I really dislike the extra-territorial aspect of it.<p>From what I understand the Netherlands copyright law is more lenient than the US law. For instance downloading copyrighted material was legal until very recently. So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there...
<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-finally-becomes-illegal-in-the-netherlands/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fin...</a><p>So you could do something which is legal, or illegal but not criminal offense (civil) in the country where you live, but if it displeases the US, then suddenly they can throw you in jail in a foreign country (the US) where you have no ties.<p>I break Chinese laws on a daily basis (Tank Man!). Why should I care about US law, since I do not live there, nor am I a citizen? It's not like I can vote for these laws...
This just seems ridiculous to me. I may well get downvoted, but it needs saying. Why do 99% of the world's governments seem completely retarded when it comes to copyright laws?<p>How many tens of millions in legal resources were expended in bringing 'justice' here? And what does the outcome even matter? Good job, tens of millions down the drain for <i>one</i> year of an Estonian's time? The system would surely be better served if they just handed those millions to the actual copyright holders?<p>The only real victory (if that's what they'd like to call it) is having taken the site down in the first place, not that that did a single thing to kerb 'illegal' filesharing...<p>The industry has moved on and adapted just fine.
Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous. Lets jail the developers of uTorrent while we are at it, thanks to them, I am able to easily queue up a torrent of Game of Thrones.<p>We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no actual harm to anyone all the while people committing actual crimes go unnoticed or repeatedly go in and out of the system. People slinging drugs in the streets probably get lesser sentences than Andrus got for helping develop Megaupload.<p>"In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. He further acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through their conduct."<p>Classic entertainment industry mathematics. How can a figure as large as $400 million be accurately proven? Seems like they just spun a massive wheel down at the law firm and chose whatever number sounded large, but not over the top. More specifically, how can a computer programmer who doesn't sound like had any involvement in the business side of things know how much Megaupload supposedly cost the industry?<p>There are so many things about this story that don't sit right with me. They went after the low hanging fruit. They couldn't touch Kim Dotcom, so they're going for the vulnerable and lesser high profile people involved in hopes of building up a case for bringing down Dotcom. This is what it is all about: sending a message to Dotcom and trying to slowly try anyone even remotely involved in the Megaupload site. They know Kim won't go down without a fight, they'll basically say: Well one of the sites developers admitted there was copyrighted material on the site and he knew about it, he was sent to jail.<p>As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned with this judgement.
By that logic, authors of filesystems, ssh, TCP/IP should go to jail. Quick, let's sue the Oxford dictionary! Military style raid on DARPA for inventing the internet! Oh, wait ... that's the military. Can't we have our cake and eat it too? Talk about political sham oldboy network rent-a-justice. Legal systems need to be decentralized, their interpretation and processes transparent. Perhaps a forward thinking country like Ecuador might be up for the challenge? I exclude Estonia as they are embroiled too much in EU legalese to have much of a chance of a running escape.
Yet every single one of the bankers who brought the world economy to the brink of collapse walks free, enjoying the fruits of his labour. The system works.
Sidenote: it's so weird the English language uses the same word "justice" for the legal system and the moral concept. In German for example the two are different, making it easy to explain to people how the legal system is about equal application of the law, not personal closure. The domain "justice.gov" just sounds like propaganda (imagine "freedom.gov") to me as a non-native speaker who mostly hears the term used in that second (moral) meaning.
> <i>Nomm agreed that the harm caused ... exceeded $400 million... group obtained at least $175 million ... Megaupload.com ... it accounted for four percent of total Internet traffic, having more than one billion total visits, 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors.</i><p>> <i>Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer ... from 2007 until his arrest in January 2012. ... he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites ... which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy” warning.</i><p>> <i>Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites.</i><p>Replace megaupload with any website or service provider (Youtube, Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook) and it gets scary very quickly.
The programmers of the largest copyright infringing company on the planet (Google) are hopefully exempt from idiocy like this. Youtube contains massive amounts of copyright infringing videos, Google books brought it to a whole new level and the Google cache infringes on a very significant portion of the web.
Article quote: <i>In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million.</i><p>Poppycock. How is a computer programmer qualified to estimate the pecuniary value of “harm caused” by the shop they're working at? What about the harm caused to Justice by farces and show trials like this?
There's a lot of lip service but I still don't get why a programmer need to go to jail for this crap.<p>Are they prosecuting everyone that ever worked for or did business with megaupload now?<p>Because that seems a bit shady.
Tbh he kinda fucked up. He waived his right to an extradition hearing in the Netherlands.<p>I am fairly certain the Dutch court would not have let him be extradited over this bullshit. Case and point, he is the only one to be extradited successfully and only because he went of his own free will.
... what the hell?<p>And they're trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US as well!<p>At the time of launch, I thought how cool it'd have been to work on the project, ouch.
It's a real shame that millions of our tax dollars go to putting a single guy in prison for a year, when they could be much more effectively put towards prevention and prosecution of violent criminal activity.
Nice job DoJ. Now to raise the bar and serve the people some <i>real</i> justice, go get Jamie Dimon ( <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106" rel="nofollow">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witn...</a> ).
What if you are a programmer working for any major corporation that happens do be doing some illegal stuff (Banks, Oil, gambling, etc). Should you be afraid to go to jail?