Fair point.

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Megaupload Takedown: The Real Meaning


Submitted by George Washington on 01/21/2012 14:28 -0500

The Feds’ takedown of Megaupload shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation is wholly unnecessary. As the Atlantic’s Dashiell Bennett correctly notes:

The shutdown inadvertently proved that the U.S. government already has all the power it needs to take down its copyright villains, even those that aren’t based in the United States. No SOPA or PIPA required.

Indeed, that might be why SOPA’s chief sponsor – who said he’d still push SOPA even after Wednesday’s web blackout – backed down right right after megaupload was taken down. (Granted, it could have also been because Anonymous’ hacking spree showed that draconian legislation won’t stop techies, or because of increased political pressure from other areas.)
WHY THE TAKE DOWN OF MEGAUPLOAD WAS WRONG

Every day, criminals use storage lockers to stash drugs, stolen jewelry, etc. When the Feds raid, they seize the ill-gotten loot, and throw the criminals in jail … as they should.
They don’t shut down the entire storage company, or the train station where the locker is located. We can all agree that that would be absurd.
But the Feds say that Megaupload was basically a criminal enterprise, focused on illegal conduct. In other words, their response to the storage company analogy will be that the storage company gave money to people who stored dope or stolen property there, and that the whole thing was a criminal enterprise. (The Feds also point out that a grand jury found that Megaupload probably did bad stuff.)
I don’t know enough about Megaupload to know whether or not that is true. Numerous top entertainment celebrities endorsed Megaupload (major stars like Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas sung Megaupload’s praises)… so it’s not like the entire business was criminal. On the other hand, some people accuse Megaupload’s founder as being a serial criminal.
But the take down of Megaupload was wrong. It should have gone through the normal court process, and a judge should have ruled on the site before anything was done to kill the business. This is especially true because the. countries involved are signatories to international copyright and extradition treaties, not “rogue” nations.
It should be the courts which examine the evidence and determine whether the business used a criminal business model, or was mainly a legitimate business. Whatever happened to due process of law?
IN THE “REAL” WORLD, PEOPLE WOULD GET THEIR PROPERTY BACK

Even if the criminal company analogy is accurate, the honest customers of a storage company would normally get their property back. They wouldn’t say “60 percent of the customers are crooks, Mrs. Jones, so we threw away your priceless family heirlooms, too.”
Indeed, if it were easy for the Feds to arrest the criminal owners of the company and to give people notice that they could pick up their property, they would probably do so, and give a specific timeframe to pick it up.
The Feds would not shut down the storage company and throw out all of the property stored there by honest people.
As Ernesto at TorrentFreak writes:

Do the feds realize that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections and much more?

What will happen to these personal non-infringing files?

People are outraged on Twitter and are demanding access to their files immediately.

By mindlessly shutting down the site, the Feds have made a very stupid move, indeed.

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"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

Kim Dotcom 'scared hell out' of neighbours with bizarre email | Technology | The Guardian

Quote:

Kim Dotcom, the internet mogul charged with earning more than £100m in illegal profits through the file-sharing website Megaupload.com, sent an extraordinary email to his worried neighbours in an affluent New Zealand suburb in which he joked about having criminal links, laundering money and taking cocaine. The 38-year-old German sent the note, seen exclusively by the Guardian, after neighbours of his NZ$30m (£15.6m) leased property in Coatesville, near Auckland, were piqued by seeing his fleet of cars speeding round the neighbourhood bearing licence plates such as HACKER, MAFIA, GUILTY and GOD. They researched his past, which includes a criminal conviction for insider dealing, and sent their concerns to the owner of the mansion, who in turn sent them to Dotcom. That prompted a remarkable reply-all from the multimilionaire, who is currently being held in a New Zealand jail awaiting the outcome of an application for bail after police arrested him on Saturday, having cut him out of a locked panic room in his mansion. "Dear Neighborhood-watch," began the email dated 21 April 2010. "As you all know I recently moved into the Neighborhood and I am a former hacker. Well I was just hacking into a local mail server and guess what I found. "First of all let me assure you that having a criminal Neighbor like me comes with benefits. "1. Our newly opened local money laundering facility can help you with your tax fraud optimization. 2. Our network of international insiders can provide you with valuable stock tips. 3. My close personal relations with other (far worse) criminals can help you whenever you have to deal with a nasty Neighbor." It continued: "In all seriousness: My wife, two kids and myself love New Zealand and 'We come in peace'. "Fifteen years ago I was a hacker and 10 years ago I was convicted for insider trading. Hardly the kind of crimes you need to start a witch hunt for. Since then I have been a good boy, my criminal records have been cleared, and I created a successful Internet company that employs 100+ people. "All the media has to report are old news. Why? Because I have chosen to avoid the media. Just look what the media did to this Neighborhood. Scary. "Now you can make a choice: 1: Call Interpol, the CIA, and the Queen of England and try to get me on the next plane out of New Zealand. 2: Sit back, relax and give me a chance to do good for New Zealand and possibly the Neighborhood. "If you feel like it come over for coffee sometimes. And don't forget to bring the cocaine (joke). All the best, Kim." However jocular the intention, Dotcom's email "scared the hell out of everybody", said France Komoroske, a retired lawyer who lives a mile along the street from Dotcom's estate. When asked if he was serious about hacking their email accounts, he replied: "Do you really think I hacked your emails? Nonsense. One of my agents has infiltrated your family :-)." Komoroske and a neighbour researched the new arrival's chequered past, the basis of which, she said, made a mockery of the decision to award him residency in New Zealand. "New Zealand doesn't seem to care about moral character if you've got enough bucks," she said. Dotcom has lived a well-documented lavish lifestyle and in 2010, the FBI estimates, he earned around $115,000 (£73,800) a day from his empire. In the past he has videoed his adventures with a large entourage on Mediterranean yachts, in Monaco nightclubs and on the beach at St Tropez, in which he almost always appears wearing a black suit and polo neck sweater over his 6ft 6in, 20-stone frame. On 19 January Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, was charged in a US court with racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering and the FBI claims he and a group of co-conspirators caused $500m of harm to copyright holders. The US authorities are seeking his extradition. Dotcom denied the charges at a court hearing on Monday. His lawyer, Paul Davison, said Dotcom's business did not reproduce or copy material as alleged and that copyright holders had been given access to the site to identify improper posting of material.

He must be a very determined chap. I'd have taken one look at the reactions, concluded that I'd accidentally moved to Moronville, and got out ASAP. New Zealanders have always been famous for their close relationship with their livestock; it'd never occurred to me before reading this that the unions might have produced progeny.

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Well, he does look a bit like "KingPin" in Daredevil...



versus

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The Best Worst Photos of Megaupload's Kim Dotcom

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Kim Dotcom, self-styled mega-millionaire of the internet who now faces charges of massive online piracy, poses like a barking sealion showing off his yacht and his woman. Model Janina Youssefian lies in the foam at his feet. Over the pearly green water, a highly expensive nautical commodity floats under the soft blue sky.

The king of this paradise has rolled up his black trousers so he can pose shin-deep in the frothing sea. He slopes one open palm towards Youssefian, while his other hand gestures towards the boat. The dark mass of his body makes no attempt to fit into the sunny scene. On the contrary, Kim Dotcom revels in the clumsy pose he strikes and the absurdity of his fully dressed bulk in the water.

King of the computer geeks was the image that Dotcom, aka Kimble, aka Kim Jim Tim Vestor, aka plain old Kim Schimtz, flamboyantly cultivated. His current name is an allusion to his participation as a teenager and in his early twenties in the original dotcom boom. Pictures like this were essential to his self-presentation. In fact, the lurid, hilarious image he presents here is a deliberate attempt to dramatise his wealth in order to attract investors – did he even own the yacht?

This picture is about money. It is a crudely enthusiastic but basically very typical male way of imaging what it is like to be very rich. There's the model. There's the yacht. And there's the fat bloke who can have them because he is rich. Kim Dotcom's idea of money is not that different from every tycoon who ever posed with a phallic cigar. He's just gone straight to the key points and made them with bullish clarity. The model, the beach, the yacht, what more is there to say?

Kim Dotcom is now in custody in New Zealand, waiting for an extradition hearing on US online piracy charges, because of his business Megaupload.com . This file-sharing site is accused of copyright theft on a huge scale. Dotcom is the face that the anti-piracy lobby in the US needs. So soon after protests by sites including Wikipedia stalled attempts to legislate to protect the copyrights of Hollywood and the music industry, his arrest provides the entertainment corporations with a great negative image of the archetypal, alleged internet pirate: brash and vulgar and ludicrous. Dotcom himself has assiduously cultivated, in images like this, a robustly amoral appearance.

So is the man in this picture a hero? Is he a piratical martyr of internet freedom, latest scapegoat in the content providers' war against the information sharers?

I can't get behind that idea at all. Rather he looks in this picture like the man who believed the internet was money. The myth of wealth and gratification he flaunts in this portrait was largely fantasy when he started out. In the crazy mood of the dotcom bubble days, he tried various criminal and semi-criminal ways to make a fortune (he was convicted of computer fraud and insider trading) while simultaneously projecting the image of crass wealth seen here. It is as if he believed, more than anyone else believed, in computer skills as a source of wealth and pursued this dream relentlessly until, with Megaupload and what the FBI alleges is its involvement in piracy, he found a way to achieve his fantasy, and get rich on the internet.

Nearly a quarter of all online activity around the world involves the consumption of pirated material. Draconian attempts to legislate against this may have been defeated for now, but defenders of internet freedom need to explain what they would do to filter out this criminal side of electronic life. From one point of view this is about freedom versus corporate power: but the line that all film and music companies are so evil they deserve to be pirated is as adolescent as Kim Dotcom's swagger. Even the term "content provider" is insidiously damaging, as if when someone writes a song or makes a film all they are doing is generating "content" like programmed components rather than human creators. So from one point of view it is about freedom versus control, but from another point of view it is about consumers teaming up with criminals to make fools of people who create things.

And since I am pretty determined here to prove that like proponents of Sopa I "don't understand the internet", can I also wonder about something more intangible? The rise of online culture is historically contemporary with what we now know to be a gargantuan crisis in the modern economy. An unprecedented credit boom was followed by a collapse of faith and a belief there is no longer any money anywhere.

Take a look at this picture. Has Kim Dotcom got it all?

Not literally, of course. But could it be that economists exhausted by their efforts to explain what on earth is happening to us ought to take the internet into account? This vast culture of free stuff, this virtual life, this new dimension of existence in which one of the surest ways to actually make money appears to be copyright theft – has it perhaps in some hard-to-define way contributed to the paralysis of western economic growth?

Just wondering. Like I say, I don't understand the internet. But Kim Dotcom did. And in this picture he's got it all.

The model, the yacht, the fat bloke ? Kim Dotcom understands the internet | Jonathan Jones | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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I really don't understand who ordinary, sane people who understand the market economy in other circumstance suddenly go all gooey when it comes to artistic products. There's no universal moral law saying that if you make something creative you'll get money from it. Van Gogh didn't have two centimes to rub together, while Salvador Dali was a millionnaire; it was due to supply and demand, not because that was what was right.

The reply to this is always "yeah, but if creative products are free no one'll make them any more". Well yeah. That's life. Suck it up.

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Word on the street is the UFC is next... for hax0rz that is.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

I really don't understand who ordinary, sane people who understand the market economy in other circumstance suddenly go all gooey when it comes to artistic products. There's no universal moral law saying that if you make something creative you'll get money from it. Van Gogh didn't have two centimes to rub together, while Salvador Dali was a millionnaire; it was due to supply and demand, not because that was what was right. The reply to this is always "yeah, but if creative products are free no one'll make them any more". Well yeah. That's life. Suck it up.

I am not sure this makes sense. Of course, art/creative stuff is subject to a market (subsidised as it may be). The issue with piracy isn't that there is no market price, it's that some people find it too high.

While some people will always be free riders and try to get things for zero, if you could get books and movies and music for one or two pounds/dollars/euros [or practice an 'honesty basket' and let people pay whatever they feel like, with some vague guidelines but after they have 'consumed' the product at least once] , I think a majority of people would be okay with that level of pricing.

The artists would still get remunerated. And thus still be incentivised to produce. The middle men, otoh, don't like anything remotely like that model as it destroys them.

That's it. No one denies supply and demand matters. Except French subsidized art forms.

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And so it goes...

UFC president hacked after scrapping with Anonymous

But the Ultimate Fighting Championship president may have second thoughts about mixing it up with members of the hacker collective Anonymous on Thursday night on Twitter, where he was on the receiving end of a brutal punch.

White's personal information, including his Social Security number, cellphone number and address, was published online just moments after the exchange, in which he defended his company's support of the controversial -- and now-shelved -- Stop Online Piracy Act.

The UFC's website was also hacked for the second time in a week.

The mixed-martial-arts promoter's parent company was a supporter of SOPA, which was intended to crack down on digital piracy. The company, Zuffa, says many of its fights are posted illegally online, either for free or with the pirate sites selling advertising on them.

The back-and-forth kicked off shortly after 9 p.m. when one of the more popular Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous called out White -- an avid Twitter user -- for comments he made in a recent interview.

After UFC's site was briefly hacked last weekend (traffic was redirected to a site associated with Anonymous) White called the Internet "a place where cowards live" and compared hackers to terrorists.

"The way this whole thing has gone down, them hacking our site is the best thing they ever could have done for us. Because what that does is, now, you look like terrorists and now a lot of people who were afraid of you now hate you," White told Ariel Helwani of MMA Fighting. "Is this bill perfect? No. No bill is perfect. I think this thing started off with the right idea. Stealing is stealing ... . It's not right and there's something that needs to be worked out."

He wrapped up with a UFC-style challenge.

"I'm not afraid of you," White said. "You don't scare me. Do it again. I don't care."

Of course, they did.

"Ahoy @danawhite - what do you have against the Internet? We're just curious, as we were quite surprised at the harsh tone of your comments," wrote the people behind the Twitter feed @YourAnonNews.

White responded: "I love the Internet. It helped us grow our biz. Stealing is stealing! And hacking into people's s--- is terrorism."

What followed was a sometimes profane back and forth with White defending his company's stance and Anonymous members or sympathizers either lobbing attacks or defending their own group's efforts, which have included attacking Mexican drug cartels and oppressive governments.

"If you guys want to change the world good for you!" White wrote. "Just don't steal my s---."

He argued that his fighters suffer financially when UFC money is siphoned away and cited the company's own "outsider" pedigree, noting that mixed martial arts were banned in many states before gaining widespread recognition. Between live bouts, pay-per-view sales, video games and other products, the UFC is now a billion-dollar industry.

For a brief moment Thursday, it looked like everyone would walk away happy.

"Why don't you read thru our dialogue with him. It was actually quite pleasant and civil...no s--- talking that we can see!" the YourAnonNews account tweeted to another Twitter user.

But minutes later, someone posted a document on the site Pastebin showing what appears to be White's Social Security number, cellphone number, address, legal cases and other information -- including his wife's name. (A later, edited version removed family information).

The UFC site also was hacked again, with Anonymous logos briefly appearing on its main page.

White did not mention either hack on his Twitter feed Friday morning, having moved on to promoting a fight card set for Saturday night.

Anonymous, of course, wasn't so quiet.

"We wonder if @danawhite will ask #Anonymous to hack him again tomorrow," YourAnonNews wrote.

UFC president hacked after scrapping with Anonymous - CNN.com

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