He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property, films, TV shows and music and the like. And unlike say normal use of bittorrent, making a lot of money off it. And being the largest player doing that. I'm not sure about the morals but you can certainly understand financially why they've gone after him.
Minor nitpick, but he was not stealing, he was infringing copyrights.
To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without permission, such that you now possess it, but they no longer have it.
To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy of another person's work without their permission.
Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of copyright infringement are losing is not their property, but the potential extra profit they could have made if they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and distribute their work.
Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their property. Copyright infringement is illegal because (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less incentivized to create things because they won't be able to profit as much.
This. The phrase "intellectual property" is an attempt to confuse a censorship strategy that's a few hundred years old with an entirely separate tradition that's been with us for millennia. They're very different, whatever words you use for them.
And then you have the people who say that language changes based on usage. Get enough people calling it property, theft, stealing, irregardless, etc. and then you can change the dictionary.
It this case revenue or profit was stolen just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.
Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
a : the act of stealing
specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to
deprive the rightful owner of it
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Revenue or profit where not stolen because they weren't there in the first place to take. There's potential revenue, but it's not there to be stolen yet.
> [...] just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.
Please assume good faith when discussing here. I personally don't think that the concept called "wage theft" is actual theft, for the same reasons I don't think copyright violations are theft. In fact, I don't think I ever used that term anywhere, in this thread or in the past. So please don't attribute to me thoughts that I didn't express.
> You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Why does the fact that something is or isn't theft imply whether or not it is immoral? A lot of things are immoral but aren't theft.
There was no revenue or profit stolen. The copyright holder had an exclusive license (a legal monopoly) to copy/sell/distribute their work, which is essentially a legal contract we've all agreed to as a society. The copyright infringer is guilty of violating the terms of that agreement. But violating terms and theft are not the same thing.
> Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?
Sure, that offends my moral sensibilities. But it's still not theft.
That said, I think it's a gray area.
Let's say you develop a recipe and start cooking it for people. Perhaps you're the first person to ever make chicken parmigiana. Then I copy that recipe and start my own restaurant that sells chicken parmigiana. Does that feel immoral to you? Probably not, because we've grown up in a world where (due to arbitrary cultural traditions) we're okay with "stealing" creative food recipes but not creative musical or story elements.
My personal moral intuition is that, the more complex a creation gets, the more I feel it's immoral to copy it. For example I'm less upset at someone who copies a riff from a song, or at someone who writes fan fiction, than I am at someone who copies a book wholesale and tries to pass it off as their own.
> He was predominantly stealing US intellectual property, films, TV shows and music and the like.
But they have no jurisdiction as he was not doing that IN the US. When the Pirate Bay guys were persecuted, the US got Sweden to convict them. They weren't extradited to the US.
Well they've been arguing over that in various court for over ten years. They didn't just charge him with copyright infringement which itself would probably not be extraditable:
>..charged in 2012 with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.
Often with US law enforcement where there's a will there's a way even if it doesn't strictly stick to normal legal practices. See also Assange, and if you read Howard Marks book Mr Nice there's another example of where they got him in an unconventional way. Plus of course a variety of drone assassinations.
He has US victims though. Fraudsters aren't absolved of responsibility in the USA just because they operate outside the border, and the same can be true of other crimes.
is US intellectual property a national security issue? I don't understand why they went to such extent pursuing a man for simply running a piracy site
meanwhile US is losing influence and trust on geopolitical stage, shouldn't that be the bigger issue
edit: im being rate limited so heres my response to comment below:
I didn't say anybody was replacing US, merely they are losing credibility and prestige on world stage and this isn't recent and not slowing down.
I don't think any country will be able to replace US and its freedom of maritime navigation anytime soon.
China is in no position to project as its undergoing internal turmoil. Neither is Russia. BRICS also won't offer much.
One potential non-zero chance scenario is the northern artic sea routes opening up due to rising temperatures melting ice bypassing the need to route through singapore and suez canal which would put Russia back on the power map.
US is a hyperpower and there is no equal.
Maybe a unified Korea with extended northern manchuria territories can fill the vacuum left by China and Russia in the region. I don't really see any other candidates.
One of the reasons the US is viewed as such a good place to start a business is that the country will go to bat for their (favored) businesses internationally.
National security is very far from the only scenario where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for better or worse.
In addition to copyright infringement, the charges are conspiracy, racketeering and money laundering, and presumably the evidence is strong. He has a long history of criminal activity, including embezzlement, selling personal information and trying to run a fake investment firm out of Hong Kong, after which he fled to New Zealand.
