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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

>Fitzgerald said that while the victims of Megaupload included wealthy multinational film and music companies, they also included small companies like a New Zealand software firm, Stuff reported.

Given how long this has dragged on for the real victims are the New Zealand taxpayer.

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But good job standing for honest small NZ software businesses! I mean, no way it was done just to protect the interests of those wealthy multinationals right? /s

Disclaimer: actually I do think NZ fares better than many countries on this so let me know if my cynicism is misplaced.

This made me think—what if we postulated that companies cannot be victims of a crime. Only physical persons can. So if all you do is harm to a company, it cannot be a crime by definition, the act can only be treated as a company doing harm to another company, and as a company you cannot go to prison

Well, if you run a tailor shop in downtown Los Angeles and you decide to burn your rival's tailor shop down, the only victim there is the other company. So I suppose you couldn't be charged with arson in this framework.

I’d think that any harmful interaction with the physical world always affects also persons. In this case it at the least gravely endangers people

You could simply walk into your rival's shop and take all of the company's materials then, when no one's looking.

By doing harm to a company you can still do harm to the owners, employees and clients of that company. You'd only be changing the entities involved in the process, not the outcome.

True. But then why do we almost never hold persons criminally accountable when they do harm through a company they control. Shouldn’t this be reciprocal?

A person doesn't control a company like they do a car. Proving criminal liability for an individual requires evidence tied to that individual.

Much easier, and a lower bar, to hold the corporate entity liable.

We could choose to hold executives and/or majority shareholders responsible instead of a "corporate entity".

We certainly could and I think, given a stringent set of regulations around record keeping of corporate decisions, we should.

Passing such a set of laws seems like a pipe dream at best, though.

Why should it be any different than for example charging a parent for his negligence in controlling his child?

What if it’s a small company with 10 employees? Shutting down their lively shouldn’t just get swept under the rug.

A company can go to prison. Otherwise you'd just make a company and then go around stabbing people. If you made Stabbing Inc then all the employees would be imprisoned for the stabbing because they're part of the organisation and acting as the organisation.

At this point he just gives New Zealand a bad name. With all the propaganda he pushes. So he’s cost every NZ citizen paying taxes in NZ and made the country look bad with his public peddling of propaganda for Putin and the CCP.

The bad look from Dotcom pushing Russian empire propaganda is dwarfed by the bad look from the authoritarian corporate copyright maximalism persecuting him in the first place. The Russian shilling is patently false and outright cringey, but going down such a rabbit hole is understandable when one is under direct attack from the US economic empire.

understandable? i have lost any ounce of compassion when dotcom, greenwald, snowden and others have went full-bore pro-kremlin.

the us and copyright bs is an iconic duo which i hate, but going after piracy is whatever compared to destroying democracy and freedom and pushing people to support legitimately evil empires

Snowden and Greenwald haven't gone "full bore pro-kremlin". You have not read a single word either have said and have constructed an image of them based on propaganda and lies.

The US economic empire is/was directly attacking these people. The Kremlin / Russian empire is not. Are you not able understand that when something is directly and personally attacking you, you're heavily inclined to not buy arguments that it could be a force for good in other ways?

I'm not saying their arguments have merit, or that people should listen to what they say (actually the opposite, which is incredibly tragic with Snowden). Just that their downward spirals are understandable.

Snowden never says anything pro-Kremlin you dimwit. He DOES criticize the west for perfectly valid reasons.

Snowden literally got Russian citizenship.

Is that the same as speaking pro-Kremlin messages?

At the time he was fleeing the US and Russia thought they could stick it to the yanks. Believing Snowden is pro an even more authoritarian government means you have no idea what the guy stands for.

I think that accepting citizenship in a nation functions as an endorsement of a nation, yes. I think very few people would interpret it differently.

That's incredibly reductionist.

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