Tag: New Zealand

Dotcom denies defence case collapsing

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

budillionaire-kim-dotcomKim Dotcom’s US lawyer has denied that a guilty plea by one of the Megaupload’s former employees could cause his case to collapse.

Andrus Nomm did a deal with prosecutors where he was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement while working for the now defunct file-sharing site.

The US is trying to extradite Mr Dotcom, who founded Megaupload, from New Zealand to stand trial.

Nomm, a 36-year-old Estonian citizen, agreed to the movie studio’s estimate of $400m of harm to copyright owners as part of the deal.

Also as part of the deal Nomm had acknowledged that through his work as a computer programmer for Megaupload, he had become aware of copyright-infringing material being stored on its sites, including films and TV shows that had contained FBI anti-piracy warnings.

Assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell said that the conviction was a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history.

Dotcom has long maintained that he had not encouraged users to upload pirated material, and has said he cannot be held responsible for what others had stored on his service.

He said that he had no grudge against Nomm, saying that he had nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm and I hope he will soon be reunited with his son.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Mr Dotcom’s lawyer attempted to play down the significance of the latest development.

Nomm was interested in just getting one year and being done with this, essentially he lost on procedure rather than merit.  It looked more like a scripted guilty plea that was more of a Hollywood public relations stunt.

He thought it strange that Nomm pleaded guilty as Nomm was involved particularly in video streaming which was not a copyright crime in the United States.

He also said as part of his plea bargain that no filtering was going on, but the failure to filter was at most a civil and not a criminal issue.

The issue as to whether all this case is civil and not criminal appears to be at the heart of Dotcom’s defence. If the movie studios can convince the US government that its civil cases are criminal conspiracies then it can use government-funded police as private security guards and lock people up rather than suing for damages.

An extradition hearing for Mr Dotcom and three of the other accused is scheduled to take place in Auckland in June.

Linus Torvalds rejects calls to be nice

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

torvaldsThe creator of Linux,  Linus Torvalds, has been explaining his comments to a New Zealand conference about having to be nice.

Torvalds shocked the conference when he fielded  a question from Nebula One developer Matthew Garrett that accused Torvalds of having an abrasive tone in the Linux kernel mailing list. “Some people think I’m nice and are shocked when they find out different,” Torvalds said in response. “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”

Apparently this was deeply shocking as apparently open sourcers secretly believed that Torvalds really loved them and they were heart broken.

Torvalds sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica  responding to statements he made in Auckland, New Zealand earlier that day about diversity and “niceness” in the open source sector.

“What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail.

“I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”

Torvalds then seems to have made matters worse by daring to point out that Open Source is not a religion and you don’t need to have faith.

“‘Open source’ as a term and as a movement hasn’t been about ‘you have to be a believer.. It’s not a religion. It’s not an ‘us vs them’ thing. We’ve been able to work with all those ‘evil commercial interests’ and companies who also do proprietary software. And I think that was one of the things that the Linux community (and others—don’t get me wrong, it’s not unique to us) did and does well,” he said.

He sent a second e-mail to Ars about the topic of “niceness”.

“I don’t know where you happen to be based, but this ‘you have to be nice’ seems to be very popular in the US,” Torvalds continued, calling the concept an “ideology.”

Torvalds lambasted the “brainstorming” model of having a criticism-free bubble to bounce ideas around.

“Maybe it works for some people, but I happen to simply not believe in it… I’d rather be really confrontational, and bad ideas should be [taken] down aggressively. Even good ideas need to be vigorously defended.”

He admitted that maybe it was just because he liked arguing and was not a huge believer in politeness and sensitivity being preferable over bluntly letting people know your feelings.

“I understand that other people are driven away by cursing and crass language when it all gets a bit too carried away.” But he thinks that the open source movement might simply need more “people who are good at mediating rather than just asking developers to calm their own tone or attitude.

Kiwis forbidden to hand over data to the FBI

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

KiwiKiwi cops have been forbidden from sharing encrypted computer keys belonging to Kim Dotcom with their chums at the FBI.

In 2012, New Zealand police seized computer drives belonging to Kim Dotcom, copies of which were unlawfully given to the FBI. Dotcom wants access to the seized content but the drives are encrypted. He is worried that if he types them in the Kiwi cops will give them to the FBI who will use it against him.

A judge has now ruled that even if the Megaupload founder supplies the passwords, they cannot subsequently be forwarded to the FBI.

In May 2012 during a hearing at Auckland’s High Court, lawyer Paul Davison QC demanded access to the data stored on the confiscated equipment, arguing that without it Dotcom could not mount a proper defence.

But while Dotcom subsequently agreed to hand over the passwords that was on the condition that New Zealand police would not hand them over to US authorities.

The police agreed to give Dotcom access to the prompts but only if the revealed passwords could be passed onto the United States.

Justice Winkelmann ruled that if the police do indeed obtain the codes, they must not hand them over to the FBI. Reason being, the copies of the computers and drives should never have been sent to the United States in the first place and they had been illegally handed over.