Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload have each been sentenced by a New Zealand court to more than two years in prison. The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering. The sentencing came after the men struck a deal last year with prosecutors from New Zealand and the U.S. Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, is continuing to fight the U.S. charges and threat of extradition. He has said he expects his former colleagues to testify against him as part of the deal they struck.
Does the punishment fit the “crime”?
All of the people who need to be in jail to protect us from them seem to never go, and they are busy busting people like these guys and Ross Ulbricht who were actually advancing use of technology.
What’s worse:
I find it very dubious to conflate running a hosting service with piracy, even if piracy was all over it.
Well, that’s something he certainly knows a lot about, as he did the same way back when.
Considering copyright shouldn’t exist, then obviously not. These people did nothing but copy data that happened to be censored by “property laws” that are based on a flawed definition of what people can actually own.