

Kim Dotcom wins right to FBI files - 69_years_and
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7013436/Kim-Dotcom-wins-right-to-FBI-files

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iuguy
It's shocking to think about the US Government's casual disregard for all the
people that used megaupload legitimately, and indeed the FBI's disregard for
the provision of documents that would be expected to be pretty much standard
in most court cases. After all, the ability to see the evidence being put
against you is a basic tenet of the justice system.

~~~
peteretep
It's a stated tenet of most justice systems, but in the US even the justice
system is politicized (elected public prosecutors?!), and everything politics
touches becomes politics.

~~~
Spooky23
US Attorneys (Federal prosecutors) are appointed by the President for 4 year
terms. Local State's Attorneys or District Attorneys are usually elected.

If a case is primarily being handled by the FBI, it's generally a Federal case
being handled by a US Attorney.

~~~
rdtsc
And the President is elected every 4 years, and he is right at the center of
political life in US. If the presidents wants to be elected again, we
shouldn't be surprised if FBI and other parts of the executive branch are used
to improve such odds. I would be more surprised perhaps if they are not used.

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junto
He could try the 'photocopying defense'.

In certain countries the prosecution has a legally responsibility to provide
copies of the evidence to the defendant's legal team within a given time frame
and bring the case to court within a second time frame. Individual copies of
the evidence for the various interested parties must be provided by the
prosecution to the defense team (defendant, legal counsel, barrister, etc).

In cases such as these with overwhelming amounts of 'evidence', a surprisingly
effective defensive legal tactic, is for the defendant to request as many
copies of all of the evidence as viably and legally possible.

It is then almost impossible for the prosecution to both copy the vast amount
of evidence (imagine pages and pages of server logs) in triplicate, and bring
the case to court within the allotted time. The copying alone is unfeasible.

If anything this tactic can be used to force a plea bargain (lesser charge
etc).

A lawyer would have to confirm whether this would work in NZ.

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milesskorpen
I imagine the US government could find the people & money to make as many
photocopies as necessary. The government runs on paper.

~~~
jerf
Megaupload has 25 petabytes of data, according to the company complaining
about having to host it. There was a company at one time who could put 50KB of
binary data on a fax page [1]. 25 petabytes / 50 KB =~ 550 trillion sheets of
paper. Heck, let's let them double-side it, so it's only 225 trillion sheets
of paper.

Even the United States Federal Government would choke on trying to produce
that.

[1]: <http://faxauthority.com/3d-fax/>

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tripzilch
Finally we may learn how it's possible what tiny fraction of those tens of
petabytes of data (25? I forget) held hostage actually consists of content
that the RIAA/MPAA holds rights to (back of the envelope calcs in another
thread showed that there's simply not enough Hollywood movies been made to get
to 5% of that amount, even if they were all encoded as 10GB BluRay rips--which
the majority of movies produced is not available as).

It's the Porn Industry that should be suing for infringement, if anyone.

Even then, given the sheer amount of data stored on MegaUpload, IMO there's
actually a fair possibility (though not a given) that at least a significant
part of that data does not infringe anything. Copyright-infringing data is a
finite resource, There's a huge amount of it, sure, but on the scale of
petabytes it's finite and very non-trivial to get such amounts of it. Non-
infringing but useful data, however, is still pretty much infinite at that
level. There's logs, generated stuff, calculations, measurements, renderings,
database backups.

It's guesswork, but I don't think it's improbable either. I'd really love to
see a rundown of it, one day. And if it really turns out that a significant
part of MegaUpload's data is indeed infringing content owned by the MPAA/RIAA,
I'd be really curious to find out what part of my estimates were so wrong.

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peteretep
If I am ever arrested for anything, I hope to make it in to the British,
Australian, NZ, or Canadian legal systems.

~~~
rmc
You can always find cases of stupid judicial decisions in the UK, like someone
convicted for a tweet, or the very harsh punitative sentances given out after
the recent riots.

~~~
simonh
Harsh sentences for rioters is stupid? I know people who live and work in
those areas.

I'd argue for the tweeting conviction too. It sent a valuable message about
personal responsibility. With the advent of cyber-bullying (awful term) it's a
lesson people need to learn.

~~~
Karunamon
Disagree wholeheartedly. Anyone who is bothered by a tweet has the option of
blocking that person and never hearing from them on that medium ever again.

That right there is why I'm mostly convinced that the entire concept of "cyber
bullying" is silly. When you have complete control over who you do and don't
have interaction with, if someone says something untoward and disturbing to
you, and you just continue to let it happen, the blame is at least partially
on you.

~~~
rys
In the Twitter case, there's nothing stopping the bully starting a new account
and tweeting from that instead, post block. You might have complete control,
but a lot of the time it's only after the fact.

~~~
Karunamon
There's no way for someone to know if they're blocked or not, though. It's not
like Facebook where if you block someone, you are prohibited from interacting
with them in any way. You can still send @messages, but the target won't see
them. DMs can't be sent unless you're friends.

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Ubervan
I find it interesting that people have files hosted in Megaupload that they
have no backups for. Really?

~~~
redthrowaway
I have files in my dropbox for which there are no backups. What's the
difference?

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Simucal
Are the copies of the files on your computer in your Dropbox folder not
defacto backups?

~~~
redthrowaway
Actually, I find myself in a position right now where they aren't on my
computer. My MBP died, and I left my old job so my comp there was reformatted.
I'm using a backup laptop that DB isn't installed on. So, were DB to get
shuttered tomorrow, I'd lose everything.

Although yes, that's far from the average case.

~~~
Simucal
I had briefly considered creating a service that would backup your Dropbox,
GDrive, and SkyDrive but it seemed to me that because most of the users had
the files on their computers locally anyway the idea didn't have a lot of
value. That is why I ask.

~~~
tar
I wonder if there is a service that will sync a local folder on my PC with
more than one cloud service. For example, all my files in a folders are synced
with Dropbox, GDrive AND SkyDrive.

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hastur
Is it just the judge that is so awesome, or the New Zeland justice system in
general?

~~~
cesther
FYI: Judge David Harvey is the author of internet.law.nz and teaches Law & IT
at the University of Auckland's Law School.

~~~
tgasson
Note that internet.law.nz is a book, not a website.

[http://lawshop.com.au/products/internet_law_nz_3rd_edition-8...](http://lawshop.com.au/products/internet_law_nz_3rd_edition-840-40.html)

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J3L2404
Very few people dispute he was profiting from copyrighted material.

Very few people would make a better villain.

The best way to help the RIAA is to have a Kim Dotcom as your poster boy.

~~~
viraptor
We aim to be civilised. The fact that someone broke the law, whether
officially proven or not does not strip them of any protection or rights (well
- it does to some extent if they're jailed, but you know what I mean). He has
the right to fair justice whether he was profiting from distributing
copyrighted material, or not.

