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Kim Dotcom sues New Zealand government for damages
By Mary-Ann Russon Technology Reporter, BBC News

   22 January 2018


Kim Dotcom, the founder of file-sharing site Megaupload, is suing the New Zealand government for billions of dollars in damages over his arrest in 2012.

The internet entrepreneur is fighting extradition to the US to stand trial for copyright infringement and fraud.

Mr Dotcom says an invalid arrest warrant negated all charges against him.

He is seeking damages for destruction to his business and loss of reputation.

Accountants calculate that the Megaupload group of companies would be worth $10bn (£7.2bn) today, had it not been shut down during the raid.

As he was a 68% shareholder in the business, Mr Dotcom has asked for damages going up to $6.8bn. He is also considering taking similar action against the Hong Kong government.

As stated in documents filed with the High Court, Mr Dotcom is also seeking damages for:

   all lost business opportunities since 2012
   his legal costs
   loss of investments he made to the mansion he was renting
   his lost opportunity to purchase the mansion
   loss of reputation

"I cannot be expected to accept all the losses to myself and my family as a result of the action of the New Zealand government," he told the BBC.

"This should never have happened and they should have known better. And because they made a malicious mistake, there is now a damages case to be answered."

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Radio New Zealand: "This has obviously been an ongoing matter, so no it doesn't surprise me."

Key argument

Mr Dotcom's key argument over his extradition is the warrants used for the raid on his mansion and arrest in January 2012 were based on Section 131 of the 1994 Copyright Act of New Zealand.

"Under the NZ copyright act, online copyright infringement is not a crime," said Mr Dotcom.

"92B of Section 131 - an amendment created by parliament in 2012 - prohibits any criminal sanction against an internet service provider in New Zealand.

"In order for the US to be successful with an extradition, the allegation of the crimes that they are charging someone with also have to be a crime in the country from which they request the extradition."

On 16 January, Mr Dotcom announced that he had received two containers worth of his assets that had been released by the Hong Kong government.

"It's about $2m worth of designer furniture and high-tech stuff," he said.

"But most frustrating is the loss of our family archive of 800 hours of video, the birth of my children, birthdays, holidays - it's really sad."

Fighting extradition

Mr Dotcom is still fighting extradition, and the next hearing for the case will be in the Appeals Court on 20 February.

In December, Mr Dotcom requested a judicial review into his case. The US applied to have the arguments he made for his case to be reviewed struck out.

High Court judge Timothy Brewer rejected seven of the eight arguments because he said the High Court was not the place to bring up a judicial review, however he felt that Mr Dotcom did have a case.

"Given the context of the application, and acknowledging Mr Dotcom's submissions outlined above, I accept there is a reasonably arguable case that the district court judge did not have reasonable grounds to believe that the offence for which Mr Dotcom is sought is an extradition offence," he wrote in the judgement.

Mr Dotcom intends to raise the judicial review at the Appeals Court hearing in February.

On Saturday 20 January - the sixth anniversary of the raid - Mr Dotcom married Elizabeth Donnelly in a private wedding ceremony in Auckland.

"Liz and I got married on the sixth anniversary of the raid so that this special day will always be a happy anniversary in the future," he said.

His new micro-payments business, Bitcache, is also preparing to launch an initial coin offering (ICO) in the next three months, underwritten by crowdfunding investment platform Bank To The Future.

Due to the ongoing legal case against him, the ICO will not be open to residents of the US.

Mr Dotcom says that he is separate from Bitcache to ensure that it cannot be shut down in the event that he is extradited and tried in the US.

Nevertheless, he says the damages case is essential to removing the loss of reputation that has made it difficult for him to do business in many countries.

"That's why it's all so important that I clear my name and all the charges are dropped and this damages claim goes ahead," he said.

"I don't want to be seen as what the US government charges me as."

The US Department of Justice has said Mr Dotcom and his associates enabled copyright infringement by letting users store pirated files in free cloud lockers.

Users posted links to the pirated content for others to download free, but Megaupload would not close down lockers containing infringing content.

Mr Dotcom has long argued that he did not aid piracy because he had a takedown system that enabled copyright holders to delete links to pirated files, and without the link, a user could not reach the file.

US authorities say Mr Dotcom and others cost film studios and record companies more than $500m (£322m) in lost earnings, while making at least $175m for themselves.

ontheotherhand wrote:Pinker

The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences

New Report Reveals Google’s Extensive Financial Support for European Academics and Think Tanks

Google has spent millions to support academic research to benefit its business interests.
March 16, 2018


WASHINGTON – Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group focused on public accountability, released a new report revealing how Google has paid tens of millions of euros to European academic institutions over the past decade to develop an influential network of friendly European academics who write research papers supporting the tech giant’s business interests.

CfA Executive Director Daniel E. Stevens stated, “Google’s lavish funding of academics and think tanks helps the company exert a subtle and hidden form of influence on European policymakers. As Europe looks to crack down on Google’s excesses, regulators need to be aware that a good deal of the academic research defending the company is written by Google-funded institutions.”

Spanning the length and breadth of Europe, Google-funded think thanks have published hundreds of papers on issues central to the company’s business, from antitrust enforcement to regulation governing privacy, copyright, jobs, and the “right to be forgotten.” Events organized by Google-funded institutions have attracted many of the European policymakers charged with creating and enforcing regulation affecting the company.

Google’s academic influence program in Europe has gone beyond funding existing academic institutions, as it does in the U.S., to helping create entirely new university institutes and think-tanks in the United Kingdom and several other countries including Germany and France. Executives from Google’s lobbying operation have helped conceive research groups and covered most, sometimes all, of their budgets for years after launch. Google policy executives have acted as liaisons to steer their research priorities and public events with policymakers.

In Germany, for example, Google has provided at least €9 million and offered personnel to help set up the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Additionally, Google funded the creation of the Research Alliance for a Digital Europe (Readie), which is managed by the London-based Nesta foundation. Both organizations have hosted events where Google representatives rubbed shoulders with policymakers, even pitching tech firms’ preferred policies to leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Google has created and endowed chairs at higher-learning institutions in European countries such as France, Spain, Belgium, and Poland. These “Google Chairs” have been established at prestigious universities such as HEC Paris and the College of Europe in Brussels. The chairs are often occupied by academics with a track record of producing research that closely aligns with Google’s policy priorities. The College of Europe’s “Google Chair in Digital Innovation,” for example, is currently occupied by Andrea Renda, a researcher at the Google-funded, Belgium-based Centre for European Policy Studies, who has defended Google against antitrust charges by the European Commission.

Google-financed research and Google-funded academics also are intertwined with research commissioned by the European authorities themselves. In one case, Google and the European Commission jointly financed a study by the Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal that included arguments supporting less restrictive copyright and intellectual property rules, which Google favors.
Europe is both a key market for Google, and the most organized and effective source of opposition to Google’s expansion plans. The European Commission is arguably the only regulator beyond the U.S. with sufficient clout to cause Google to change its conduct.

Stevens continued, “While it’s not surprising that Google is spending millions to influence regulators, government officials should have the benefit of fair, neutral, and unbiased research as they chart a path forward in the digital age. It’s a safe bet that’s not what they’re getting from Google-funded academic institutions.”

https://campaignforaccountability.org/new-report-reveals-googles-extensive-financial-support-for-european-academics-and-think-tanks/

The Cambridge Analytica Files

‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

by Carole Cadwalladr
Sat 17 Mar 2018 18.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

...
In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”
...

Mr. Moonlight wrote:lik se ladno preziva dot com?  lol

Gargantua wrote:https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine

...
What Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing, Facebook and Silicon Valley giants like Google do every day, indeed, every minute we’re logged on.

Today’s internet business ecosystem is built on for-profit surveillance, behavioral profiling, manipulation and influence. That’s the name of the game. It isn’t just Facebook or Cambridge Analytica or even Google. It’s Amazon. It’s eBay. It’s Palantir. It’s Angry Birds. It’s MoviePass. It’s Lockheed Martin. It’s every app you’ve ever downloaded. Every phone you bought. Every program you watched on your on-demand cable TV package.

All of these games, apps, and platforms profit from the concerted siphoning up of all data trails to produce profiles for all sorts of micro-targeted influence ops in the private sector. This commerce in user data permitted Facebook to earn $40 billion last year, while Google raked in $110 billion.

What do these companies know about us, their users? Well, just about everything.
...

lalinea wrote:

Gargantua wrote:https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine

...
What Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing, Facebook and Silicon Valley giants like Google do every day, indeed, every minute we’re logged on.

Today’s internet business ecosystem is built on for-profit surveillance, behavioral profiling, manipulation and influence. That’s the name of the game. It isn’t just Facebook or Cambridge Analytica or even Google. It’s Amazon. It’s eBay. It’s Palantir. It’s Angry Birds. It’s MoviePass. It’s Lockheed Martin. It’s every app you’ve ever downloaded. Every phone you bought. Every program you watched on your on-demand cable TV package.

All of these games, apps, and platforms profit from the concerted siphoning up of all data trails to produce profiles for all sorts of micro-targeted influence ops in the private sector. This commerce in user data permitted Facebook to earn $40 billion last year, while Google raked in $110 billion.

What do these companies know about us, their users? Well, just about everything.
...

pa ono, moze se ziveti bez smartfona, netflixa, online shoppinga itd. ko hoce, nek izvoli. plus, ne prodaju sve firme podatke korisnika drugim firmama, tj nije ovo sto je uradio FB bas norma.

ontheotherhand wrote:Ne moraju da prodaju podatke da bi vlasnici takvih servisa i sajtova imali koristi od informacija koji korisnici svojim učestovanjem stvaraju i uvečavaju njihovu vrednost.

William Murderface wrote:

lalinea wrote:
pa ono, moze se ziveti bez smartfona, netflixa, online shoppinga itd. ko hoce, nek izvoli. plus, ne prodaju sve firme podatke korisnika drugim firmama, tj nije ovo sto je uradio FB bas norma.

Ma baš je to neki izbor. Kome se ne sviđa, nek ide u šumu i nek vrca med s uskokom. Mislim, upravo je takvo uslovljavanje problem.

lalinea wrote:

ontheotherhand wrote:Ne moraju da prodaju podatke da bi vlasnici takvih servisa i sajtova imali koristi od informacija koji korisnici svojim učestovanjem stvaraju i uvečavaju njihovu vrednost.

A u cemu je tu problem? Javi kad izmislis server koji radi na nista.

U članku Share Laba objavljenom o ovom istraživanju, kao i u drugim tekstovima, jasno se može nazreti na čemu počiva ova ljudska piramida i enormna akumulacija kapitala. Pored uglavnom outsoursovanog robovskog rada, koji stvara i održava hardversku podlogu svih IT poduhvata, i koji ne spada direktno u Facebookovu osnovnu delatnost, ova megakorporacija se oslanja na još dva potporna stuba. Besplatan rad korisnika koji je, možemo zapaziti, ispod robovskog (jelte, radna snaga je uvek nešto koštala, ali su u korisnicima svojih servisa internet korporacije konačno dosegle džekpot vladajućih klasa tokom cele istorije, radnu snagu koja radi zaista za džabe) i rad u vidu dostavljanja i sistematizovanja robe, koju čine njihove lične informacije koje se kasnije prodaju u marketinške svrhe. Korisnici to rade pisanjem statusa, tagovanjem, kačenjem slika i uopšte svim svojim aktivnostima na Facebooku (i van samog Facebooka, ali to je priča za drugi put). Drugi, takođe besplatan vid angažovanog rada jeste algoritamski rad, gde algoritmi putem analize podataka koje su korisnici tako voljno predali, stvara ogromne količine metapodataka koji su od još veće važnosti za poslovanje kompanije u advertising biznisu. Share Lab je tokom godina obavio veoma obimna, kvalitetna i faktografski bogata istraživanja vezana za Facebookovu (zlo)upotrebu rada korisnika i algoritama, ali ćemo se na to osvrnuti drugom prilikom, pošto smo ograničeni prostorom i tematikom.

https://www.sk.rs/2017/09/skin01.html

POVJERENICA EU-a za pravosuđe, Vera Jourova, poziva Facebook da razjasni jesu li osobni podaci Europljana, bez njihova znanja, nekontrolirano prikupljani putem te društvene mreže, objavio je njemački list Bild am Sonntag.