The copyright industry should brace itself: the Kim Dotcom saga isn't over

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/25/mega-kim-dotcom-copyright-baboom

by lukashed • 13 years ago

91 118 13 years ago

angersock• 13 years ago

"Big rarely means agile. Even so, there remains in New Zealand a fast-moving fat man who is causing an immense amount of trouble to anyone who ever troubled him."

Good opener.

devinj• 13 years ago

I usually get irritated at unnecessary references to a person's size, but I think the closer made it all worth it.

GigabyteCoin• 13 years ago

I found it a little out of place to mention the subject's size in this article.

He's going to beat the copyright industry with his brains, not his girth.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

I think Kim uses that joke punchline himself anyway, I don't think he is very sensitive about it. He probably knows it contributes to his PR branding anyway as a unique character.

pacofvf• 13 years ago

Kim Dotcom, described by Crispin Hunt as a 'chubby Che Guevara'.

moomin3• 13 years ago

Schmitz is a deeply unpleasant man. It takes a fair amount of effort to make him look like a good guy, but it looks like the MPAA and the FBI are putting the hours in.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

Why is he an unpleasant man?

fein• 13 years ago

Hopefully this explains some of it: http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/kimble/

There's a lot of history that gave kimble his stigma.

Crito2• 13 years ago

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

-H. L. Mencken

It is a well known problem, but one that you must deal with if you are interested in defending principles that you stand for. The ACLU has defended the KKK in the past. Most recently: https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-...

moomin3• 13 years ago

We can add weev to the list of people I'd much rather not have to defend.

toufka• 13 years ago

Woah - bold plan Mr. Mega.Com:

Dotcom will launch Baboom! next year... It aims to directly reward artists by paying them when users listen to the songs for free. The price for downloading free music is that users install the "MegaKey", a piece of software which strips out embedded online advertisements in favour of those sold by Dotcom.

ThomPete• 13 years ago

A friend of mine tried to do this with a browser plugin. He replaced ads for profit with ads for "good".

The newspapers obviously got pissed :)

seniorsassycat• 13 years ago

What is the legal precedent for this?

Adblock has been able to fly under the radar because it is used by people who sought out a way to block ads, a minority of internet users.

MegaKey replaces ads (something that is more likely to piss off advertisers more than removing ads) as the 'cost' of downloading free music, something many consumers are interested in.

drcube• 13 years ago

Why would this be a legal issue at all? Can't I do what I want to the software on my own machine and with my own network connection, so long as I abide by the software license terms and the contract with my ISP?

Certainly I can't be compelled to accept whatever unwanted packets someone throws at me just because that someone based their business model on the practice, right?

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

Putting aside the legal issue, what about the technical issue? If this becomes at all popular then websites will just start redirecting visitors using it to a page that provides no content other than instructions on how to uninstall it.

flavor8• 13 years ago

I built software that did this back in 2001 for a scammy company called CyberRebate, during a low point of my consulting career. They imploded before they could take it to production.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

There are (at least) a few ISPs that route users' web traffic through a proxy which replaces, for example, Amazon referral codes with their own.

xzel• 13 years ago

I would say this article was surprising well written for a tech piece for the Guardian, though, I think it could have been a little deeper.

Love (do people love him?) or hate Dotcom, he is an interesting man. Aside from a heart attack, I seem him being a pain in side of the music industry for years to come.

bhewes• 13 years ago

If anything this is going to make copyright law more efficient. If one man can cause so much havoc what happens when a few people that own a ton of copyrighted work wise up and use the same tech?

leeoniya• 13 years ago

very similar to the Pirate Bay guys, just seem to keep on truckin'

grecy• 13 years ago

Domestically, Dotcom has caused carnage. A government minister has resigned and is facing charges of not declaring political donations made by Dotcom. Prime minister John Key has had to apologise because an intelligence agency for which he was personally responsible was exposed as illegally spying on Dotcom. The police were embarrassed when it emerged their raid, using an anti-terrorist strike force, was carried out unlawfully

It would be great to see these kinds of repercussions in America when the government oversteps it's bounds.

earbitscom5• 13 years ago

Yes, and equally great if criminals got convicted instead of awarded damages.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

What was his crime? Bribery?

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

Dotcom built Mega so it was technically impossible for anyone, including the site’s operators, to know what content users had stored. It means one result of the FBI’s action is the creation of a rogue website which exists outside the intrusive surveillance technology exposed by Snowden.

Are these claims accurate?

anon4• 13 years ago

I think they might be if you're outside the US. That is, the NSA monitor all communication within the US, so a US citizen uploading a file to MEGA would be recorded. A non-US citizen uploading a file to Google Drive would be recorded. But a non-US citizen uploading a file to MEGA would not be recorded most of the time, unless the NSA happen to be listening in on the right underground optical cables that day.

The claim is not completely false.

pantalaimon3• 13 years ago

Actually, the file is encrypted on the client side using JavaScript, so even the NSA listening wouldn't see it's content.

jmillikin• 13 years ago

When I go to Mega and download a file, the URL includes the decryption key. I am not asked for any additional information. That means anyone who knows the URL of that file can obtain its contents.

Every request sent to Mega to download a file goes to their servers, which means that they control the code served to your browser. At any time, they could change that code to send them logs of which URLs you request from their service.

Claims that Mega can't access the content of your files are true in only the most superficial sense. If you require secure file storage, Mega is an inappropriate solution.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

It uses client-side JavaScript, of which the experts seem to agree is insecure and open to manipulation.

downer962• 13 years ago

Time to wade through all the forum slide and astro turf of another two minute hate.

  Blah blah blah, he's fat. 
  Blah blah blah, music thief. 
  Blah blah blah, copyright law.

Okay. Yeah, we get it. That's great. We get it. The fat man has a website, and it's very bad. He's a fat, ugly, stinky man. Boo hoo! Make him go away!

I'm still not clear on what it is about his website, and all the implicit data transfer it's responsible for, that's so radically different from any other website that hosts massive amounts of any data I want, shared with the world.

Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?

Mostly because movie studios have more lobbyists and PR flacks than still photographers.

Also, Hollywood does vilify the various other websites. YouTube is an evil pirate website which Viacom has had to sue to vindicate its rights, didn't you know? And a couple of YouTube founders watched a Hollywood movie someone uploaded to YouTube that one time, so therefore Google should have to shut down YouTube and pay a billion dollars.

Malstrond• 13 years ago

What is your counter-argument to the fact that he turned "on us" in the past when he gave all information on users of the House of Coolness BBS to the authorities, the lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, and just about anyone who would pay?

How can "we" be sure he won't just cave in again?

downer962• 13 years ago

I fail to see the difference between your complaint and the reality of all large tech companies, as we now know them to be. Secret agreements for wire taps and traffic analysis. National security letters and eavesdropping. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft. All of them.

I say again: Why is this guy more evil than anyone else? Why is he worse than, say, Steve Ballmer? Why is he smeared, but other corporate parasites, not so much?

MBlume• 13 years ago

To me, Kim Dotcom's activities are reminiscent of one of those villain crossover movies -- Alien vs. Predator or whatever. I don't bear Dotcom much good will, but if he damages the copyright maximalists while they're taking him down, I'm happy to see that.

Malician• 13 years ago

He's not a nice man. He's been a mobster and a fraudster and if you're trusting him, well, you probably don't have very good sense.

The point being made is not that we should trust him, but that there's nothing inherently illegal about his new site.

earbitscom5• 13 years ago

Two massive problems with this plan.

Next to no artists own the rights to their music. So, there will be no significant catalog on this service unless people falsely claim to be the rights holder (as they do on Grooveshark) and upload the content under DMCA, then start collecting fraudulent checks for the material.

But the main problem is, the kinds of people who will install garbage on their computer in order to get free music are already getting it through Pirate Bay, etc. If I care enough about getting it "legally" through this service, wouldn't I have a problem ripping off the other companies whose sites I browse that depend on the ad revenue I'm now depriving them of? "Hey music lovers - make sure your favorite artists get some hard earned money from their music by taking it away from all those writers, game makers and other people whose products you use!"

earbitscom5• 13 years ago

To that point, anybody who works for an ad-supported web business ought to realize this is a plan to rip them off by someone who really just cannot figure out how to make money without taking it from others.

Guthur2• 13 years ago

From my understanding the only party that can make money without taking it from others are governments, though they do take as well.

1010011010• 13 years ago

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Referencing some "copyright industry" is like saying that farmers are part of some "private land industry." Its a legal protection that's available to everyone, not just one industry. Its also a legal protection that is more morally justifiable than private land, seeing as it protects original works of creation rather than (in the U.S., anyway) land stolen from native Americans (which in any case is a product of nature).

letstryagain• 13 years ago

You are correct but I think everyone understands that they mean the RIAA / MPAA in this context.

bad_user2• 13 years ago

It protects original works of creation

Disney.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Disney paid $210MM to produce _Brave_, which money went not only to creatives, animators, and movie production types, but also to software developers, testers, devops teams, and network administrators.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Say what you will about Disney, but I can spend a few dollars to buy a Disney product on iTunes, and my kid can watch a beautifully made cartoon without being bombarded with advertisements for cheap crap. That's more than I can say for most of the rest of the tech industry.

belorn5• 13 years ago

Those very morally justification that demands 12 year olds to work and earn a pay if they want to learn physics, rather than just letting them learn.

Or that morally justification that only allows a rich 12 year old child to listen to music from all around the world, and learn to be a great musician.

Or that morally justification that only allows a rich 12 year old child to watch movies and become a move creator of culture and thus learn from the past.

Or that morally justification that only allows a rich 12 year old child to experience a wide range of video games, so he later get inspired to make new fantastic and wonderful games.

Or that morally justification that only allows a rich 12 year old to use images programs to create images of art, or advanced physic emulators to become the next Einstien.

After all, the creator of copyrighted works need to get paid, and restricting 12 years old in learning is the only moral superior way to force such payments.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

This is an analysis that comes from simultaneously valorizing popular culture consumer products while denying the producers of those products a livelihood. It makes absolutely no sense in any case; where does the analysis end? Does freedom from copyright end at age 12, or should huge companies be allowed to ignore the GPL?

criley24• 13 years ago

Think of the children!

Give me a break with the theatrics. You're basically saying "doesn't my extraordinary case justify copyright infringement / theft?"

No, it doesn't.

It justifies you getting off your rear and making resources for 12 year old kids to learn and play and experience FOR FREE. The existence of commercial products doesn't negate free stuff. So why not let the 12 year olds use any of the free and open source and widely available stuff? If you think that the stuff produced for free isn't as good as the copyrighted stuff, isn't that itself a useful observation of the effects of copyright?

Instead of using those 12 year olds as a prop piece for a bad argument, put your money where your mouth is and go out there and produce content for them that will inspire them, without forcing them to break copyright to be inspired.

throwawaykf7• 13 years ago

If you think any non-negligible fraction of people infringing copyright are looking for education or inspiration, I have a bridge to sell you.

beedogs• 13 years ago

I don't see how an effectively-infinite monopoly on content (which is where we are now with copyright term lengths) is justifiable in any way whatsoever.

Peaker5• 13 years ago

It's a restriction put upon all of society, that creates artificial poverty and scarcity.

Property rights have a net positive effect, increasing the value property yields.

Copyrights decrease the value these works yield to society.

throwawaykf7• 13 years ago

There is no "artificial scarcity". Original creative works don't drop out of the sky.

jordigh• 13 years ago

The thing is, this is how they sell the law to us, "it's for everyone", but in the end, the ones who really benefits from it are the big players.

It's a lottery system, basically. A few lucky rock stars cash out. Everyone else doesn't win. And lotteries are also a good way to convince the population to pay more taxes, with the promise that anyone can win, where in reality few people do.

aston• 13 years ago

I think most people would call the rock stars cashing out "talented." Why not treat entertainment creativity the same way you would code? (Especially since both fall under the same copyright law?)

moomin3• 13 years ago

No. The copyright laws only look vaguely fair if you're not paying enough attention. They're deliberately slanted to favour specific businesses, which are colloquially known as The Copyright Industry.

Don't take my word for it. Ask a drug-addicted musician if you want chapter and verse on this.

http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

Guthur2• 13 years ago

For me the pertinent part of this and related stories is that the governments will undertake any action no matter how abhorrent at the beckoning of whatever lobby dollars come their way. That is the real criminality; text book protection racketeering.

Whether or not what Kim is doing is right or wrong, or if he is a nice person or not is a red herring and is used to deflect people away from the real issue.

This article had so many character assassination elements I would not consider it impartial journalism at all.

criley24• 13 years ago

Kim's story is interesting and I enjoyed that part of the article but I think the analysis of the music industry and Kim's new venture is very wrong.

Firstly: his monetization strategy is a browser extension that strips ads out of sites and places his own. This is appalling and I'm shocked the Guardian, a site that undoubtedly relies on internet advertising, doesn't realize that his monetization strategy would prevent even them from monetizing users who used both services.

Getting past the grossly immoral monetization, the article casts the music industry as, once again, some unchanging monolith that refuses to change in light of modern ideas.

Last time I checked, I can buy mp3's one by one, without DRM, and load them on any device I want, from any number of online stores. Last time I checked, I can use Spotify or another service and listen to the vast majority of popular music free with ads, or for $5/mo.

I don't get it, I can go to bandcamp or soundcloud right now and see thousands of indies who aren't signing labels and who are putting their music out there, selling it and giving it away.

It's not 2001 like that article desperately pretends, and our music reality is not what it was. (And if they think Kim or any web music site can upend the entertainment business of nationally popular celebrity/artists, then I charge that they don't even understand the basics of why it's successful).

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

I respect your beliefs, but I disagree that it is immoral to give people a tool that swaps ads for your own.

It's not nice but I think once you send someone some bits, you give up any claim to control what they do with them in the privacy of their own home. Even if they swap out the ads.

In fact I would argue using physical violence (police) to enforce what you deem to be "proper private use" of distributed bits is immoral.

The copyright industry should brace itself: the Kim Dotcom saga isn't over

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