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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I don't know the full story, but as far as I understand, it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time, was aware there was a ton of piracy on the site and didn't give any indication whatsoever that they were even trying to react to it by banning accounts that were uploading infringing content.

I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".

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He shared a lot of them. Still absolutely not something that should lead to this multiple-state sanctioned response.

Agree, disproportionate response for sure. Still, flagrantly ignoring the law will get you in trouble.

Getting in the way of powerful people getting more power is always punished more harshly than anything else, including murder.

In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.

Your comment appears to have been downvoted for being inconvenient, despite its truth.

I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says, his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively, which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded directly, but in my experience commenters who start talking about things like "powerful people getting more power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about whether the claims they make are true.)

Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and legal arm wrestling.

That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.

And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.

When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.

This is not about justice, this is about power.

> it seems like they (Megaupload) were ignoring DMCA takedown requests for a long time,

"Long time" is subjective.

> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that

New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.

As far as I remember, not only aware, but activly uploading warez themself (not officially).

So? If that's a crime under NZ law he can be prosecuted there. If it isn't then too bad for the US.

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