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To: Future Useless Eater

People seem to be unclear on who this Kim DotCom character is.

A short history. The guy started out a hacker and ended up a big owner in the Peer-to-Peer file transfer business who got shut down and lost it all.

A little history. Everyone remembers twenty years back and death of MP3.com and Napster? This was file sharing of medium to small music files. The record business shut it down and tried to clamp down on the cash cow of music sales in high quality, something that digital made obsolete.

Along came video files and peer-to-peer sharing became mandatory as few could afford their own FTP site to share from, and files became just too damn big to email as an attachment.

Now, whole music CDs, movies, porn, and all sorts of digital work could be “shared” endlessly — all it took was hosting services on a peer-to-peer service and dozens sprung up. Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, etc.

This is where Kim DotCom comes in. He made some money after being a hacker in an early internet security venture, took that money as he sold out and started MegaUpload in New Zealand. After a profitable few years the Feds decided that to placate the music and film industry they needed to shut down or make-an-example of some of the peer-to-peer deals for “copyright” issues. Ignoring many international restraints they went nuclear on MegaUpload and destroyed the assets and wealth of Kim DotCom and shut down a consortium called Pirate Bay.

Anyone wanting to read the history of before and after Napster should read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_file_sharing


35 posted on 05/20/2017 2:37:49 PM PDT by KC Burke (If all the world is a stage, I would like to request my lighting be adjusted.)
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To: KC Burke

A lot of background from his side of issues of P2P.
http://kim.com/whitepaper.pdf


37 posted on 05/20/2017 2:41:15 PM PDT by KC Burke (If all the world is a stage, I would like to request my lighting be adjusted.)
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