[EDITED TO ADD] Watching the karma count on this post, yo-yoing up and down, has been fascinating. This seems to be an issue that people have very strong feelings about.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country.
People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?"
I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill.
We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
Actually, that's what I do, these days. Take a gander at my work. It's not exactly "Hobby grade" stuff, but I don't make a dime from it.
I'm grateful for the many years of being a professional, that helped make it possible for me to do it creatively, these days.
This transaction does not need IP protection at all.
That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career.
I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes.
Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products.
I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count.
So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different?
I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.
I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported.
Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.
In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales.
I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop.
This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers.
The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a pirated game, is a lost sale.
A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.
AutoCAD, in particular, used to be[1] super smart about this and went out of their way to get their toolchain in front of high-schoolers (even back when that involved pricy copy-protection solutions like physical dongles).
[1] Not to imply they are no longer super-smart about it; I just no longer have clear signal.
I pirated every single game I have ever bought first, with the exception of games that had Demos. If it's a Denuvo game, I refuse to ever buy it (especially since the pirated version is guaranteed to be a better experience).
What leads to lost sales in the video game world (at least if we look at people like myself) is making bad games, whether it be horrible optimization issues, bloated spyware like Denuvo, broken/buggy games etc.
Like Gaben said, people have no problems with paying for stuff, it just has to be high quality and reliable, and most modern games are neither for the most part.
You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.
But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to).
Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.
It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
In fact, if you look at the behavior of many tech company legal teams, that seems more like what tech corporations do, than individual creatives.
This is the stuff I did in the 1980s, when I was considering making a living at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry
The jury's still out on that.
The music industry can't hold a candle to some of the raw destruction that has been wrought by tech.
It's just balanced by a lot of good (and making tech billionaires isn't really what I consider "good").
Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.
To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties.
Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same.
As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.
[0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent
[1] Fascism with extra steps
[2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.
Something tells me the extradition orders only work one way — if the US Government wants it.
Who knows. To be fair it took years and seems to have been given due process. But how much of it is “leaning on” the countries? Recently on his X interview with Musk, Trump bragged about “how quickly” he was able to use US leverage to extradite people they wanted, from LATAM countries! And everyone was like “right on!”
I also don't think you can be held responsible for what your users do with your service, especially if you are complying with DMCA requests.
They're shooting the postal service just because it bothered some powerful people.
This is happening because Media is a powerful lobby in the USA and Mega is a nobody.
Just another example of government corruption, move along.
A road paver is a great thing to have, but if I rip a three-lane highway through my neighbor's back yard, you can be damn sure someone's going to try and stop me.
I’d argue Kim was too successful and too unlikeable at the end of the day, and that was probably his downfall. Toward the end, MEGA had transitioned to actually partnering with hip hop artists for distribution.
The US has a long history of IP rights holders criminalizing new business models / protecting current models in law, and then a fair amount shaking down and sorting out happening as new technology hits the scene, going back to radio. Each of these waves has led to push / pull between distributors, retailers, artists and song writers, and whether or not you like it, that’s the system we have today.
MEGA was too early and too tainted (and run by an aggressively weird / antagonistic dude) to become Spotify. But, it wasn’t the wrong model using tech of the time. It was too early, and too successful, without cutting in the existing rights holders properly.