Kim Dotcom Offers $5 Million Bounty To Defeat Extradition 253
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."
You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cell (Score:3, Insightful)
Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the film industry creating a cartel and using laws to enforce it, stuff like region coding DVD's and BluRay's, encryption, or adding unskippable bs like copyright notices on LEGIT bought products. The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product, but corrupt governments side on the media cartels who refuse to update their business models to the current real world - they are stuck in the last century.
The law has been bought and paid for by the corrupt media cartels. The law is a disgrace, as are our bought corrupt politicians.
Re:How about a Kickstarter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hundreds of millions of people _do_ do copyright infringement, because there are typically no adverse consequences.
FTFY.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
If simply being an asshole was just cause to terminate your civil rights, we'd all be behind bars.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
Re:How about Kindergarten? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
If it's not just yours, pay a corrupt legislature to make it exclusively yours, and to make anyone else using it a criminal offense, enforced by the threat of violence.
Fixed that for you.
Given his record... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I wouldn't count on him actually planning to pay a cent.
Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:2, Insightful)
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.
He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."
Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws MUST be supported by the general population if they are supposed to be upheld. Laws OPPOSED by the majority of people are actually a threat to the legal system itself.
If there is laws that most people oppose (like, say, a lot of laws in former communist states), they will break it, or at the very least, they will not report it if they know someone else breaks it. Be honest: Imagine your best friend kills someone in cold blood, would you tell on him? I'd say the chance that you do is at the very least a LOT higher than you ratting him out for downloading some blockbuster movie. Why? Because your support for the law against murder is (at least if you're a somewhat normal human being) a lot stronger than your support for copyright. If the latter exists at all.
Copyright is a law that is enforced by and for a minority. While at the same time opposed or ignored by a majority. The danger here is now that this not only means that copyright becomes a hollow shell of a law, it means that laws are questioned entirely. Allow me an example.
I remember an experiment where a "no littering" sign was put up prominently on a corner of the street. And no littering happened. The place was clean. Then, after a week IIRC, they dumped some litter on the spot and it didn't take long for the litter to grow and multiply. When people see a law being ignored with impunity, they will follow suit.
The problematic thing here is that copyright is one thing. What's next? When you can break copyright laws, why not other laws? We identify copyright laws as unjust and wrong, so what about the others? Are the other laws right? Or should we take them into question as well? Why not break other laws? Once you broke one, breaking another one gets a lot easier.
Re:Cartels (Score:4, Insightful)
If a law is so easy to casually disregard, and violating it provides a clear benefit to the violators and the harm it causes is theoretical, that's a sign the law itself is bad. Eating at Burger King should not be thought such a harm to McDonalds that it should be outlawed.
We ought to have digital public libraries by now. Such a thing is a clear benefit to society. Searchable works of art! No more archaic card catalogs. No more denying a patron because all the copies are currently checked out. No more losses from patrons being careless with the physical media and damaging it. Far less storage space needed, space which can be used to hold more works, or repurposed. No more late fees and returns. No more having to physically travel to the library, twice, spending time and most likely gas. Did you see the article some days ago about streaming saving society lots of money compared to fooling around with DVDs? We could have all of this, now, if not for copyright law.
Everyone should be willing to practice civil disobedience of bad laws. Be like Rosa Parks and don't meekly go along with racist seating arrangements. If US citizens are no longer willing to do that, maybe we ought to petition the British Monarchy to let us back in the fold, and we'll all issue a national apology to George III.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your point? That he was guilty then, so whatever charges the government brings against him now are valid, and no matter how much the government violates standard procedures and illegally obtains evidence, it should be ignored?
Re:How about Kindergarten? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who doesn't know... Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
Sure, he is. What's truly incredible is that a piece of lowlife scum such as that can come out looking like the good guy. He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
He might be bad, but the people pursuing him are much worse. The fact that they're doing it using your taxes and claims of legality makes it vastly worse still.
slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the /. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
Suckers, all of you.
It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is (Score:2, Insightful)
> It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is, they went back to 1787 to bribe the founding fathers to include copyright in the constitution [...]
How long was copyright protection then? How long is it today? Was infringement a criminal offence then? Today?
Ah, and BTW: it is actually amazing how much corruption Hollywood can get away with. And deepressing.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:2, Insightful)
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
And this is how sleazy fraudsters survive. It's called misdirection. They're exploiting the weak minds of good people who don't realize that the other thing he's pointing at is simply the same thing in a different place. Politicians and sleazy fraudsters are of the same kind. By constantly pointing at each other, they prevent us from taking them down, because we can never decide which one to get rid of, focus and finally do it.
Re:Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope.
Basically nope. I mean, sure, you can make stuff up about me if it makes you feel better. If you look at my wall full of DVDs and don't even consider the ones I've given away to charity shops, you'd be hard pressed to claim I'm a freeloader.
I still use TPB. Heck, I even download Agents of Shield from TPB despite it being 100% legal for me to watch it either broadcast or online.
Why do you think I do that?
It's because the service offered by TPB and the resulting product is indisputably etter than what you can get elsewhere. The advantages of TPB are:
* Variety of size / quality options available.
* Everything available in one place.
* Great search engine.
* No "streaming" crap, you just get a file.
* No DRM: you can watch the file anywhere.
* No ads.
* No unskippable "content".
* Works in my favourite media player.
* Works on my phone.
* Even my in-law's TV can play the files natively.
* Some very old, obscure stuff available.
* Good download clients where you can prioritise stuff you want now, versus stuff you want later.
The disadvantages:
* No obvious way to compensate people for their work.
* I do not actually believe that impossibly proportioned women would like to date my testicles.
A better product is more than just the film itself. If someone jabs you with a sharp stick for the entire duration of the film as a condition of you watching it, then that, too is part of the product.
TPB removes the bit where they jab you with sticks. People like that, free or not.
re: Dotcom's history (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to defraud telephone companies with custom made electronic boxes that let people cheat the established system, making long distance calls for free. That was before their careers took off, building and selling computers. Please elaborate on how that activity done as teenagers for kicks invalidates Apple as a legitimate business today?
Re:How about a Kickstarter... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is bullshit fear mongering.
Statistics about rape vary widely, mostly because "rape" is not clearly defined. People with an agenda to push use "rape" as a term because our mental image is that of someone brutally abusing his (generally) victim, forcing sexual intercourse against physical resistance, with screams and blood and violence.
But to arrive at that 30% number, you need to include every outlandish definition of "rape", which includes statutory rape (boyfriend who is age-of-consent +1 day having consensual sex with his girlfriend who is age-of-consent -1 day), date-rape (aka you were drunk and regretted your decision when you sobered up) and various other kinds of so-called "rape" that include all the shades of grey you can imagine.
The whole topic is so emotionally charged and confusiong that it has its own Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], and if you follow that, you get some enlightenment:
Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.)
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which uses a narrower definitions, found that only 0.5% of women and 0.06% of men, age 12 or older, were victims of rape or sexual assault in 1995. (The NCVS groups together rape and sexual assault.) By 2010, these numbers had decreased to 0.2% of women and 0.01% of men.
Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:4, Insightful)
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials
No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate [wikipedia.org], for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair [wikipedia.org]. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.
What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers [wikipedia.org]. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.
I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.