Unrelated, but you should never expect HN's "hacker" ethos to prevail beyond basic profitability or circumstantial relevance. The users on this site are by-and-large studied capitalists that will try to reroute blame or responsibility away from private interests. They are not "hackers" in anything but name, and only when their daring-do makes them attractive to investors.

You gotta use other sites if you prefer the company of ideologues with a backbone. Apologists and sycophants will outnumber you 10:1, here.

The problem is that government doesn’t have a line, that line is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).

Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses is a fool’s errand. Copyright holders, the government, and powerful interests are entities that have no problem playing dirty.

You know how nuts that sounds to me as a mathematician?!

1s and 0s can be sending bitcoin to a hit man to kill your wife. In this case, link to harm is indeed obvious, and evil and years in jail are justified. Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?

I don't know if theres a correlation between evil and jailtime. The debate around the severity of punishment is different than the debate about whether or not something should be illegal. I do think my (US) justice system is very flawed, especially around sentencing.

> Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?

I can take a stab at it. Simulated CSAM :

* if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.

* has the potential to normalize the distribution of CSAM due to #1

* has the potential to normalize the consumption of CSAM.

To address the comments being birthed around unproven causal relationships- yeah I know. The parent asked for arguments. Besides, a study into this doesn't seem very ethical or possible.

I am not able to discount the "ick factor", but I'll try to make a counterpoint.

All of the arguments I can think of to the contrary center around free speech, false positives and weaponization. That's where I think the challenges are and where subjectivity can cause issues. Without a real person, it's difficult to assign a simulated age unless a prompt is captured or other context. Otherwise it becomes the job of a person or other 'AI' to guess the simulated age of the image.

Yes, but at the same time it'll greatly devaluate the real CSAM. It'll be like flooding the black market of perfect copies of rhinoceros horns. People won't have any economic incentive to create real CSAM.

I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.

That statement is carrying a lot of non-evidence with it.

Say my fetish is chocolate. If I ask an image generating AI to give me a photo of an adult made of chocolate and covered in sprinkles, that doesn't necessarily mean it was trained on that specific thing.

For a more than just relevant part of people who would play with weights on a model to create anything that compensates for "child abuse" with "fake child abuse", the risk of lowering the threshold is extremely high. VR, AR, fake news and the scripted nature of some world events that are driven by common subgoals of interest groups are decrementing the opaqueness of the line between reality and delusion/illusion. Loss of reality & dissociation from humanity are things, especially among people with a fanbase & influence, money, power.

Games & TV and their influence are obvious and they do erode the threshold as well but it's reversible because the player is not the creator of his reality while with gen ai, prompts & weights, the player becomes more and more capable of simulating his own reality based on his derived preferences & idiosyncrasies. Games and TV have constraints that are set by the devs and show runners and all the crews involved in the process. Gen AI doesn't have that.

I've watched my own three children learn to talk, then to write. The human mind is also trained on inputs.

What's crazy is that my library contains naked photos of ME as a toddler (I scanned a bunch of old slides in a few years ago) and I have to of course wonder if that is going to get flagged. (My parents were German immigrants. Germans DNGAF about human nudity, unlike the puritanical Americans.)

There's a cost to automating this. You might say "well a human can tell" but humans don't scale.

Regarding the evaluation of everything else, I find it useful to ask what the concrete demonstrable harm is that has been done. Not the hypothetical harm, mind you. So for automatic generation of self-indulgent pornographic material (or for example things that are not even possible in reality such as... hentai?), I don't see an issue unless it is acted upon and demonstrably harms someone or violates consent (harm caused by creating a court case should not count towards this since that is circular reasoning). Most people who are only attracted to adults have fapped to content that is something they would never do in reality; I don't think it's a strong argument that the mere possibility that that might occur is enough to ban it.

At which point is the boundary between meme and instigator?

I too would love to know the story behind that claim because, having lived in the UK for a good number of years, I’d guarantee there would be more going on than simply just what the GP suggested.

UK law does not prohibit memes. It prohibits incitement to riot, as does US law. It prohibits incitement to murder, as does US law. In fact, these acts are illegal in almost every democracy in the World, even the most progressive and liberal ones, because they are reasonable statutes to extend common law (protecting people and their property from damage by others).

In recent weeks, a young man born in Wales to Rwandan-born Christian migrant parents, diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, stabbed three 6-year old girls to death at a dance class. He attempted to murder the other children in the class, and the adults who intervened.

The "illegal memes" as you put it, were that he was a foreign-born Muslim who had entered the country illegally (all aspect of this narrative are false), and that people should riot to show their displeasure, and kill Muslim migrants to "save our children".

Seeing these "facts", mobs rioted in multiple towns over the course of a week, injured multiple (unarmed) police officers, caused tens of millions of pounds in damage to private property, and attempted to burn down a hotel with 200+ migrants (including children), staying in it, while many people of colour were individually attacked, their shops looted, their homes and cars damaged, and so on.

Arresting and charging the people who did these things is an obvious priority.

Arresting and charging the people who spread misinformation (I believe it was actually disinformation - purposeful, intentful lies), and suggesting that riots and murder should take place, are just as guilty of incitement in the UK as they would be anywhere else in the World.

The internet is not a fantasy land. What you post has real World consequences. If you get together in a private forum and plan to kidnap, rape and kill a celebrity (a case also tried in the UK recently), that's not "online meme banter", that's conspiracy to kidnap, rape and murder. You're going to prison, you're a threat to public safety.

The lines you say the government don't have, they're there. They're called "laws". Some of them are arguably unjust - I've campaigned against some IP law extensions in the past, including the introduction of software patents in the EU (when the UK was still a member), and think RIPA was a tragedy of law making - but to say that laws are irrelevant and action is defined only by the resistance a government faces is absurdly cynical, naive, and simply not true.

Your last sentence leads to an obvious question: what do you think people should do instead of "sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses"? Do you think inciting riots and murder are the way to go?

Migration of all forms is at a record high in the UK [0], yet violent crime is at an all-time low. How is violent crime correlated to migration, as so many people claim on Twitter, WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages?

"What about the money we spend on them?", some ask. Well, contrary to popular belief, asylum seekers don't get mainstream benefits [1] and legal migrants aren't entitled to public funds until they have been granted indefinite leave to remain [2]. NHS costs need to be paid for either through the IHS scheme, or directly at 150% of cost [3]

"Oh, employed are they? Taking jobs off locals, are they?", the pub bore starts to snort. Well, no. Nobody really wants to spend 12 hours a day running a corner shop, or working in a field picking sprouts on minimum wage, which is why there are record levels of job vacancies in the UK right now. [4]

I'll ask again then, where are the previous drops? Migration does not cause increases in crime by any measure, the only costs incurred are caused by delays in processing, they're not "taking anybody's else's job" and overall migration leads to higher tax incomes, and they pay their way for services through taxes on jobs no local wants.

So please, spell it out for me. I'm really curious about those previous drops. I suspect that you may have been lied to.

[0] https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2193-9039-...

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

[2] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...

[3] https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...

[4] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

Yes, people are frustrated about many things in the UK (lack of affordable housing, dentists, decent jobs etc). But a most of these things are down to austerity, poor governance and the greed of the ruling classes. They aren't caused by relatively tiny numbers (29,437 in 2023) of desperate people coming across the channel in small boats. They are just a convenient scapegoat.

Since when? Some people keep local copies of their media. Censorship and arbitrary license disputes can have streaming content snatched away at any moment.

Tell me a legal streaming service that I can use while swimming and I'd consider using it.

Until then, I'll stick to my MP3.

But really, how often are people offline? For me it's only when I'm on a flight, and I can prepare for that by using spotify or youtube and pressing the download button on a playlist.

I am when I am hiking, camping, or have poor reception like in my apartment complex. There are vast swathes of the globe that do not have connectivity at all.

Also, worth considering the online service could change its offering or die at any time. Songs I like are routinely removed from various online platforms, and it enrages me every time.

No, you make tools which are easily copied and spread which disempower states and groups and instead empower individuals to act unimpeded. You make tools which make it impossible to enforce copyright or any other state imperative because everybody has the tools needed to neutralize the group attempting to use force.

The correct answer is to formulate software and memes (human software) which act as viruses which infect the local carriers of the overall social operating system (in America it is some flavor of American Westernism), turning the original operating system non-functional (Bezmenov's demoralization), and steamroll the reigning technocratic elite off top the tiger and install yourselves, or your StateDAO, or whatever.

When the system is going to take at least a decade, that should be treated as a pending life sentence or execution, and I admire anyone who fights it to the death even. Just don't go in, get housed in concrete, work for $0.68/hour they deduct 75% for housing from and then sell you bricks of Ramen for $1, while dodging shivs from behind. At that point it is too late to act to defend yourself!

You need a year of this treatment if you disagree with me!

> Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?

Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?

Comparing Kim Dotcom to Snowden or even Assange feels gross. He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.

You can re-read the first line of my comment if you think I'm putting those two things on the same level, and you will see that I agree with:

> He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.

It is like posting “You have interesting thoughts about Kim Dotcom. What is better, paragliding or parasailing?”

Am I the only one that didn't read either that way? I think a lot of biases are hanging out in this conversation.

The top-level poster appears to be proposing a general rule for how people should behave. But how suitable is it really?

The way to explore that is to test it out by trying other inputs, as the GP did here.

> He was a commercial opportunist, not a real activist or whistleblower.

That is noticeably different than stating, "it feels gross so don't do it".

It also seems designed to shut down criticism of the original proposed rule -- or at least that's the only interpretation I can ascribe to it. This is bad because that original proposed rule is bad (in my opinion) and deserves criticism. Ihe best kind of criticism of any rule is "Let's try this other input, and see if you still agree with the conclusion".

Publicly available information supports the fact that Snowden was also an opportunist - the vast majority of the material he leaked was unrelated to domestic surveillance, which was his stated purpose for leaking.

Numbers don't lie.

Victims are victims. We just overlook victims of the state because of a biological religious adherence to revenge. Righteous violence and all that jazz.

Human understanding of humans and human social structures (which one needs to make just rulings) isn't objective. To claim otherwise is not just subjective, but incoherent. It's an infinite regress. Many people throughout history possessing ideas that we now consider to be stupid were convinced of their objectivity.

FWIW, I think this vendetta against Kim Dotcom is way out of line, and wouldn't have happened if he were more important.

The premise was that these services didn't actually perform the piracy, its users did. Kim Dotcom played both sides of the field, much like how social media platforms are right now with the whole "we're not a media company" but wanting all the profits of providing services that those companies do.

I'm not saying I agree, but it provides context as to why people felt Kim Dotcom was a hero.

> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?

I don't think it's a relevant comparison, but I do think that particular suggestion should apply to them. Imo a fundamental component of "succeeding" in Western culture is in how quickly you learn which parts of which systems act on perverse incentives or actively against the good of the people, and subsequently being able read the room when there's an opportunity to play hero; sticking your neck out might earn you a smily face sticker next to your obituary, but more likely it'll end up screwing you, and it's naive and/or arrogant to think that this time will be different and you'll singlehandedly rid the ocean of pollution (metaphorically). Realizing that you can't rid the ocean of pollution doesn't mean you should start dumping more trash into it, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't do your civic duty to reduce your personal waste, but it does mean you have to set your ego aside for your own benefit, because in practice and in all likelihood you'll make practically zero or even very negative difference, and put a real tangible target on your back, in whichever context this plays out.

Could be a safety meeting at your company in which you're just a peon and you feel like speaking up about a code violation, could be that you're a young Mr Beast employee that wants to vouch for their co-worker who's making less but doing more, or it could be that you want to make your company's website more accessible, in any case, unless you very clearly have the latitude to do so and control over the outcome, don't, because you'll screw yourself or someone else.

Drive as well as you can in your lane, whatever that means to you, and if you don't like it, signal and change lanes, then do it again.

This also means not overexerting oneself on things that require real tangible sacrifice but have only tenuous, nebulous, or only marginally more financially beneficial outcomes. Don't sacrifice too much time alone or with your partner or family or in nature for shipping yet another arbitrary AI SaaS bs product that will disappear in a week, pick the relevant battles and demand am important outcome, we don't have enough time to squander on such asinine missions. Again, that doesn't mean don't do work, or earn money, or help others, or whatever, just be careful how much of your life you trade for some 1s and 0s.

> Do you think this should apply to, say, Snowden, Assange, and whistleblowers in general?

Or maybe even more generally to people like Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffet? Because maybe at some point enough should be enough?

While they want you to believe that, there’s no correlation between being rich and being best, or even good, at anything. You’re not the best athlete because your mom and dad were the best athletes. But if your parents were wealthy, you’re wealthy.

If they want standards to be applied ”consistently”, great. They can start by paying their taxes.

Why shouldn't this quantity be softly capped at some value to prevent natural runaway towards 100%? What's wrong about capping it on the other side slightly above zero for the purposes of personal survival and preventing organic deterioration?

> Or maybe you're suggesting the rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits away?

Obviously that.

> and who would they give it away too?

That is really irrelevant. The money they gave away can literally be burnt and it would still improve the situation. Money is not value. Money is just a score indicating how much value are you entitled to obtain in the future.

> The federal government controls more money than any entire private business

Is that true? Despite trillions of debt? There are national governments in the world (and not small ones) that currently owe more to businesses than they own assets.

Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success. Once you win everything you should step aside and let others have their fun. You shouldn't feel compelled to punish your body even harder for years to come and others shouldn't have to wait till your performance deteriorates.

I don't agree with this definition of money. The vast majority of money doesn't represent human output/labor and none of it is created by human labor. Probably the simplest to understand example of that is crypto. It represents trillions of USD in wealth and has almost no human labor input or output. That's a simple example, but certainly not the only example.

> Is that true? Despite trillions of debt?

Yes it's true. It's not even close. The US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out. They could save up for roughly 6 months and buy out the most expensive company in the world (apple). A company that has been growing their wealth for 50 years. This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money. Moving money from the grossly rich to the insanely unthinkably rich doesn't make much sense to me.

> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.

What problem does this solve? I don't have anything much against it either, but I can't find any reason to do this.

If online gaming is any indication, what you are describing is largely not the way the most vocal people feel. It's more generally, "let's actively hunt down little kids to ruthlessly defeat and record it while mocking them so we can make ourselves internet celebrities!" and "if I can't do it myself, at least I can watch this other guy mow down kids with no chance of competing and cheer him on!"

There are exceptions of real skill of course, but those exceptions are what the others are desperately trying to emulate by seeking out weaker opponents. Introspection is going to be a hard sell for those others.

I think enough time has passed that I can say this openly: I worked for an ad network that was used by MegaUpload. Most of the traffic from his site was fraudulent bot traffic. Mysterious advertisers would repeatedly rebuy ad placements that were clearly not generating any returns. There was definitely things that didn't add up to the point I would error on the side of believing the government on this one.

Russia or China wouldn't have extradited him.

Also, he'd probably live a peaceful, wonderful life had he not flexed and talked shit on Twitter so much.

Hell there was a whole monthly meeting and magazine dedicated to that sort of behavior. Criminal? Yes. Part of hacker culture? Also yes.

Too bad Mr Goldstein lost all credibility (that he may or may not have had) when he started shaming folks for not taking the clot shot.

Many people seem to forget or not know that all along his career he went ripping off fellow nerds and hackers left and right for his personal gain. He spied on them on his BBS, stole their secrets, defrauded them, ridiculed them, even tipped them off to law enforcement when it was beneficial to him. He proudly admitted to doing all of this in german interviews.

Kim and his endeavours are undoubtedly part of hacking history, but he himself was never part of the culture. He couldn't give a rat's ass about the culture if it weren't to build his legend and bedazzle his followers. All he really ever wanted was cold hard cash, Rolexes and cars.

Now come again about Goldstein?

Off the top of my head, Cliff Stoll did some pretty hackerish stuff on the right side of the law.

I mean, if your definition of decent requires you to be a fraud and a conman, then no.

---

My father, while he certainly pirated a lot of software back in the 90s, wasn't stealing any phone cards, or doing any embezzlement. Presumably, that makes him not decent with computers.

The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. And that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice. This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and convivence for the end user of course; though outside of Linux ISOs there's little question what kind of files people are sharing), screwed him.

Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK. Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him 10... bet he regrets that now.

"Better safe than sorry" is certainly, uh, safer. But I don't know if you can really say the DMCA requires it.

Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but, in their case, now the law is something entirely different and unexpected.

+10x Twitch. I still remember JustinTV ..

>>>> Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated

Could you please elaborate ? The implication is that other similar sites were not removing child pornography or similar ?

You could ask the same question about the Hollywood studios that were built on evading patents.

What he did was clearly illegal - because the studios make the laws.

Which of course explains their allure and the desire to retroactively improve their origin stories. They stand precisely in the face of what the OP himself retroactively considers.

> "I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved."

Which is the mantra of the bullied. As if we aren't the government. When precisely did we all decide that copyright should exist for a term of life PLUS 70 years? The government does not seek our permission when applying these laws to us yet we have to implicitly sacrifice our freedoms in order to blithely comply with it?

And we all know that the problems with these individuals is not that they committed these crimes, it's that they explicitly called into question this very authority in the first place. That the government then uses this as further justification to destroy these individuals lives, permanently destroy their liberty, and broadcast a chilling effect over anyone who would ever attempt to improve these policies is what inspires people to lionize these figures.

I’d be willing to bet a massive amount of money that most pirated media is less than a few years old.

I don’t believe that we as a society are ever going to decide that copyright protection should be less than that.

A society where we have open, legal access to all the cultural pieces of the last century is very different from our own. And it seems difficult to know how it would affect both the consumption, but also the creation of media.

Sometimes, when I argue about this IRL, I'm told that we are practically there because of piracy. But this is a debate of tech enthusiasts, we know how to download, we now how not to get caught. The majority does not

When the internet was even younger, and he called himself Kimble, he sold out other pirates to save his own ass.

His attitude is of a selfish and greedy person. Nothing to be admired.

> Schmitz was arrested in March 1994 for selling stolen phone numbers and held in custody for a month. He was arrested again in 1998 on more hacking charges and convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud and 10 counts of data espionage. He was given a two-year suspended sentence; the judge of the case described Schmitz's actions as "youthful foolishness".

> In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump,resulting in a €1.5 million profit for Schmitz.

Also, that he used many of these things to enrich himself and live a lavish lifestyle does not exactly make him more likeable to me.

He started it as an improved successor to megaupload, but something shady happened about 2015ish with a Chinese investment firm doing some kind of hostile takeover.

Humanist values include right to property ownership, and the right to get the benefits of your work. Artists deserve that, and can sell their rights to big studios if they want.

Just because it's easy to copy something, or just because studio execs were idiots who wouldn't get on board with streaming, or whatever else, doesn't mean it's morally right to copy someone's work for free.

It's perfectly fine to copy someone else's work. The immorality comes in when you start using physical force to punish people thinking thoughts you feel entitled to.

Copying scientific ideas (with attribution!) is completely OK and good.

Having heterodox ideas is vital for society.

Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to) is the worst evil.

But making a movie is a commercial enterprise that involves risking a bunch of capital. It rarely pans out to make a profit. Copying it without payment is a very minor form of theft, but it's still theft.

If the content is a movie created in the last 100 years, it was almost certainly created to slot into that revenue model.

The artists have a right to sell their property on their terms. And if they decide to do so by selling their rights to a studio, then that's how it is. And if you don't like corporations, contracts, or the revenue model, then that's completely irrelevant to the parties involved.

Furthermore, what is and isn't legal is a product of the legislature and the judiciary. Let's not forget that people write laws and interpret laws. They aren't some function of the cosmic order, though it's convenient to posture them as if they were.

When someone "has the right," it's because a group of people gave it to them, and anything that can be given, can be taken away. The fact that we forget this reality is a massive collective hallucination. Once you know how the hallucination works, it's hard to buy into it ever again.

TLDR; The arrow of implication doesn't go from reality -> laws. It goes from laws -> reality.

The pirated works were created under this understanding of the rules.

In other words, movies and games were financed and made at great expense and effort with a view to selling copies and tickets and making money off of VHS rentals / Netflix streaming. Piracy is a clear subversion of this, and by the way, if it became mainstream, would break the industry that creates some of the things we like.

While the law isn't part of some cosmic order, there's nothing written in the stars that entitles you to every creation of every other person, at your convenience, for free.

I'm glad there's room for both and the gray areas in between.

Do we, for example, have an obligation to those who play by laws we believe to be unjust?

If movie productions were so concerned about profit, maybe they should stop all the Hollywood accounting nonsense.

The industry has just made several films surpassing a billion dollars. The industry is absolute fine. And someone downloading Deadpool isn't stealing or doing any harm to that industry.

Like forcing people think that copying is theft? Or that by clicking a button you agree to few hundred page agreement you couldn't possibly read or understand?

This was also a time before mass copying and distribution on a massive scale.

To try to own information is like trying to own a flame. I lit your candle with my candle, so I own the flame on your candle. Making a copy is the same. To claim you own the copy is just plain stupid.

Information can be any collection of bits. You can copy these easily and almost for free.

But almost nobody cares about information in the abstract. I'm talking about specific, artful arrangements of bits. Lots of effort goes into making sequences of bits. (we can give our sequence of bits names like "The Lion King" or "Windows 98"). You only want a copy of these bits because of the effort that went into it.

Of course nobody can control how you flip the bits on your hard drive in practice, but that's missing the point. It's a particular arrangement of bits that you find entertaining or informative or useful, somebody put a lot of work into making it that way, and it's this creative effort that you end up enjoying and paying for, not the actual bits.

And of course you are depriving the artists of something - a royalty payment. The art was likely created with a view to that royalty payment. Which is why you want to pirate it in the first place. You want to enjoy the creative work without having to shell out for it.

You can come up with elaborate arguments about information theory, but in the end this is what it comes down to - pirates want other people to create value for them, for free, and will howl about "corporations" and "information wants to be free" to try and justify it.

I don't owe artists any royalties just because they say so. If they demand a kiss they won't get it either. I won't be bound by arbitrary restrictions around the physical matter in my possession.

To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without permission, such that you now possess it, but they no longer have it.

To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy of another person's work without their permission.

Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of copyright infringement are losing is not their property, but the potential extra profit they could have made if they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and distribute their work.

Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their property. Copyright infringement is illegal because (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less incentivized to create things because they won't be able to profit as much.

But they have no jurisdiction as he was not doing that IN the US. When the Pirate Bay guys were persecuted, the US got Sweden to convict them. They weren't extradited to the US.

>..charged in 2012 with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Often with US law enforcement where there's a will there's a way even if it doesn't strictly stick to normal legal practices. See also Assange, and if you read Howard Marks book Mr Nice there's another example of where they got him in an unconventional way. Plus of course a variety of drone assassinations.

meanwhile US is losing influence and trust on geopolitical stage, shouldn't that be the bigger issue

edit: im being rate limited so heres my response to comment below:

I didn't say anybody was replacing US, merely they are losing credibility and prestige on world stage and this isn't recent and not slowing down.

I don't think any country will be able to replace US and its freedom of maritime navigation anytime soon.

China is in no position to project as its undergoing internal turmoil. Neither is Russia. BRICS also won't offer much.

One potential non-zero chance scenario is the northern artic sea routes opening up due to rising temperatures melting ice bypassing the need to route through singapore and suez canal which would put Russia back on the power map.

US is a hyperpower and there is no equal.

Maybe a unified Korea with extended northern manchuria territories can fill the vacuum left by China and Russia in the region. I don't really see any other candidates.

National security is very far from the only scenario where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for better or worse.

If you say the US is losing influence, then who is taking their place in your view? Is China / the EU actually gaining influence?

Although NZ has agreements with Aus and the US, you'll find on the ground that kiwis are actually not super fond of the US.

We won't let US nuclear ships into our waters, and we actually have quite a good relationship with China.

NZ is also quite self sufficient in many ways and so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from potential conflict.

I suspect the small size of the economy, the small number of people in it, and lack of strategic importance in military matters are what keep it protected from potential conflict more than it's self sufficiency and distance. In fact, if anything was to create conflict would be someone trying to capture that self-sufficiency to support their own population.

Small country, fairly neutral stance, little involvement in international conflict, and huge distance.

Follow that up with alliances and there's not much reason to come to NZ, other than for a holiday!

Also what he was doing is also a crime in NZ otherwise he wouldn't be extradited.

How would US citizens would feel if another country, say China, wanted to extradite a US citizen because he allegedly violated Chinese copyright law?

Dotcom is absolutely right in saying that US is playing world police.

International crime can be a tough problem to solve. Who gets to decide what is a crime, how it should be judged and punished?

If those two things are present... well, then it is what it is. Now, I doubt China would be able to provide the fair trial part, but if we're trying to compare your situation to what Kim Dotcom is going through, it's a question we have to answer. I'd much rather take my chances in a US courtroom than a PRC courtroom.

Hmm, excellent question. And for context, America is going to give Kim Dotcom a functional life sentence in what Americans like to call "pound-you-in-the-ass prison". For sharing files. He'll be given more years than harsher than most murderers.

This is underlined by other US excesses, ie [1] or the fact that US prisons are have many citizens of other states, but there are very few US citizens detained elsewhere (in democratic systems, not used for some political deals).

[1] "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody. The antithesis of fairness and basic human equality rights.

Americans commit exceedingly little crime internationally. Even in ultra-low crime countries, US citizens rank below native citizens per capita. That is probably why.

Probably how Swedish citizens felt when China 'extradited' Gui Minhai. At least in US you have due process?

See also https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan....

> US is playing world police

NZ and US have a bunch of shared laws, trade and extradition agreements and stuff. It's not like US dropped in and snatched Dotcom without any NZ cooperation. Not world police, just boring international justice.

Many of these are public companies that anyone can buy shares in. Tons of people have part of their life savings in US stocks - these people all own a slice of the rights to various works of art.

Are you saying if they own a large enough amount of it, it's OK to ignore their rights?

As an aside, here's a list of public companies [0]. 7-8 of them are "trillion dollar companies", and only one (Apple) has a stake in media (that I know of) and that's a very minor part of their business. The media business is not a very good one to be in.

[0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Let's not pretend these companies give the slightest hint of a shit about morality. They'd destroy the world next year if it meant they could earn a penny more of profit this quarter.

As long as companies like Disney are pulling moves like this [1], I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if these companies are in the right.

The only reason Dotcom (a non-US individual with 0 ties to the US in any way that should matter) is being extradited is because US politicians are pathetically cheap and easy to buy off, and Disney and all the other big media companies have infinite coffers with which to do so, not because of some vague bullshit about morality or property rights.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

It's like that for companies. It doesn't matter if Disney sucks in many ways, if they own something, they own it.

If you think this is vague bullshit, then I'd invite you to read up on how societies tend to work without it. Even communist China instituted reforms and amendments in recent decades cementing the concept of private property ownership.

And Dotcom does have a tie to the US that he willingly and knowingly created: he committed a crime against their citizens and companies.

You can argue that there's too much protection, or that it doesn't afford equal protection under the law for smaller parties.

I don't think anyone other than Disney shareholders gives an iota of a damn if others pirate movies/shows/music from the big guys. And I especially don't think most people would seek extradition for a guy who hosted a piracy website, especially, that's the type of thing psychopathic execs and their ilk seem to be into. Especially someone who's not even a US citizen or has any affiliation with the US.

Also, keep in mind we're talking companies like Disney here, who are currently fighting a legal battle [1] because someone died due to their negligence and using the argument that agreeing to the T&C of their streaming service absolves them of wrongdoing in a person's death.

So yeah, don't expect anyone to feel sorry for the plight of the poor soulless megacorporation here, they'd destroy the earth if it made them half a nickel more in yearly profits.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

I like this. Us internet boomers got to learn and get everything for free. The new kids coming in are paywalled to hell :)

I'm far more concerned with the stuff that governments get away with, including infringement of the freedom to share information.

I can't celebrate this at all, and I am never sympathising with legal thuggery. It is just naked power exerting itself and it will always be ugly.

> It is just naked power exerting itself

and it's a relatively minor showing of it. Compare it to direct assasination of foreign nationals (of which both the US as well as russia has done). The chinese stationing covert forces to try to police their migrant nationals overseas (spy stuff basically), or if what snowden leaked is as widespread is it is alleged, the amount of hoovering of information and surveillance that exists!

Maybe we'll have a generation of people with a backbone again who will be able to free us from government oppression.

The trend is going the other way, so I think we're heading to socialism-ville for a repetition of last century's lessons.

I think there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated. If I illegally download a song/movie I wouldn't have otherwise bought, did anybody lose out? There was a reason Napster was popular in colleges, because many of those people were cash poor. Music industry revenue peaked in 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again. Also, the entertainment industry are not multi-trillion dollar conglomerates. Not even close. Disney is worth $160B and Netflix is $260B.

That being said, if it were up to the music industry we'd still be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 for an album we only like one song on and we wouldn't be able to create out own playlists. You can only fight the consumer for so long (and they fought long and hard). That's to say nothing about the morality of repeatedly increasing copyright from 14 years to life plus 70 (which is BS). The Beatles' great great grandchildren (or whoever owns the rights later on) shouldn't still be benefiting from intellectual property.

> Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen from another country using the power of the state, and drag him before their feet is tyrannical.

This is what rule of law is. KDC knew he was breaking the law and not only didn't do anything about it, but invested in an encouraged it to benefit himself financially. Even after being charged and having megaupload shut down, he then tried again. Do you really feel sorry for him?

> there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated

I'm not sure how relevant the harm is. It seems like copyright law doesn't have exceptions for "harmlessness"* -- and even if that were a carve-out, it would be a stupid one for the kind of offenses we're discussing, since it hinges on hundreds of millions of individual 'butterfly effect' decisions and how they hypothetically would have unfolded in a fictional world without piracy vs. the real world. No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue. Maybe "Firefly" was boosted massively in its long-term commercial success by piracy, but some $400 physics textbook had materially less sales. I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.

*I'm aware there are specific exceptions for things like fair use and timeshifting -- I just don't believe all 'harmless' acts are protected or that that was ever even intended.

Just that is an indication on how little piracy affects revenue, the effect is at best so small that it's effectively invisible.

> I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.

Because discussing about the real financial impact of piracy is a sure way to throw a lot of pretty extreme copyright laws out of the window.

They really don't want to start this debate. Piracy is just a boogeyman at this point to pass ever stronger IP laws and the large IP conglomerates are pretty aware of that.

More than two decades of studies show there is no harm to these companies and that pirates spend the most on content.

Piracy is flat out a net good for humanity and society. No convincing counter-arguments can be made.

The only example where harm could be said to happen is with very small content-creators who would be relying on income to get started, but even then I don't think that matters.

If you're the source of a creation and people want to see more, they will fund it. It need not be funded by everybody that will or has viewed or enjoyed it.

That's because the music industry was incredibly slow to adapt to the internet. They basically took a full decade to react and lost revenue in the process.

You might object this evidence by telling me that you bought all seasons of House only because you had been streaming it illegally before, and that you wouldn't have done so without previously streaming it – but in most jurisdictions, this kind of "business procurement" does not cancel out the harm done in the first case.

Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me not buying it is on you.

There is no harm done in the first case. You say you would have bought House if you couldn't have streamed it, but I say that's nonsense. If you didn't want to pay for it you would have borrowed it from a library or a friend.

My "counter evidence" to your example could be something like: I bought House on DVD 10 years ago because my friend who had pirated it told me it was a good show to checkout.

Not sure if you know this, but there are tens of thousands of people involved in making a movie or TV series. Many making minimum wage and many who own businesses that are employed by the studios like catering companies. Or transportation companies, or even all the companies who tech they use like the camera's they use to film said movies.

ALL of those people? Their employment DEPENDS on movie studio's and the work they do to keep them gainfully employed. When you pirate movies you're not taking money out of the faceless multi-trillion entertainment companies, you're taking money out of the people's pocket who are integral part of creating the movies and shows you watch and who's livelihood depends on their continued employment by those companies.

Take a studio like New Line who put out the Lord of the Rings movies and was wildly successful until a series of flops effectively closed the studio:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/featu...

From 'Nightmare on Elm Street' to 'Lord of the Rings', New Line Cinema created some of Hollywood's most influential blockbusters. But now its 40-year history is in tatters following a string of big-budget box-office flops.

Also, I would consider pirating a perfectly valid protest of what producers have done over the last two years, dragging their feet to break the backs of unions in advance of negotiations. Hollywood, Atlanta, New Orleans, NY, all filming far less over the last two years due to producer’s greed and hope that they can enjoy these pesky trades entirely by automation and AI. This has done more damage to tradespeople than pirating ever did.

Fortunately, it’s pretty clear that it will not be feasible to make a coherent movie or TV show via AI in the near term. Hopefully consumers vote with their wallets too and don’t buy or stream any content that is made without trades.

https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for...

It is an industry that employs real people from artists to studio engineers to musical instrument and equipment companies to the bartenders at the venues. Those people are sharing a smaller pie than they used to before Internet piracy devalued their music.

In your opinion it's tyrannical. Sure, most certainly a non-violent crime against a wealthy corporation isn't on the same level as murder or assault. At the same time, copyright infringement is conceptually not that different from property crime.

You would want the police to arrest someone who broke into your home and stole your movie collection.

You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own website.

It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.

Don't forget that Megaupload was specifically designed to enable piracy and discourage other uses of the technology. It wasn't a file storage service that could be used for legitimate personal use because unpopular downloads would be deleted. The company actually paid people via an incentive program to upload popular files that were copyright infringing. This wasn't just "YouTube is bad at playing whack-a-mole with DMCA claims," this was a company that was responsible for something like 4% of all Internet piracy all by itself and actively encouraged it.

It's not like they were a company that didn't have access to lawyers who could warn them not to do what they did. Kim deserves his fate because his own hubris invited it.

> It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.

For many (if not most?) software businesses nowadays, the code itself holds little intrinsic value. If someone were to steal my SaaS code, it's unlikely they could deploy it and sell a similar product. The value of my business lies in its domain expertise, not in the code being a trade secret. Many internal projects aren't open-source simply because opening them to the public would require significant maintenance. Otherwise, there would be no issue in sharing the code, as much of what's built today is based on open-source projects.

Similarly, if I'm selling an application and its code is leaked, people would still prefer to install it from the app store. Few would go through the trouble of compiling the code and deploying a "hacked" version.

This contrasts with the 80s and 90s, when illegal copies of floppy disks and CDs posed a significant issue for some software businesses. However, times have changed. Nowadays, people prefer to pay for the support of a SaaS or the convenience of installing an app from a store, complete with updates.

There are exceptions, but I believe most software engineers don't work on projects where the code itself has significant value that needs to be protected by copyright laws.

The situation with music is somewhat similar. People have stopped buying physical media because it's no longer practical. Even those who collect CDs, vinyl, or tapes typically use streaming platforms for most of their music consumption.

If you do that you'll get a very misleading answer. That low payment he got was for writing credit on a song with 17 writers.

But the main reason streaming gives less revenue than CD sales isn't a "devaluation of music" thing, it's because streaming is closer to radio.

You really think if Spotify came along in 1998 that all the major record labels would agree to give them their entire catalog for $10 a month? Back then they were selling a single CD for around $20.

Piracy existed a LONG time before Napster hit the scene.

How do online communities discuss controversial subjects while ensuring good-faith participation?

I don’t think newcomers should be excluded from conversations…what’s the requirement; 12, 24, 48 months? Who determines that? Account age isn’t the best indicator of good-faith participation (accounts can be hacked, bought, etc.).

Instead engage with the content itself and where it comes from to determine if it seems to be in “good-faith”. Ironically, writing off someone’s opinion based on a single (potentially unrelated) fact is probably “bad-faith”.

From the guidelines:

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