Hmmm
Non US eh? I wonder if this is the beginning (or at least an indicator) of US tech isolation from the rest of the world.
The New Zealand High Court has unleashed some of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's considerable assets in order to help the contentious entrepreneur cover his legal fees in New Zealand. The @KimDotcom Twitter account modestly told the world: “BREAKING NEWS: The High Court just ruled the release of restrained assets to cover our …
Not sure if it is an urban myth or not but I recall conversations about a certain encryption company who are not based in the US getting annoyed at the rules on encryption key length the US wanted to impose and so offering the rest of the world a higher level than they could sell in the US.
Wanting to control the world is one thing, making the rest of the world fall into line through peaceful means is something else entirely
Put Apple in charge.
Let all foreign nationals and assets out who want out.
Leave em to it.
I for one would like to apologise on behalf of my ancestors for Britain's contribution to the forming of the USA. It feels a bit like having an errant offspring that mugs old ladies at night and your neighbours, while polite to you know you're partly responsible.
Flame on, merkins, I've closed the window.
"I for one would like to apologise on behalf of my ancestors for Britain's contribution to the forming of the USA."
It's NOT Britain's fault! Blame the rabble-rousing slave-owning tax dodgers (aka 'The Founding Fathers') for the USA.
Canada, on the other hand, turned out just fine.
Didn't the guy make most of his millions by acting as a hub for distributing stolen goods?
OK, OK, I got really, really annoyed back in the day when the original Napster got shut down.
I didn't pay any attention to file sharing UNTIL the MIAA made Napster into a big issue and started trying to shut it down, which they eventually did. So just before it got shut down, I tried it. When I did try it, I found it to be a great way to discover new stuff, some of which I went out and then bought, because I wanted the original CD to rip, and not the mish-mash of crappy MP3 files available at the time.
So it seems to me that the MIAA shot itself in the foot, because (1) the demise of Napster just spurred the creation of the P2P services, and clients like LimeWire, ShareBear, etc. (2) their claims of theft were greatly exaggerated because I certainly would never have risked real money by buying stuff I wasn't sure I liked until after I had downloaded it and listened to it, and (3) you could still copy or rip your friends' CDs anyway without going on-line and risking getting caught.
Having said that, I think that when organized crime gets involved and starts trying to profit big time from other peoples' work, that you have to look at the matter differently than just some kids swapping music with each other.
People who defend file sharing don't automatically defend, say, a company in the far east manufacturing millions of counterfeit music CDs, games, and movies. When somebody gets rich by providing a server structure specifically designed to enable widespread copying, how is that morally different?
I am dead set against prosecuting end users for sharing files, but anyone trying to make an actual business out of piracy has to expect that the police are going to come for them.
If you can suffer a bad analogy, its sort of like the difference between the old hippy growing a pot plant in his back yard, which one might overlook, and a drug cartel, the existence of which leads to serious problems.
Actually, he was close.
A commonly found term for those evil organizations is MAFIAA.aka Music And Film Industry Association of America.
Some have suggested that the I may suggest other words, like Incompetent or Idiot; while the first A might be better expressed as Assholes.
Megaupload responded quickly to all notifications of pirated material by taking them down - and somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3(*) of what was hosted there was non-infringing material.
(*) the numbers depend on who's printing the story.
Add to that, nothing there was publically browsable. It was/is a file locker and the only way to get files was with a login/password.
What seems to have irked the MAFIAA most wasn't that Mega wasn't proactively scanning for infringing material (which would be illegal in a lot of places anyway, including the USA), but that they'd announced an upcoming service which would directly compete with, and undermine, the existing MAFIAA models.
I suspect that if someone else started signing major recording artists to new contracts and planning a similar model to Mega's they'd receive similar treatment.
Does that make Kim Dotcom a Hero? Not really. He's an ex-spammer, ex-hacker, convicted fraudster who can play the PR game well - and the USA/NZ have executed some spectacular own goals while attempting to take him down for all the wrong reasons.
I happen to intensely dislike most of what he stands for, but I dislike what's been done to try and take out Megaupload even more, especially given the ramifications for the Internet at large should the MAFIAA ultimately suceed through illegal methods.
You know that is the real reason behind the DOJ's clumsy raid on Megaupload.
I bet the piggies at the MAFIAA member labels and film studios shit bricks at the prospect of seeing their snouts taken out of the revenue stream food chain if Megabox were actually launched.
Shit, it doesn't take a fucking rocket scientist to see that if artists could completely bypass the pigs at the trough the record labels; and sell directly to consumers, who the fuck needs the labels any more???? What value do they add to the equation??? I can easily see what they subtract from the equation. Talk about a monumental shift in the game. But, the fucking labels, run by the dinosaurs that can not appreciate new technologies, are facing being left behind.
Do I feel sorry for those bastards? Fuck NO!!!!