> I had to be made an example of as a warning to all IT people who were intending to work in similar companies.
That's scary. I'm supposed to police my employers actions? To some extent I can understand, but that puts a lot of IT people in awkward positions. Do Dropbox employees need to worry that infringing content is being taken down fast enough, lest the face prosecution?
I didn't follow Megaupload too closely, so I hope I'm blowing this out of proportion...
If saying an employee acted without authorization and/or tampering with the papertrail will save a few million in fines then you better hope no one like that is on your board. But your stock options will be safe.. though you probably wont be entitled to them.
This is why Google is on such good terms with the State Dept, friends in high places will ensure that no matter what happens you will not run into issues of "law".
Not that I disagree with what Megaupload was, but "they paid me to help, and I didn't ask any questions" is about the worst excuse in the world.
edit: to be super-clear, if you're participating in Megaupload, you're participating in Megaupload. It isn't just the CEO who is taking a stand against copyright (or for private communication, or whatever), you are too. Also, you should be prepared that people generally aren't sympathetic to moral stances that are personally lucrative, especially at the expense of others. This is because people lie for money.
Not with Condi Rice on the board. I'm sure her appointment was strategic, but I've refused to use their services since then. My principles don't allow it.
She was Secretary of the State Department and National Security Advisor during GWB's presidency. It was her advocacy for the Iraq War and her support of CIA torture that I have a problem with. She's tried to downplay her role in it but moron wouldn't.
I've worked for an employer that has wanted me to do illegal things on their behalf w.r.t. payroll 'tweaking'. Refusal to do these things was causing lots of friction and so I did the prudent thing and quit. I've touched the code base that does payroll (doing legal unrelated tweaks). It is still probably being used to steal from their own employees. Am I to expect a knock on the door?
I'd imagine the Napster criteria of "substantial non-infringing use" would be used to differentiate between Dropbox and Megaupload, so I doubt either the company or its employees would have a problem on that front.
But there are lots of companies that break the law so blatantly that their employees cannot claim to be ignorant. For instance, if I were an employee of Uber, I would be very careful traveling and would take every opportunity to hide the identity of my employer, especially if I were going some place where Uber was particularly irreverent of the local laws when trying to enter the market.
So basically employers/entrepreneurs get all the rewards if their companies succeed but if they fail, it's the employees who take the fall.
And then, when things do work out, these 'entrepreneurs' are the ones who boast about how they overcame adversity in the face of impossible odds.
Now I understand why Donald Trump is so popular in the US.
People just lost all faith in the system; so they might as well get some entertainment out of it.
You can expand the scope and say that generally, the rich and powerful can get away with crimes while the poor and powerless (and less-connected) take the fall.
> Now I understand why Donald Trump is so popular in the US. People just lost all faith in the system; so they might as well get some entertainment out of it.
That's my theory too, and US is not the only Western country where this seems to be happening. Voter turnout is falling across the whole Western world, and a big part of it is probably people realizing politics is a circus, and not wanting to touch it with a ten-foot pole. When every choice is equally bad, and you'll have to find your way around the problems by yourself anyway, what's the point of even caring about the political scene? Getting some laugh at its expense is about the best use one can find.
I wouldn't exactly say that the system has let Kim off at all. Sure, he hasn't spent any serious time in jail, but it's just because the U.S. hasn't been able to get him extradited. In fact they've pursued him so aggressively that it's helped his fight against extradition.
And the other employees and Kim probably didn't come voluntarily to US. The US government would be happy to have Kim thrown to prison as well, but they haven't been able to catch him.
"Like Dotcom, Nõmm next spent a significant amount of time fighting extradition. But eventually in 2015, he voluntarily traveled to the US and was arrested in Virginia."
Some of the coders from Lovoo (dating site/app) may be next. They created fake bots for male customers which the german IT magazine c't reported on last year based on a set of Outlook mailbox dumps they were handed. Now the police raided Lovoo HQ.
What's the thought process behind documenting the illegal activities in email threads? It makes you wonder if they honestly thought they were just developing test bots for QA purposes.
What's the actual law/potential charge behind the Lovoo situation? Creating fake users to make a Web site popular is hardly new: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of... .. In the UK, at least, I believe what Lovoo appears to have done would be treated as false advertising which generally results in fines for the company, but not jail time for employees (at least, in my limited experience reading about such cases).
IANAL, but tricking paid users to believe they're in contact with real humans, with whom they have the hope of getting into some relationship, is on another level.
I do not understand how the US can charge someone with copyright infringement if that person is not a US citizen and has never been to the US. Is there an international agreement on how to handle infringement? Can Americans be extradited for infringing upon copyrights from other countries?
This Australian never been to USA. After doing a similar piracy outfit, they got extradited to USA and prosecuted, jailed. Then when released they got jailed again for being an illegal alien, then deported and banned from USA. I wish I was kidding.
The extradition is legal for a few reasons:
+ Must be a crime in both countries
+ Must be a large jail sentence (Due to the excessive copyright penalties, this one is easy)
+ Must be authorised by the attorney general. The Australian government has the choice not to give up one of their citizens, but in this case they chose to do so.
Any country can charge anyone as long as its laws say it has standing to do so. Having your citizens harmed is a common reason.
Yes, there are international agreements regarding copyright infringement and regarding extraditions in general. In general (and again, IANAL) I think it's common for a country to accept to extradite someone if the alleged crime is also considered a crime locally.
I assume if you are involved in stealing property from folks in the US (I assume many of the owners of the stolen material are American companies), the US has the right to extradite you. Seems reasonable to me.
Clearly our prison system in the US is terrible. Of course most other countries are even worse but you'd think we would be more civilized. It's also embarrassing that the only person they were able to put in jail was a simple programmer.
I've never understood why people say things like this.
The USA is supposed to be a developed country, and supposed to be at or near the very best.
What do you have to gain by comparing it to undeveloped countries that are clearly not in the same league?
For example, you just said: Sure, my pro baseball team finishes bottom of the ladder every year, but it's clearly better than all the highschool teams out there. - I sure as hell hope so!
Compare the USA to all the developed countries, aspire for better, and work towards improvement.
>Of course most other countries are even worse but you'd think we would be more civilized.
You'd be surprised. Most western countries, for example, are far better.
And for all countries in general, including the most backwards ones, the overall system is quite better for their citizens, in the sense that the US is (by a large margin) the king of incarcerations. 4% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's inmates.
Then there's those medieval ideas like the "death penalty" which almost all the modern world has abandoned.
I don't know if it's available any more but there was a series on The History Channel ( from back when it had, y'know, history on it ) called "The Big House" with Paul Sorvino narrating that covers how this came to be.
I realized a massive high school being built in my (then) home town had an architecture based on prison design. Not only were prisons a political innovation, but they had a lot to do with how architecture developed.
the high school i went to was of this design as well, very much like a prison. courtyard in the middle, everything was segmented and easy to lock down. very blocky and few external windows.
It's a little sad specifically his own government didn't provide him much help. Numerous other issues with the US aside, I've always been reasonably confident that if I'm out of the country, the American embassy will help me.
And going after the IT staff is pretty awful. Generally speaking, we're just there to make it work. While I make a point to work jobs and clients I think do good work and are moral entities, the reality is, IT doesn't generally decide what a company does or what messes they get themselves involved with.
> I've always been reasonably confident that if I'm out of the country, the American embassy will help me.
You and many Americans. Helpfully aided in that belief by TV programs like Beyond Borders where US authorities act as the World Police jumping into other countries and taking over investigations and rescuing US citizens from any and every scrape they get themselves into.
Outside your own country, your local authorities have very little ability to do much and certainly won't help you in any relatively minor scrapes (nor in most major ones either). Although the US exerts more external influence than it really should, that's limited to guarding US interests (like copyright protection or drug related things).
Unless you happen to be key to US national interest, you'll be on your own, apart from a visit in prison from the embassy staff to let you know that they know you're there - just like the citizens of every other country, as Andrew Nõmm found out.
The Barbary wars were conducted because of the economic impact of taking American sailors as slaves. Free-ing the enslaved sailors was just a value-added benefit.
They will send a consular to make sure you aren't being mistreated while being detained. They will give you a list of english speaking attorneys you can retain for your trial. They may even call your family back home to wire money to your english speaking trial lawyer.
That is about all the help you will get. For this "service" you are expected to file taxes to the US no matter where you work.
During the Yemen civil war while every other country was frantically evacuating their citizens the US did nothing. They did issue a warning saying you should probably leave. A lot of US Citizens, working in foreign aid, found out exactly how far the US was willing to go, not very far at all. Not like how the movies portrays it at all.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other
See case of John Demjanjuk[1] . USA citizen was extradited twice: to Israel and to Germany as "nazi". After his death, FBI confirmed that they know that he is innocent.
Major evidence is fake. Do you know any other evidences?
Throughout three decades of US hearings, an extradition, a death sentence followed by acquittal in Israel, a deportation and now a trial in Munich, the arguments have relied heavily on the photo ID from an SS training camp that indicates Demjanjuk was sent to Sobibor.
Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by Demjanjuk's defense attorneys. However, the FBI report provides the first known confirmation that American investigators had similar doubts.
In 2011 the Associated Press had uncovered a secret 1985 FBI report which indicated that a Nazi ID card showing that Demjanjuk had served as a death camp guard was a Soviet-made fake.
He survived the ordeal, and volunteered to be sent to the Trawniki concentration camp division utilized for the training Hiwi guards recruited from Soviet POWs
Any person who would even briefly read the wikipedia article you linked would see obvious problems with your comment. Did you read the article before linking it?
The gross procedural violations and disgusting behaviour of our (New Zealand) government have helped his case at this point. The judiciary have taken a pretty dim view of John Key's teams' antics.
...except when those orders are to build something innocuous.
If someone told me to build some filesharing software and give it to them, making me responsible for the content is absurd. Its basically the legal equivalent of holding Dropbox developers responsible for piracy.
The only difference is Megaupload was public and blatant enough in English-speaking media (of which the programmer was not a native speaker) for Americans to say "Yes, he should have known what it is for."
What got him in hot water was the fact that Megaupload clearly knew about specific instances of copyright infringement and still went ahead anyway. And this guy knew about it and kept working there helping them do it.
> I also had to sign my name to all of the evidence that had already been collected—for example, to the fact that Megaupload ignored complaints from time to time and did not remove illegal content fast enough. If anyone had any doubts about a file, Kim always calmed them down and said there was nothing to worry about.
> What got him in hot water was the fact that Megaupload clearly knew about specific instances of copyright infringement and still went ahead anyway. And this guy knew about it and kept working there helping them do it.
Do we know it was actually illegal in the country he resided?
As far as I'm aware, the reason he had to be brought to the US was he was within the law in his home country.
So this guy was jailed because he coded an advertising platform and a video hosting service.
I know Mega was on a thin shady line, but what has he done wrong to be jailed in USA ?
The UK has a law called "Joint Criminal Enterprise" which is oft critiqued[0]. In America, this same concept is a de-facto legal and social standard to apply "Guilty by Association" wherever it can.
So, in the USA, it can be (incorrectly) argued - by very, very high powered RIAA legal team - that this was aiding and abetting.[1] It's absolutely wrong, but this is the legal world we live in as developers.
All right, in fact, I think the law you explained is even fair and needed to prosecute some "Joint Criminal Enterprise".
But in this specific case, how could it be "incorrectly" argued, "absolutely wrong" and not dismissed by a judge.
I mean, how can you trust the justice if only the poor chap is the one going to jail.
Yeah, I'm naive, I know.
This was an interview telling one person's side of the story, and it was presented that way I am all in favor of fair, honest and balanced reporting, but in this case I don't think anything was done incorrectly. This was not a "straight facts" piece, it was a subjective interview and clearly labeled as such.
As someone working on a side project that allows people to upload data publically (think something like codepen), what can I do to stay away from trouble like this?
Crazy how the FBI has become the biatch of the american copyright mafia even to a degree of tromping and violating people's rights in other continents. GO USA!
What exactly was the claim against this software eng? By this article it almost sounds like the FBI (guided by the copyright mafia) fabricated a case against some defenseless software dev just to gain more leverage on dotcom.
Remember when GS got the FBI to arrest and prosecute a programmer who did nothing wrong? The arresting agents couldn't even articulate why they were arresting the programmer.
That's what the FBI does. I'm watching The Sopranos on Amazon Prime. Without the FBI doing this, that would have been a much shorter show. I doubt The Sopranos is reference grade, but I don't doubt that the bones of these plot elements are valid.
Some people need to be more careful about what they are offended by.
It's really worth studying the history of the FBI. Hoover basically blackmailed people who got in his way long enough for the general culture to get used to the idea - it was stridently opposed for a very long time.
That's scary. I'm supposed to police my employers actions? To some extent I can understand, but that puts a lot of IT people in awkward positions. Do Dropbox employees need to worry that infringing content is being taken down fast enough, lest the face prosecution?
I didn't follow Megaupload too closely, so I hope I'm blowing this out of proportion...