2 men who helped run popular pirating website Megaupload sentenced to prison in New Zealand
2 men who helped run popular pirating website Megaupload sentenced to prison in New Zealand
Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload have each been sentenced by a New Zealand court to more than two years in prison. The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on m...
U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.
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I can't actually find what these guys were actually guilty of. All media is sharing the same story that they pled guilty to something, and the charges "could have included racketeering if they were extradited to the US", but they apparently weren't.
AFAIK the whole story was that they specifically started Megaupload in NZ because it was not a crime there, yet the FBI raided their place in a foreign country. If I was a Kiwi, I'd be up in arms about it.
we were at the time. Note that it has been 11 years and Kin Dotcom still hasn't been extradited to the us
What does NZ charge him or these guys with? I mean if they broke NZ laws, it's fine, I know how this piracy thing works, but at the time it seemed made up.
It looks like they were charged in the US. I didn’t see with what specifically but the US sentenced them to prison for about a year and they elected to do their prison sentence in NZ (which is allowing one of them to wait until the birth of their child before beginning their sentence). It looks like NZ’s role in this isn’t harmful (besides allowing foreign search of their home)
undefined> (besides allowing foreign search of their home)
So it is harmful.
Even in the US there's no law against hosting encrypted files. They could be liable if they knew a specific file was illegal/pirated and didn't take it down but a recent SCOTUS case (think it was Twitter v Taamneh) set the precedent that general knowledge of illegal activity is not enough.
Thank you for that reference! I did think it was a poor reasoning for US to say "you're distributing pirated material" versus their response of "it's the users who are distributing it". I'll look more into the SCOTUS case
I don’t think the original MegaUpload site hosted encrypted files, at least not in a zero-knowledge way. They also encouraged users to do things like upload their entire music libraries and had a searchable database of them called Megabox. They weren’t just a file hosting provider, they were in many instances encouraging their users to upload pirated content and had all of the tools to see what was being uploaded and what was infringing.
I was always wondering why this isn't an obvious "gotchya" for pirated content. Wouldn't even a very simple encryption make it impossible to prove that the content being shared is copyrighted/illegal? After all, there could be anything in these bytes?
The crime of making rich people think they might be a little less rich than they could be.