
Megaupload programmer goes to prison for one year - xyby
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/member-megaupload-conspiracy-pleads-guilty-copyright-infringement-charges-and-sentenced-one
======
jackjeff
I really dislike the extra-territorial aspect of it.

From what I understand the Netherlands copyright law is more lenient than the
US law. For instance downloading copyrighted material was legal until very
recently. So downloading something from Megaupload was hardly a crime there...
[http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-
fin...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-finally-
becomes-illegal-in-the-netherlands/)

So you could do something which is legal, or illegal but not criminal offense
(civil) in the country where you live, but if it displeases the US, then
suddenly they can throw you in jail in a foreign country (the US) where you
have no ties.

I break Chinese laws on a daily basis (Tank Man!). Why should I care about US
law, since I do not live there, nor am I a citizen? It's not like I can vote
for these laws...

~~~
easytiger
Also imprisoning people who are not a danger to society in any way shape or
form is very modern American. And socially destructive.

~~~
aw3c2
[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-
dilemma/](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma/) has
this creepy chart
[https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/roed...](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/roeder-
feature-incarceration-1.png)

~~~
hippich
I think this is because of "war on drugs." Officials decides that drug sellers
and drug users are danger to the society, and therefore locked away (i will
not argue about dangers, just stating what Nixon and most of officials did)

~~~
task_queue
Three strike laws, zero tolerance, the War on Drugs and prison profiteering
have resulted in a generations of poor or black males who will spend the
majority of their adult lives in prison.

------
KhalPanda
This just seems ridiculous to me. I may well get downvoted, but it needs
saying. Why do 99% of the world's governments seem completely retarded when it
comes to copyright laws?

How many tens of millions in legal resources were expended in bringing
'justice' here? And what does the outcome even matter? Good job, tens of
millions down the drain for _one_ year of an Estonian's time? The system would
surely be better served if they just handed those millions to the actual
copyright holders?

The only real victory (if that's what they'd like to call it) is having taken
the site down in the first place, not that that did a single thing to kerb
'illegal' filesharing...

The industry has moved on and adapted just fine.

~~~
BlueAndroid
I work in Law Enforcement, so feel to disregard my opinion as biased ,
however, 75% of my work relates to child exploitation material, and an
enormous amount of child abuse material disappeared from easy access when
mega-upload went down. I used to find computers with lists and lists of
megaupload urls. When that method died out a little beacon of happy shone for
me. Now I understand that free movies trumps removing abusive material, and as
rapidshare and others took a more reasoned approach the child abuse material
slipped into TOR and then i2p (after we brought the house down repeatedly on
lolitacity and similar places in TOR). So it was more of a temporary reprieve.
But those still at it have to work a bit harder and I'm happy about that. It's
all about the free movies right? Well if that's your world, you're lucky.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Your gross simplification of the issue to "free movies vs raping children" is
a straw-man. That kind of patronizing condescension may work on morons, but
there are those who have given careful consideration to the issue and decided
that despite the negative aspects of free speech and the rule of law, that
free speech is in fact more important than catching file-sharers of any kind,
and that your ends-justifies-the-means philosophy is absolutely the wrong way
for police to operate in a "free country". I'm glad you realize that you're
playing wack-a-mole, while perverts film themselves raping children and then
sell that. Hopefully one day you'll graduate to actually stopping child abuse
at the source, but hey, feeling good about yourself in this moment is more
important than actually doing good, right?

~~~
BlueAndroid
The depressing reality is that I'm confronting the reality of the hands on
abuse on a day to day basis. That's my world. If your's doesn't have that,
lucky you. I don't feel good about it in the slightest. But thanks for letting
me vent that :) I'm not sure why free speech IS file sharing in your argument.
Maybe freedom of intellectual property? You're also making assumptions about
the law I operate under. I'm not in the US or NZ. So I couldn't have any
impact on the mega situation. I too am amazed by the extra-territorial nature
of the proceedings. I think it's bad law. I mean, WETA is in NZ, some of their
movies would have been on mega, it could have been done by New Zealand police
and courts. Why not?

I am occasionally regaled by tales from investigators I have assisted with
descriptions of jail sentences handed down to abusers- you would think that
would be satisfying. It's not. It's just confirmation by jury and society that
they were in fact evil human beings and in a couple of years they'll be back.
And that's grim.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>The depressing reality is that I'm confronting the reality of the hands on
abuse on a day to day basis. That's my world. If your's doesn't have that,
lucky you.

Yeah, I get it, you're a dedicated do-gooder and people don't stroke your ego
often enough. You're a legend in your own mind.

>I'm not sure why free speech IS file sharing in your argument.

"file sharing" or 'freeloaders watching movies without paying' is a minor
consequence of free speech on the internet.

>You're also making assumptions about the law I operate under.

Your rhetoric falls within what I would classify as typical American
scaremongering. TBH, if you're going to make these kinds of posts in a thread
about the US DOJ's crowing about their success defending private industry's
profit goals; I don't think it matters much.

------
DigitalSea
Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find themselves
in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people are using for
infringing content. This is ridiculous. Lets jail the developers of uTorrent
while we are at it, thanks to them, I am able to easily queue up a torrent of
Game of Thrones.

We are living in a world where people are being jailed or acts that cause no
actual harm to anyone all the while people committing actual crimes go
unnoticed or repeatedly go in and out of the system. People slinging drugs in
the streets probably get lesser sentences than Andrus got for helping develop
Megaupload.

"In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the
Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million. He further
acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through
their conduct."

Classic entertainment industry mathematics. How can a figure as large as $400
million be accurately proven? Seems like they just spun a massive wheel down
at the law firm and chose whatever number sounded large, but not over the top.
More specifically, how can a computer programmer who doesn't sound like had
any involvement in the business side of things know how much Megaupload
supposedly cost the industry?

There are so many things about this story that don't sit right with me. They
went after the low hanging fruit. They couldn't touch Kim Dotcom, so they're
going for the vulnerable and lesser high profile people involved in hopes of
building up a case for bringing down Dotcom. This is what it is all about:
sending a message to Dotcom and trying to slowly try anyone even remotely
involved in the Megaupload site. They know Kim won't go down without a fight,
they'll basically say: Well one of the sites developers admitted there was
copyrighted material on the site and he knew about it, he was sent to jail.

As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I
don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll be
sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be concerned
with this judgement.

~~~
tzs
> Uh, oh. Lets hope that programmers at Google and Dropbox don't find
> themselves in prison for knowingly developing web applications that people
> are using for infringing content. This is ridiculous.

Neither Google nor Dropbox was set up with the intent of aiding copyright
infringement. Neither Google nor Dropbox based their business model on aiding
copyright infringement. The comparison is invalid.

> As a developer this worries me. If my employer is committing illegal acts I
> don't know about like copyright infringement or fraud, does that mean I'll
> be sent to jail even if I legitimately didn't know? We should all be
> concerned with this judgement.

He was the head of software development for Megaupload. It is hard to imagine
that he did not have full knowledge of what they were doing and was not
involved in planning it.

~~~
kaoD
To be fair, Megaupload didn't explicitly condone copyright infringement, and
if I recall correctly infringing files were removed.

Are my memories flawed and Megaupload ignored the copyright infringement
notices, or is Megaupload the fall guy to scare everyone else?

~~~
tzs
When Megaupload received notification of an illegal file, their action
depended on the type of file. If it was child porn or terrorism propaganda,
they deleted the file. If it was copyright infringement, they made the
specific URL that was reported stop working, but retained the file, and all
other links that referred to that file continued to work.

Even making the specific URLs stop working was a sore spot with Dotcom. He
sent emails to employees telling them to not even do that when they got a mass
report of infringement from an "insignificant source". An "insignificant
source" meant anyone other than a major organization in the US (e.g., major
Hollywood studios).

As far as explicitly condoning copyright infringement goes, sometimes users
would see movie trailers, and ask Mega where they can see the full movie
online, and Mega employees would answer by pointing them to third party sites
that linked to the full movies on Mega. One Mega email to such a user included
the explanation that you cannot find the links by directly searching Mega
because "that would cause us a lot of trouble".

~~~
tptacek
Megaupload also ran a monetary incentive scheme that ranked rewards for users
based on the value of the content; discovery during the prosecution turned up
emails from Megaupload employees overtly acknowledging copyrighted content and
rewarding it with enhanced payouts.

------
contingencies
By that logic, authors of filesystems, ssh, TCP/IP should go to jail. Quick,
let's sue the Oxford dictionary! Military style raid on DARPA for inventing
the internet! Oh, wait ... that's the military. Can't we have our cake and eat
it too? Talk about political sham oldboy network rent-a-justice. Legal systems
need to be decentralized, their interpretation and processes transparent.
Perhaps a forward thinking country like Ecuador might be up for the challenge?
I exclude Estonia as they are embroiled too much in EU legalese to have much
of a chance of a running escape.

------
SebKba
Yet every single one of the bankers who brought the world economy to the brink
of collapse walks free, enjoying the fruits of his labour. The system works.

~~~
easytiger
Please, give it a rest on this "banker" polemic nonsense.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
why ?

~~~
blowski
Because it makes the issue seem like it's only a concern of angry and ignorant
teenagers. While I for one would love for the current corporate capitalist
model of society to be fundamentally restructured, it's not going to happen by
making snide remarks on Hacker News.

~~~
SebKba
It's the first thought that popped into my head...

I don't exactly see how your comment helps any more than mine but that's fine.

~~~
psykovsky
Bread and circus... Bread and circus...

------
pluma
Sidenote: it's so weird the English language uses the same word "justice" for
the legal system and the moral concept. In German for example the two are
different, making it easy to explain to people how the legal system is about
equal application of the law, not personal closure. The domain "justice.gov"
just sounds like propaganda (imagine "freedom.gov") to me as a non-native
speaker who mostly hears the term used in that second (moral) meaning.

~~~
bhayden
I'm an American, when I think "justice system" I think of justice not on a
personal level, but on a punishment level. Justice is having a punishment that
fits the crime. If someone wanted personal justice, I think they usually
qualify it with "personal" before "justice".

~~~
pluma
Interesting. I don't think of the justice system as concerning punishment at
all. The primary functions to me are rehabilitation and prevention (via
incapacitation).

Even though my view certainly isn't representative, it seems to me that
American culture is far more concerned with punishment or retribution than
rehabilitation than we are in Germany. Sure, we have tabloids calling for
"severe punishments" as well, but in general the system seems to be far more
concerned with protecting the public (and maybe converting the criminal to a
law-abiding citizen in the process).

~~~
bhayden
The prison system in the US is designed to create repeat offenders. This is
because we have a lot of for-profit prisons that benefit from repeat
offenders. There is no rehabilitation going on, I assure you. Quite the
opposite is true.

~~~
pluma
Unsurprising, especially with how prison rape seems to be considered par for
the course in the public conscience. The only thing that confuses me is how
the public doesn't seem to mind, especially when it comes to young black men
(who seem to be considered criminals a priori these days).

------
draugadrotten
If the EU is willing to do this to a programmer, it makes it easy to
understand why Julian Assange is refusing to leave the Embassy of Ecuador.

------
jkot
> _Nomm agreed that the harm caused ... exceeded $400 million... group
> obtained at least $175 million ... Megaupload.com ... it accounted for four
> percent of total Internet traffic, having more than one billion total
> visits, 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors._

> _Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer ... from 2007 until his
> arrest in January 2012. ... he was aware that copyright-infringing content
> was stored on the websites ... which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy”
> warning._

> _Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files
> from the Mega websites._

Replace megaupload with any website or service provider (Youtube, Dropbox,
Gmail, Facebook) and it gets scary very quickly.

------
jacquesm
The programmers of the largest copyright infringing company on the planet
(Google) are hopefully exempt from idiocy like this. Youtube contains massive
amounts of copyright infringing videos, Google books brought it to a whole new
level and the Google cache infringes on a very significant portion of the web.

~~~
throwawaykf05
Youtube honors the DMCA (the spirit as well as the word of the law - something
Mega was shown not to do). Google books did get sued, but were found exempt
under fair use (and having used Google Books, I'd tend to agree with that
decision, though IANAL.) And last I checked, caches are explicitly exempt from
copyright considerations.

------
tempodox
Article quote: _In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright
holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million._

Poppycock. How is a computer programmer qualified to estimate the pecuniary
value of “harm caused” by the shop they're working at? What about the harm
caused to Justice by farces and show trials like this?

~~~
pluma
"Agreed" is also such a weasely claim.

And of course the "harm caused to copyright holders" is a farcical concept to
begin with. You can't just take, say, the total number of downloads and
multiply that with some fictitious amount of lost revenue and then claim that
as damage, yet that's exactly what the rights utilization industry has been
doing for decades.

This concept is based on the idea of physical _theft_. If I steal a truckload
of soap and then sell it myself, the damage I'm doing to the legitimate owner
is equivalent to the volume I stole multiplied by the original selling price
minus regular shrinkage (e.g. lost sales because of faulty products, damage
during regular handling or natural expiry).

Digital goods don't work that way. The "theft" of digital goods does not
result in you having less products to sell. Instead it's more similar to the
damage done via the "theft" of trade secrets. If I steal the Coca Cola recipe
and begin giving away knock-off cola for free, I arguably cause damages due to
lost sales, but it'd be ridiculous to assume that every "sale" of my product
is equivalent to one lost sale of the Coca Cola company.

In fact, MegaUpload didn't even "steal" anything. If we want to use physical
crimes as metaphors, it's simply dealing with stolen goods -- or more
precisely: giving stolen goods away for free. And if one million users
downloaded the same illegal content, they didn't give one million stolen goods
away, they merely gave the same stolen goods away a million times.

It's not that copyright violations can't cause damages, but the current system
for valuation of those damages -- especially in the US -- is entirely
ridiculous and only continues to exist because the courts are either too
apathetic or too ignorant (or sometimes both) to dismiss it.

------
Fuxy
There's a lot of lip service but I still don't get why a programmer need to go
to jail for this crap.

Are they prosecuting everyone that ever worked for or did business with
megaupload now?

Because that seems a bit shady.

~~~
Tharkun
Might as well jail every tobacco or arms producer as well.

~~~
bhayden
Pretty sure if an arms dealer promoted, even indirectly, the use of their
firearms for illegal purposes, they'd also get some people going through the
justice system.

------
guard-of-terra
That's Iran-grade justice.

"Let's persecute a random programmer that touched thing we really dislike".

~~~
tzs
He was Megaupload's head of software development, which is a bit more than
just "a random programmer that touched thing".

~~~
guard-of-terra
This is another way of saying "he was a naughty boy". Yes he was, and no, you
can't imprison someone for that.

He downloaded some illegal files, he was a head of development and not just a
developer, he saw some scare banners on content - all that facts help you sell
a story to newspaper reader but for court it's all tangential.

~~~
throwawaykf05
Have you read the full charges against Mega? They actively uploaded, and
encouraged others to upload, copyright infringing material to jack up their
traffic. They very knowingly violated the law. That's quite a bit different
from the garden variety "download a few files" piracy.

------
kumarski
Wells Fargo smuggled half a Trillion(with a T) dollars worth of drug cartel
money.

Zero Punishment.

~~~
hellbanner
None at all huh? Please discuss, HN (see my other comments in this thread).
This seems relevant to the idea of "Justice".

------
jpgvm
Tbh he kinda fucked up. He waived his right to an extradition hearing in the
Netherlands.

I am fairly certain the Dutch court would not have let him be extradited over
this bullshit. Case and point, he is the only one to be extradited
successfully and only because he went of his own free will.

~~~
pluma
I'm fairly certain he talked to a lawyer before waiving his right. I know that
that's what I would have done in his situation -- it's not a decision you take
lightly.

I'm also fairly certain his lawyer told him that his hearing would be unlikely
to result in a rejection and that complying with the US prosecution would be
his best chance for the least bad outcome.

------
ryan-allen
... what the hell?

And they're trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US as well!

At the time of launch, I thought how cool it'd have been to work on the
project, ouch.

------
primitivesuave
It's a real shame that millions of our tax dollars go to putting a single guy
in prison for a year, when they could be much more effectively put towards
prevention and prosecution of violent criminal activity.

------
choppaface
Nice job DoJ. Now to raise the bar and serve the people some _real_ justice,
go get Jamie Dimon ( [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-
witn...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-
witness-20141106) ).

------
jcrei
What if you are a programmer working for any major corporation that happens do
be doing some illegal stuff (Banks, Oil, gambling, etc). Should you be afraid
to go to jail?

~~~
omeid2
Of course not, Banks, Oil, and basically all big corps are immune from law.

The sad thing is, that is hardly an exaggeration.

------
TylerH
Wait, I can't tell if this is about the old Megaupload site or the new
Megaupload site.

------
smutticus
Can someone with more details on his involvement provide more information? I'm
confused as to what exactly this guy did for Mega.

------
ommunist
Why than the owners of Google are still free?

------
elcct
Well, programmer is not a banker...

------
manish_gill
This is such bullshit.

