Kim Dotcom has hired multiple high-powered lawyers to fight the extradition and charges.

NZ politicians are calling for an enquiry as to why he was permitted NZ residency in the first place, because he'd have to meet a "good character" test and having previous convictions for fraud in Germany, as well as the business he operates, would seem to preclude his entry.

How do you stop piracy without limiting the internet in some crippling way though... it's impossible.

All the big names are saying 'follow the money', but many pirates don't share files for money they just do it to share. And where is this money exactly?? That is the whole point of pirating, we, as consumers, are getting our products for free from the pirates.

Well Kim Dotcom had enough money to lease a $30m mansion north of Auckland to live in and donated some large amount of money for an Auckland fireworks display in 2008 new years eve or something (can find a video on youtube).

So indeed megaupload was bringing in a lot of money to Kim Dotcom et al, through users paying for subscriptions for faster download rates. Basically they're in the same position of Napster: knowingly abiding in piracy but pretending it didn't happen or that it was at arms length and there was nothing they could do about it. But because the files were directed hosted and transferred from their servers, they are going to have a very difficult time of it. Contrast The Pirate Bay which only hosts .torrent files, and is in fact moving away from that as well and from the end of this month will use only magnet links and not host any .torrent files at all (for a magnet-link enabled client, they function the same, but offer yet another layer of legal protection to TPB).

The money is the profit the content makers potentially lose if someone who would have bought their product pirates it instead. The thing is, not everyone who pirates a product would have bought it if pirating wasn't an option, so you can't really tell how much difference pirating makes. You could even argue that pirating helps some content providers because of the extra marketing. (For example, I definitely wouldn't have bought Assassin's Creed: Revelations if I hadn't pirated and played through Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood.)

It's kind of like if a terran scans instead of dropping a MULE.

megavideo also got shut down...

Well what we can say, is that if the content providers offered subscription services similar to megaupload did, then they could have made all that money instead.

The problem is they want to charge so much for the content that they don't want to do this. They'd also have to be careful about it, only offering content that was 6 or 12 months old on such a service otherwise they'd lose money - why spend $20 on a DVD if you can download that DVD (and lots others) if you paid $14.95 or whatever megaupload costed.

Apple pretty much did this with iTunes already and Netflix isn't too different. Hell, even Steam is quite similar. It's only a matter of time until they move to a business model more like this; the question is really how long it'll take and how much extra DRM shit they'll force on people.

They should shut down all stores with illegal black market sales going on in the back room, even if the store front is legitimate. Sure megaupload was doing some legal filesharing and stuff, but everyone knows a shit ton of copyright infringement was going on there and I'm pretty sure the FBI is completely justified in taking it down, like even if this was the year 1776 and America wasn't overburdened by super confusing laws, stealing, or aiding and abeting stealing has never been legal.

When this goes to court, if Megaupload can prove that they're giant dumbasses enough for the "OMG I DIDNT KNOW WHAT PEOPLE WERE UPLOADING ON MY SITE" argument to work, then they should get off the hook. But honestly, how does anyone support Megaupload on a moral basis. I support them from a convenience standpoint, its awesome to be able and go steal shit from them whenever I want to, but I know it isn't legal or right.

As much as I dislike all those greedy bastards at the big movie labels and music labels and whatnot, they do have a point, stealing is stealing any way you look at it. (Which means everyone on Wall Street should be arrested too).

This is why I want to put all my files in a an RGBA png and upload them to an image hosting site that never deletes images and has a fairly large maximum image size. It would actually be really cool to make a snow program to do this automatically, and IMO I think that with all the tools available to compress pngs (especially kzip), you can easily beat some of the more advanced compression algorithms out there. I'm going to ask my friend about this actually.

Next up they take down the chans.

I don't think you'll actually achieve much with this, though, if you're talking about uploading already-compressed video such as AVI. If you're talking about raw uncompressed video then yeah converting it into a static PNG could potentially give you a smaller file size, but generally video compression is lossy and deliberately throws away information that is determined to be unimportant to as to reduce file size. Any PNG compression you use is likely to be lossless and therefore won't throw away that useless information, resulting in a much larger file size.

So the png compression could potentially be better than uncompressed files, or files you were going to compress with some other lossless algorithm, but again already-compressed or lossy algorithms it won't perform nearly as well. It is also true that you can take those same files, compress them using rar or zip and then create an (uncompressed/uncompressable) PNG of that file.

Like this?
[attach=8312]


I just used libpng, so no fancy compression here. I made it so it includes the original filename (excluding path), too. (Sorry I just sorta stole your idea xD).

Attachments:

I am morally compelled to oppose copyright laws. In fact, the very idea that people can own information is somewhat bizarre. I understand why they exist, and that's so people can profit from information, but I find that copyrights do not have a very strong moral background other than the assertion that it's stealing, which it isn't, but it's like stealing, or so the fallback position claims when confronted on this ground.

In fact, the entire argument is only backed up properly iff the assumption that people have some intrinsic right to control information created by them. Which I argue isn't true and information is something that cannot be owned because it is not quantifiable.

You're thinking about this from far too much of a computer reference that it doesn't even make sense.

Copyright doesn't protect "information", it protects a performance or work. Copyright protects plays on broadway (for example). It also protects DVD recordings of those plays. Those DVD recordings might be the "information" you speak of.

If you yourself created a nice work of art, say a painting that it took you 6 months to work on. You got it included in an exhibition at a local gallery. A customer came in and really liked it, they thought it would go perfectly in their living room, but didn't want to pay you $5,000 to buy it. Instead they just took a photograph of it and got it printed out onto a large piece of paper and had that framed instead. How would you feel then? Would it make you want to go and spend another 6 months working on another painting? Or would you just say "screw it, it's not worth it" and not bother any more?

I fail to see what's wrong with aforementioned scenario.

=|

Said customer also would not have bought the painting even if cameras were nonexistent. I don't see how this results in lost revenue for you.

And even if it did result in lost revenue, I'm still struggling to find a moral argument for it.

Take the broadway performance example. A bunch of actors spend weeks training, rehearsing, making costumes, ect, and put hundreds or thousands of dollars into making one performance. The day of the performance comes, and some ass with a $60 camera comes along and tapes the whole performance and sells it. It's not his performance, he just stole it and starts selling it. He didn't put any effort into it, all he did was make a quick copy. He's selling a performance he doesn't own, just like if I broke into your house and stole a precious vase and sold it on the black market. Its theft through and through. If you accept theft as morally wrong, there's your basis.

If you're one of those pseudo communist anti-property-rights proponents *COUGH COUGH PAYNE COUGH COUGH*, then as long as you accept that stealing a vase isn't stealing because you can't own a vase, then sure you can say it isn't stealing, but you might as well try stealing something extremely valuable then and see how people take it.

I don't think so.

Information that is copied is not information that is stolen.

I find the mentality that the person who creates something original shouldn't have more rights involving it than anyone else quite scumbagish.

So like, if we're in the middle of WWIII and you happen to accidentally give a Russian spy a copy of the American strategies, weapons capabilities and operational deployments, you would be cool with that?

You probably wouldn't paint any more paintings if you couldn't sell them to make a living. The human race would have less art produced.