Kim Dotcom Offers $5 Million Bounty To Defeat Extradition

heretic108 (454817) writes "Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom has posted a bounty of $5 million to anyone who can dig up any dirt which saves him from extradition to the U.S.. This bounty would be payable not only to government employees, but also to anyone who can retrieve documents clearly proving corruption in the whole prosecution process. 'We are asking for information that proves unlawful or corrupt conduct by the US government, the New Zealand government, spy agencies, law enforcement and Hollywood', Dotcom told website Torrentfreak.com."

Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel

[L4t3r4lu5]

For anyone who doesn't know, Kim Schmitz aka Kimble aka Kim Dotcom has a history of electronic theft, theft of trade secrets, insider trading, fraud, and has narrowly avoided prison in Germany a handful of times. He's was doing it before his "career" took off, hacking into banks from as early as 1995.

Go look into Kimvestor, a shoddy investment firm, and Data Protect. He made his "fortune" selling the latter off at the peak of the dot com bubble. Later he straight up pump-and-dump'd Letsbuyit.com, netting over â1.5m in profit.

Cartels

[CodeBuster]

That's really only true in the United States and somewhat less so in Europe. In most of the rest of the world they don't really give a damn about copyright, at least in practice. Oh sure, foreign governments will sign the copyright conventions or promise to enforce local laws, but in practice they turn a blind eye.

First, film and music piracy is largely considered to be an American problem and it's hard to get people to care much about rich foreigners being less rich (and all Americans are rich by their standards). Second, in Mexico, Brazil and other South or Latin American countries, media piracy is looked upon with about the same seriousness as jaywalking if it's looked upon as a crime at all, which it's often not. The police down there largely couldn't care less and they look the other way in return for modest bribes. Third, in societies such as Mexico and Brazil, which are very unequal in terms of wealth and income, pirated or knock off goods are the only way that most people have any access to consumer items. Without pirated media and knock off goods, they largely wouldn't be able to afford any foreign things like DVDs, name brand fashions, music, video games and the like.

Lastly, the copyright business in Mexico especially is frequently under the control of the cartels (the drug cartels not the American media cartels). The two biggest are Los Zetas [wikipedia.org] (who based their logo on the title card of The Godfather) and La Familia Michoacana [wikipedia.org]. The pirated DVD business doesn't bring in as much scratch as drugs, but it does provide walking around money to pay cartel foot soldiers and helps the cartels maintain presence and better control territories in Mexico. Of course, it goes without saying that they're not very concerned about copyright laws being that they torture and kill as a matter of doing business. The Mexican government itself already doesn't have a large enough budget for their own internal needs, never mind enforcing foreign copyrights. So you see, copyright is essentially de-facto meaningless outside the United States and Europe.

Re:Cartels

[Opportunist]

That's not even a requirement.

People follow the law out of, well, custom. People actually like living in a predictable environment, and it's predictable to live in a world that has laws you can rely on. Do this and you're a good citizen, do that and you're not. That's something that is generally very well liked among humans. Most people like a predictable life.

And as long as this predictable environment does not conflict too much with their own version of morality and legality, they will support it. They might not support all laws, they may even not care about most of them, and they will probably not understand the reasoning behind some, but, and that's the important part, they don't openly oppose them.

And as long as this is the case, a country is stable and will be supported by its citizens. Only if you start ruling against your population, you will need more and more rigid and oppressive structures to keep up the status quo. And if history has shown us anything, then that such a situation is not sustainable in the long run because you need to waste resources to prop the system up against the own population, which not only costs you resources you could spend elsewhere, it also means that your population will only offer you the bare minimum of support needed. And you will need to watch them closely to ensure that they actually do it, there's no "voluntary" work you can depend on.