[FussyZeus]

Nice to see I'm not the only one who's tired of seeing this guy.

No, he wasn't technically responsible. Sure, his site complied with takedown requests to the extent they were required to and literally not one damn quarter inch further. Technically, technically, technically.

He also profited directly off of and made no secret about enabling people to skirt copyright laws. I agree they need a lot of work, but you don't get to break the law simply because you disagree with it.

[tristor]

The reason it matters is exactly what you said. MegaUpload did comply to the law and not one inch more, just like they were supposed to. Then the MPAA got the US government involved in what should have been a civil matter. That wasn’t enough so then the US government induced an allied government to execute a tactical raid on the guy’s house and seize his business assets including the servers containing customer data.

The outcome is that this has been strung out in court so long that companies like Google/YouTube far exceed what the law requires in bending over for the MPAA/RIAA mafia, leading to massive amounts of false copyright claims. The precedent set by MegaUpload was “it doesn’t matter if you follow the law, the MAFIAA is so powerful that the US will send men with guns after you no matter what corner of the Earth you reside in.”

[FussyZeus]

They violated the law, and assisted others in violating the law, openly, and defiantly.

When he was raided it was of no surprise to anyone who was paying attention, himself included. People like to paint this up as "this guy was just running his business in full compliance with the law and Big Government came in with their jackbooted thugs and took away his business" but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.

He was openly snubbing the Feds and MPAA, he was deliberately allowing and not even making face attempts to dissuede his users from uploading copyrighted material to share, and was quite aware and complicit of the whole thing, and wasn't one damn bit interested in stopping it because it was making him rich.

I'm just saying, if you want a martyr for people who got screwed by our Government because of overstepping authority, Dotcom is far, far, FAR from the best example of that. Dotcom is more a poster child for the old axiom, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

[tristor]

I'm not holding up the guy as a saint, but what happened to him was heinous. Whether you agree with his behavior or not, the fact men with guns were used to take enforcement action about US copyright law in New Zealand is a problem.

If I was going to write about someone I think is a much more admirable martyr for the insanity of US copyright laws I'd point to Aaron Schwartz, not Kim DotCom. But that's not what this conversation is about, and nothing I said was untrue.

[FussyZeus]

> I'm not holding up the guy as a saint, but what happened to him was expected.

He showed his ass to the feds for YEARS, not even in like a dignified and well articulated way like Snowden, in an open, flagrant "Fuck you and your laws" way.

And frankly, as broken as the US IP laws are, this whole "you can't enforce X country's law in Y country" is BS. In our ultra-connected global economy, especially in terms of tech companies, if you can skirt the laws of a nation by simply moving to another one, then we might as well have Anarchy and skip a few steps.

[thaumasiotes]

> his site complied with takedown requests to the extent they were required to and literally not one damn quarter inch further. Technically, technically, technically.

> you don't get to break the law simply because you disagree with it

I'm having a hard time seeing where complying with the law in full, but refusing to go above and beyond its demands, is supposed to be an inappropriate course of action when you disagree with it.