 All right. That video was released by Kim.com a week ago. So it's good to see the charges have not slowed him down in any way or make him think twice about anything in any way. All right, welcome. This is Mega Upload. Guilty or not guilty. I'm Jim Rennie. This is Jennifer Granik, if you couldn't tell us apart. We are both former criminal defense attorneys and we are now both internet law-ish people. What's your official title now? I'm a civil liberties director at Stanford Center for Internet and Society. I'm not that fancy. He's very fancy. All right. So today we're going to talk about Mega Upload, kind of talk about the charges against them, the current state of the case, and then we're going to have a little debate slash lawyer argument time. It's going to be more in the style of a closing argument. If you don't know the difference between a closing argument, basically an opening argument is really boring and a closing argument is the stuff you see on TV where lawyers are like, my client is guilty, my client is not guilty. All right. So we're going to have about 10 minutes each for our main argument and three minutes for rebuttal. That's really, really, really, really short. In real life for this case, I think each side would take at least an hour, if not many hours, doing the arguments. So you were getting the very brief version. So we're not going to talk about every aspect of this case, but hopefully we'll enlighten you a little bit about the case, what's going on, and you'll have some fun at the end. You get to vote if you think they'll be found guilty or not guilty or something else entirely. So Jen's going to explain a little bit about the state of the case right now. First I want to give special thanks to Jim for showing up this morning. He is fresh from taking the three-day California bar, and then they delayed his flight, so he got in at five in the morning this morning. So I want to thank him for actually making it. So if I sound a little like Dan Kaminsky while I'm giving this talk, that's why. And then I wanted to just take some time to give you guys a little bit of an update on what's going on in the case. Jim didn't mention this, but he's going to play the prosecutor. He's going to argue that Kim.com is guilty, and I'm going to play the defense attorney, and I'll argue that Kim.com is not guilty. I feel a little bit like I'm in the Matt Blaise role from the last panel, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. But it's a great case with some really interesting legal issues, so hopefully these will elucidate them. So first thing is he's in New Zealand, and the United States government that's prosecuting him is here. How do we get him from there to here? Well, there's extradition, and that is an agreement that countries that are friendly have between each other that when a bad guy lives over there, they're going to send him over here. But certain things generally have to be true, and I'm not an expert in extradition law, but the status of that right now is that the extradition hearing has been put off for a number of months and will not happen anytime soon while they continue to sort of work through the case. One of the major issues in extradition is parity. The thing that the person is accused of doing has to be the same in each jurisdiction or similar in each jurisdiction, because we're not going to export people from the United States to stand trial for things that aren't crimes here in other countries where they might be crimes. So if you badmouth the Thai king here at DEF CON, you can be pretty confident we're not going to extradite you to Thailand to stand trial there for less majesty. It's a crime in Thailand. So one of the major questions in the extradition hearing, and we're going to get an interesting preview of this, is whether copyright infringement that he's charged with here is a crime over there. And it'll be a preview of the argument. So I'm also not super familiar with New Zealand copyright law, but you know, it's not, and I don't know how similar it's going to have to be. Yes, they have criminal copyright law there. Yes, we have criminal copyright law here. But this case, the heart of this case is really based on the idea that mega upload and Kim dot com are criminally liable for the copyright infringement performed by their users. And I have no idea whether New Zealand law even begins to address that. So that's going to be a super interesting hearing. The second thing that's important to note is that just a couple of weeks ago, Kim dot com won a motion to suppress evidence in the New Zealand jurisdiction and motion to suppress their laws similar to ours also a British common law type of country. And that's based on the idea that for searches and seizures, you have to have warrants that are based on probable cause that specifically identify the places to be searched and the things to be seized. And what happened there, the court said is that the people who executed the warrant did not have enough information in the warrant about what information they ought to take. So it said copyright infringement, but it didn't identify that it was that they were looking for evidence of copyright infringement under specific provisions of United States law. They at the very least had to refer to the statutory provisions of United States law. In fact, the warrant didn't even really say that it was about United States law as opposed to New Zealand law. And then there was this whole huge list of things that they could seize. And they basically took whatever they found, including stuff from people who were at Kim dot com's house who were not involved with mega upload like his housekeeper and other kinds of domestic help and that sort of thing. So the warrant needs to specify what the situation is so that I can look and be like, oh, this is the housekeeper's diary. And even though it says books, I'm looking for evidence of this criminal copyright conspiracy. So I'll leave the diary alone that doesn't get seized. So at a certain point, it becomes a general warrant. And the judge in New Zealand was like, this warrant didn't meet these standards. It was too broad. They seized too much stuff. And I'm super pissed because they sent it all over to the United States and it doesn't say they're going to do that in the warrant. And now we can't even get it back to suppress it or return some of the stuff and the privacy of this stuff to people who were affected who were not involved in the mega upload business. So that was a nice success for Kim dot com. But then it was a little bit of a setback because the judge who was overseeing his extradition gave a speech at a conference. And in the speech, he said, we have seen the enemy. And it is us, IE the US, IE the United States and that the United States has an exporter of our copyright law as an enemy to the New Zealand. After making that statement, he had to step down and they'll have to find a new judge to hear his extradition case. So that's the situation there. I'm just going to do a little bit of framing before Jim gets up and makes his argument. We are going to be focused. The case has a couple of charges in it. It has a racketeering charge. It has a money laundering charge. I think he'll be addressing the direct infringement charge. But basically what we're talking about is the criminal copyright infringement for the mega upload business as a whole. I think we both agree there was direct infringement in the case. For example, one of the things that the emails show is that they were basically trying to copy all of YouTube to populate the mega upload service with. And I don't think there's any question that that's direct copyright infringement. But that's not interesting. That's like a five year thing. It's whatever. It was a portion of what was up there. The interesting stuff is what we're going to talk about. And Jim's going to give his closing argument and explain to you the jury, why Kim.com is guilty, then I'm going to get up and try to convince you why he's not guilty. Jim gets a rebuttal because the prosecution always gets to have two times. And then we'll do. I'm going to be nice and give you rebuttal too. I'm going to rebuttal. And then we'll maybe we'll do questions and then we'll vote. And you guys can decide whether he goes free or not. I just want to say as a criminal defense lawyer, when you see your client put out a video where he compares himself to Martin Luther King, you're not feeling that good. But whatever. Okay. In case we care. Okay. I'm assuming you all know what mega upload is. If you don't, here's an extremely brief version. It is slash was a digital storage site where one person could upload a file and then provide URLs, many different URLs that pointed at that content to anyone they chose. Anyone who had a URL that pointed to the content could then download that content. The business model was that it was free to download at first. But it was slow. I mean, we've all used these download sites for various legitimate purposes, I'm sure. But if you want a faster download rate, you have to pay. And then they also sold advertising on the site. So obviously it's in their best interest if you're selling advertising that your site is popular. It's in your best interest when you sell advertising that you have content people want to download. And they learned extremely quickly that the content people want to download is things that infringe other people's copyright like movies, TV shows, software, et cetera. Now, who is being charged? It's not just Kim.com. There's actually a big list of people who are charged. Kim.com is charged personally in his role as the president slash founder of mega upload. Mega upload as a corporation is being charged. Vestor Limited is basically Kim.com shell company that he held his shares of the mega upload stock in is also being charged. And then various mega upload corporate officers who took part in the conspiracy are also charged. Alright, as Jennifer mentioned, they're charged with all manner of stuff, racketeering, fraud, direct copyright infringement. That's going to take a long time to talk about. We're more interested in COUNT 2, which is conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. So I'm going to break that down for everyone so everyone understands what that means. Because if you don't understand what the law is, you're not going to be able to find Kim.com guilty. Alright. A conspiracy is an agreement between at least two people to commit a criminal offense and they have to take an affirmative act toward the commission of that offense. So what that means is if you and your friends are sitting in a room and say, wouldn't it be great if we could rob a bank? We'd have all that money. We could just, you know, retire on an island somewhere. That is not a conspiracy. If the next day one of you goes out and buys a bunch of ski masks and duct tape and maybe some ammo for your gun, we're starting to get toward that affirmative act where now you've indicated that you're really going to carry the conspiracy out. Now what is criminal copyright infringement? It is any person who willfully infringes copyright for the purpose of commercial advantage or financial gain. That is criminal copyright infringement. And the key word here is willfully. You cannot accidentally commit copyright infringement. If you remember back to the Sony Betamax case, the Supreme Court found that the Betamax VCR device did not contribute to copyright infringement because Sony was not willfully trying to make that happen. They took no role in the copyright infringement. And you'll see it's very different from this case here. So we combine those together and we get conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. An agreement between two or people to willfully infringe copyright for commercial advantage or financial gain. Now what is the evidence that Meg upload has done this? As they went over the business model a little bit earlier, they definitely had reason to want to infringe copyright. They wanted to drive traffic. They knew what was popular. I also want to go over how content is shared on Meg upload. As I said, there's the green box there, which is the content and the blue boxes are URLs pointing to the content. Now, you may have heard of the DMCA before, the Millennium Copyright Act. And under that act copyright holders can submit a notice to a site and say, hey, you appear to have content that belongs to me. I would like you to take it down. And Meg upload did have people in charge of responding to DMCA notices. So what happened is there's all these pointers to this content and the copyright holder would say, hey, Meg upload, this is pointing at content that's mine. I have not authorized this to be on Meg upload. Please take the content down. And what Meg upload would do was say, great. We'll take your content down and remove the link that the copyright holder sent them and leave all the other links to the content intact and tell the copyright holder, look, it's gone. Go check the link. We removed your content. When in reality, many people were still sharing and downloading the copyright holders material. This is a willful act that is assisting users in infringing copyright. They've just been told that they don't have permission to have this material on their site. They've been asked to take it down. And instead of actually taking the content down as they're supposed to do under the law, they have allowed, instead they can gain shenanigans and allow the content to keep being shared. I want to go over a few emails and a large part of the indictment, which is in your DEF CON materials by the way, a large part of the indictment is emails between Mr. Vander Kolk who's the lead programmer and Mr. Ortman. Unfortunately for everyone at Meg upload, Mr. Vander Kolk did not do a very good job of deleting his emails in a timely manner. But it's fortunate for us because we get to read all sorts of things like him saying, him sending messages to the CTO of Meg upload saying, we have a funny business. We're modern day pirates. And the CTO of Meg upload responds, oh we're not pirates, we're just providing shipping services to pirates. Smitey face. So I think it's pretty clear that everyone at Meg upload knows what's going on. They know what their service is doing. They want it to succeed. As part of their business model as well, they would give reward payments to users who uploaded content that was popular because popular content drives advertising. They cut those users in on a share of the advertising. And they did not have a sophisticated system for sending out these reward payments. It was not automated, it was manual. So Mr. Vander Kolk would get emails containing lists of who to send payments to. And next to the amounts would be descriptions of why they were sending payments to those users. The description said things like 10 full popular DVD rips or key generators or porn movies. Popular DVD rips, PDF files that look like scanned magazines and they would send money based on the popularity of these items. Again, it's very clear here that everyone knows what's going on. Everyone is willfully helping the users engage in copyright infringement by paying them to upload the copyrighted material. And then we have an email here from Mr. Kim dot com. Actually a mega upload user sent this email in. I guess he didn't have a very cloaked email address. It was probably Kim dot com at mega upload. But anyway, the user sends an email saying I've been trying to watch Dexter, but the sound doesn't match up with the visual. You know, I don't really like your site, but you guys seem to have episode six and seven and no one else does. So I'm watching them on your site. Kim dot com knows he doesn't have permission to show Dexter, which is a show time show. He knows that that's copyrighted material. And what does he do? Does he tell the user, I'm sorry, can't help you out, you know, or does he send an email to anyone saying, looks like we have some copyrighted material, we don't have permission, we should take it down? No. He sends an email to the technical team and says, oh man, people are complaining about audio and visual being out of sync. We need to fix that right away because we're pissing off our customers. So even Kim dot com knows exactly what's going on. He knows there's copyright infringement going on. And instead of trying to stop it, he tries to help people have a lovely experience on mega upload, helps them watch copyright material without the rights holder permission. So again, this is a conspiracy because there's an agreement not only between mega upload and its officers, but also with the users of mega upload to engage in copyright infringement in a systematic way. And again, as Jennifer mentioned earlier, they had, they were systematically ripping off YouTube videos as well. Here you can see Mr. Vander Kolk talking to Mr. Ortman again and saying, you know, Kim really wants us to rip off YouTube's videos on a one-to-one basis. We want to rip them off now so we can have them for later and decide how we're going to benefit from all these videos. So now if we go back ladies and gentlemen to the elements of conspiracy commit copyright infringement, we have agreement between two or more people that's easy to see from the emails between the officers and the users of mega upload. They're clearly willing, willfully engaging in copyright infringement. This isn't some accident. This isn't like a sharing site where they're not even looking at what's being uploaded. They're sending emails back and forth. They know what's being uploaded. Users are telling them that they're looking at copyrighted content and they do nothing about it. And finally, it's clearly for commercial advantage or financial gain. You saw that as part of the YouTube emails and also because it's driving advertising to the site. That's why they cut in users in their referral programs. Therefore I think it's pretty clear from just that evidence and there's many more emails and I'm sure as the case evolves there will be many, many more emails that show that, whoops, that shows I don't know how to use PowerPoint. The show Kim.com is in fact guilty and that he thinks this whole thing is a big joke. That's his car. And if you can't see it, the license plate says guilty. He also had many other cards say mafia and things like that. And from the video you saw he doesn't take any of it seriously. He doesn't care. He's just after money. And ladies and gentlemen, remember it's not about whether you think copyright infringement law is the greatest thing ever. If you think the law is terrible, petition your congress people, give money to groups like the EFF. But the question here is about whether they broke US law and I think it's pretty clear they did. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm here to tell you that mega upload and Kim.com are not guilty. First let me remind you of the prosecutor's responsibility in this trial. Prosecution must prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that Kim.com is guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Now there's a couple important things in there and the important thing is here. There has to be a conspiracy or an agreement to commit a crime. Okay? Not an agreement that copyright infringement is happening on the system. Not an agreement that somebody is civilly committing an infringement for which they might be civilly liable. There has to be an agreement for a crime that is willful copyright infringement. Okay? So the important thing to look at in this is what mega upload is. And mega upload was a cyber locker service just like any other cyber locker service that you can go and find on the internet today. You can go to Google Drive, to Dropbox, to any other number of services, and it is a place where people can store and share extremely large files. And people did on mega upload and on all these other services. Where filmmakers store works in progress, where people use to distribute things that they don't have home hosting for. Increasingly, as regular people are using the internet, they store and host these files and share them in the cloud. And there are lots of businesses that have this service. Maybe the people who are the heads of these businesses are less colorful than Kim.com. Maybe their license plates are a little more boring. But that is not a crime. So we need to remember that what we're looking at here is what they did, not the style in which they did it. Okay? We don't want people going to jail because they have on DEF CON t-shirts. We don't want people going to jail because their cars say guilty or mafia and they think that's funny. That's not what we're judging people. That's not what we're judging this on. We're judging this on whether there's beyond reasonable doubt evidence of criminal activity. Now what the prosecution only vaguely mentioned, but which you have to understand for this case, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Safe Harbor provided by the United States Congress for businesses that deal with user-generated content. Okay? Now, who here thinks that there's infringement on the internet? Everybody knows there's infringement on the internet. There's also porn out there. But as I explained to a reporter just the other day, but the infringement on the internet, if you were responsible as a service provider for seeking out and finding and policing every instance of infringement, we wouldn't have a commercial internet with user-generated content on it. It's just nobody can do that. Nobody can afford to do that. And it's not just me saying this. It's the United States Congress that said this. And what Congress held, what Congress ruled, issued a statute which said that. If you have a policy that, if you have user-generated content, people are putting stuff up on your site. And you have a policy. And the policy is when somebody notifies you that they are the copyright holder and that that particular content is infringing. And if you take it down, then you will not be liable for the infringement. Okay? They also have a provision in there about red flag knowledge, which says, again, if you come upon this red flag knowledge that there's infringing material on your system and you take it down, then again, you have no copyright liability. Now let me make a point here. You have no civil copyright liability. Never mind something you could go to prison for. You don't even have to pay for that copyright infringement if you follow the DMCA. The other thing that the courts have said about the DMCA is that this knowledge, this red flag knowledge or the knowledge when somebody writes in and says my infringement, my copyrighted materials on your service and it's infringing, it's not a general thing like I know probably somebody uploaded some Warner Brothers movies, I know this is probably whatever, this is knowledge of specific files and where they're located. Okay? So that's what the Congress said. A lot of companies may choose to do more than that, but you don't have to do more than that just to avoid having to pay money. Okay? And mega upload had lawyers and they had a policy and they took stuff down. Okay? They may not have taken the whole file down and took down the URL. Well, a lot of services do that. They call it, they basically what they do is if two people upload the same file and it's the same, they do something called de-duplication and it's a way to save space because server space is valuable and you know it may be, if I upload something and the prosecutor uploads something and it's my thing, well he might be infringing. So if somebody writes in or I write in and I say hey, he's infringing, he's not allowed to have a link to that. If they took the whole file down, then me, the legitimate user, I would lose the file. I don't want that and so they don't want that to happen. So when somebody's infringing and that link is bad or if you use a service that is de-duplication, they cut the link. They cut the infringing path. If there's another infringing path, then the copyright owner says hey, these are other ways that people are accessing this information without authorization, cut those links too. It's just a basic way to make the computer systems work efficiently so that companies can afford to provide us with these services. And this is what mega upload did. Okay? Maybe they made mistakes. Maybe there were times when they had red flag knowledge and there were particular files that they didn't take down. Maybe they didn't take stuff down. Quick enough, maybe there were problems like that. But mistakes mean at the very most that you fall outside of the DMCA safe harbor. And if you fall outside of the DMCA safe harbor, that means the copyright owner can sue you for money. It's not willful infringement. Willful means something very specific. Willful means that you had the intent to violate the law. Okay? And mega upload had a ton of lawyers. They wanted to offer this service. They knew, like anybody who operates in the world of user-generated content, that there was going to be some piracy as a general matter, that they were going to be working in this area. Everybody knows that's going to be true. But did they have specific intent along with their users? Did they agree with their users to violate the law? Well, first of all, remember, a lot of these users aren't in the United States. They don't have any intent or intention or desire to violate United States copyright law. They're just doing whatever they're doing in their countries which have their own laws. Okay, so that's thing number one. Thing number two is, was there an agreement? It can't be an agreement for copyright infringement. It can't be an agreement just to provide a service that people could use for copyright infringement. It has to be a specific agreement between Kim dot com and somebody else. You're going to intend to violate United States law and I'm going to help you do it. That's what it's got to be. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence of anything here other than a bunch of guys trying to create this service and make it very, very popular. Okay, so another, so really what this case is about is about trying to impose criminal liability for something that you can't even, they don't even have civil liability for. Now in rebuttal, I think what you're going to hear the prosecutor get up and say is he's going to talk about copyright inducement and the doctrine of copyright inducement. It's not in any of the copyright statutes. It's judge created law and copyright infringement, direct copyright infringement means you copied, you distributed, you did public performance, something like that. And that's not what we're talking about here. There may have been some of that but we're not focused on it. What we're focused on here is whether there was this criminal copyrighted conspiracy and what the, what the government might argue is oh well DMCA safe harbor or whatever, that was just a cover. They were actually trying to induce their users to violate the law. And they are therefore, even though they're not the ones with the fingers on the keyboard doing the copyright infringement, secondarily liable, responsible for those users infringement and responsible for not stopping it. So this was something that the courts have addressed in a series of cases. One of the first of them where we talked about civil liability in this context was the, what I call the beta max case and a case involving VCRs and, or VDRs, other kinds of video recorders where people could record shows in their home. And the, the, the movie studios and TV, TV channel said this is an infringement and we blame beta max for giving people the technology that allows them to record this stuff. How many people have a thing in their home where they record stuff off the TV? It's pretty cool, right? Well, they tried to stop that back in 1984. They said that that was as bad as the Boston Strangler. And what the Supreme Court said is, if you have something that is capable of sub, of non infringing uses, capable of substantial non infringing uses, even if some people are using it for illegal uses, we're going to let it be out there because we know that that's valuable to the public and we want to let that technology evolve. Okay. And that was the law for many, many years. And then more recently, the Supreme Court sort of narrowed that law in the Groxter case. And what they said in the Groxter case was, yes, but if you have bad intent and your intent is to induce the users to infringe copyright, then you don't get to take advantage of this substantial non infringing uses rule. Then you're responsible for that. So, and if you violate that, if you do induce others to commit copyright infringement, you are, again, civilly liable. It's not criminally liable. So, in order to find them not guilty, or in order to find them guilty, you have to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Kim.com conspired and agreed with these users to knowing all of this stuff I just told you about US law willfully and intentionally violate US law as part of using this service, as opposed to just using the service because they wanted to host their stuff whether it be infringing or not. And so I think when we come back and you guys after your deliberations that you will return a verdict of not guilty. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a few brief comments in rebuttal. First, when council refers to an agreement between all the parties and how there's a lack of an agreement here, just keep in mind an agreement doesn't mean that they have to have like a written contract saying, yes, we're going to violate US law. This is our objective. Agreement you can imply from their actions. And I think in this case it's very clear that the make upload conspiracy agreed that this was their function was to commit copyright infringement and make money. As far as inducement goes and whether there's inducement in this case, I think there clearly is when you combine two elements that we already talked about. One is the way they treated the DMCA takedowns. When if there was hundreds, thousands of links pointing at a piece of content, the copyright holder says take the content down and they play whack-a-mole with taking down one link. It turns DMCA into a joke. It turns the copyright holder having to police every single link pointing at their content. That cannot possibly be what Congress intended. And I don't think it is. So combine their non-village of the DMCA enforcement with the payments to their users. Remember they pay users based on how popular the content is. That is the inducement, ladies and gentlemen, for them to infringe copyright. If you know you're going to get paid possibly hundreds of dollars if you have a popular video and you know that they don't really enforce copyright takedowns anyway, why wouldn't you if you're out to make a quick buck upload some videos they're copyrighted? It seems very clear from that the combination of payments and their lack of enforcement of DMCA, that that is the inducement we're talking about here. That is what's driving people uploading all the content. Now counsel did refer again to the Betamax case. And it's true, the Supreme Court says, and this is still law, that substantial non-infringing uses means that a technology company is not liable. But in the Sony Betamax case, a key factor was Sony did not know and did not encourage people to infringe. Basically Sony sold VCRs and whatever happened once someone got ahold of the VCR, they didn't have any part of and they had no way particularly of controlling it back then either. Here's very different. They know exactly what's going on with their systems. Again, refer back to the emails where they're all talking about it inside mega upload. And although there's substantial non-infringing use, the main use and the use that makes them money was the copyright infringement. And so because of that knowledge, this makes this case different from Sony Betamax and makes it much more like Rockster who were found liable for inducement. And that's my three minutes, ladies and gentlemen. So again, because they've met all of the elements and I think it's clear beyond a reasonable doubt, mega upload, Kim dot com, et cetera, are guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Thank you. This would never happen. The defense attorneys never get a rebuttal, but Jim's nice. So first of all, willfulness means you intend to violate United States law. If you find that mega upload believed that they were complying with the DMCA safe harbor, whether they actually were compliant or not, you must find them not guilty. Number two, the safe harbor, if you mess up the safe harbor and you fall outside, it's civil liability. It's not criminal liability. This is a very different thing. Number three, with Sony and the Betamax machine, they had a record button. They knew people were making copies and they knew it connected to the TV. They knew what people were doing with it. They designed it for that. And they had advertisements that told people here's all the great things you can record on your new video recorder. So they knew what was happening and that is exactly why they chose to sue them. But because there were substantial non-infringing uses, even if the majority of the uses for this technology were copyright infringing, it's still you were still allowed to distribute the technology. You're still allowed, mega upload, still allowed to distribute the service even if a lot of its users, even if most of its users decide to use it for criminal, or decide to use it for copyright infringing purposes. What they have to show is that the users knew they were violating United States law, that the users wanted to violate United States law, and that mega upload had an agreement with these users that they were going to help them intentionally and knowingly violate United States law. It's not a question of whether they felt like they were, you know, making something that was kind of edgy or cool. It's not a question of whether they knew that people were using it for infringement. It's not a question of whether, you know, they made jokes among themselves, or wore strange t-shirts, or had funny license plates. The question is, did they think they were complying with the law, and were they offering a service that has some substantial non-infringing uses where people could make something valuable but out of it, whether filmmakers or whatever. And the answer to those questions is clearly yes, and that is why you must find them not guilty. So yeah, we're going to give you like a minute to deliberate. Please be social and talk to your neighbors. I know it's DEF CON, but be social anyway. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back in a minute. It's still DEF CON, so we don't want to be too social. Hang on. No, I'm not going to be a four person. That's going to be a clusterfuck. Okay. All right. Let us wrap up, and we're going to vote. So, hands up all those who think Kim.com and make upload are guilty. Ooh, I got a few people. Hey, all right. Hands up all those who think they are not guilty. I think there's more people who say not guilty, but it is actually pretty close from up here. All right. So on that vote, they win at not guilty. But I have one more question. Hands up all those who think even though they're actually not guilty, they will be found guilty. Yeah, that's like everybody. Okay. So, yeah. We all know the jury they're going to get is not the people in this room. They're going to get your mothers and grandmothers and stuff like that. So, and now we have like 10 minutes for questions and I hope lots of people have questions. That's good. And there are lots of questions. Yes. No preponderance. It's a criminal case. I'll repeat the question. Yeah. Right. So let me let me repeat his question for those of you in here. He's saying given so much of the evidences in email and that you have to show an agreement, what would that look like? So first, let me say to show the agreement you do not necessarily need direct evidence. And this is what Jim was saying about they don't need a written contract. You can show an agreement through circumstantial evidence and the contents of the email could be circumstantial evidence that there was an agreement. So that is possible. What would that look like? That's up to the jury. And certainly there are going to be cases out there where they say this was not enough evidence of an agreement. This will be to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. This was enough, but it's going to be very fact-based. And I'm not sure I could give you an answer in this case. But Jim's argument, the prosecution's argument is going to be given the way they designed the bonus problem, but the bonus thing. Given the way that the service was designed, given what their conversations were internally, they and their users knew what was going on. And they were basically sending these people money for posting popular files. Are you going to call them? I suppose. Yes. Yes. This question is, they violated the intent of the law. You have to violate the, not the spirit of the law, but the law itself. So that's not a good argument. He's saying that you violated the intent of the law. That is true, but it's a closing argument. And in arguments, you often, you often argue things like they're violating the intent of the law. I mean, you also have to show that they violate the actual elements of the crime. But as part of your argument, you do, you can. When one of the elements is willful, and very often in criminal law an element is willful, what you have to show is that people intended to violate the law. And I think that's, so it's, you know, you're really are trying to show that they knew what the law was and they wanted to violate it because they're bad. So that is kind of part of it when they have a willfulness thing. But the rest of what you said is totally right. Let's go to the guy in the back. You know, yes, you. So the question is, the evidence that the users are being paid for infringing content was quite convincing for him. Were there cases where users were paid for content that was not infringing? I would assume so. I'm not aware of it right now, but we haven't seen all the evidence. But those of us who are lawyers are writing that down and being like, if you represent to the new people in this case, find stuff where non infringing people were paid. And you know, what you're looking for there is like a filmmaker who puts up something or like Louis C.K., you know how he put up his stuff. People are beginning to sort of get rid of the middle man and put out their content themselves and get paid directly and these kinds of cyber lock services are great for that and then people will get paid based on that. So, you know, they're gonna have to look for that. What I would say is the defense attorney was it's totally susceptible to being used for that, especially as the entertainment industry evolves. So don't hold it against them that right now people didn't come up on it. Yeah, I was gonna say that the evidence we have right now is based on the indictment from the government and so they don't really concentrate on when they did good things in it. So we don't know yet. That'll come out as the case progresses. I demand the red shirt here. So the question is given that the New Zealand courts have already found that the warring execution was improper, what are the chances he's really gonna get executed or executed? Extra dieted, given how New Zealand already feels about the seizure. You know, we were talking about this a couple days, a couple weeks ago about the warrant and what effect finding that the warrant for the house was bad and the evidence suppressed. What the effect of that will be? I'm not convinced that they found a lot of good stuff with that warrant anyway. Like most of the evidence in this case is gonna be emails and conversations and things that have backups elsewhere. And so I'm not really, I mean who knows? There could have been some smoking gun in this house. But I think most of the evidence is gonna come from other places anyway. And so I don't know that that's really fatal to the case and I don't know if I have a big problem with extradition because of that. Say again? I vote not guilty. As you all should have. You always believe your own argument. Yes? One question. If it's about local copper violation, how could this seize his assets on the services? Okay, so the first question, the first comment was that Dropbox and some other services don't advertise the content. Like Mega Upload did. Although Mega Upload did advertise non-infringing content and didn't have infringing content links on its website. And then your second question was, how do they seize the assets? They have to show that the assets were the proceeds of illegal activity in order to keep, in order to seize them. You can seize them and then you move against them to forfeit them and if you show that they're the product of illegal activity then the United States government keeps it but it's a civil for forfeiture usually and not that it was the result of illegal activity. So it's a tool for the civil forfeiture is a tool that the United States government developed during the 80s drug wars. They used prolifer, like proliferatively. And I also want to mention because I forgot to mention my argument that a bunch of their servers were in the U.S. and that's one of causing the big problem right now is their servers in the U.S. were seized and now no one can get their data out of there. Carpathia still has the servers. Yes but they're being jerks but yeah. Yes so the way New Zealand were copied and sent to the United States but let's Yeah I was going to say the way seizures work like across international borders is you know it's kind of a scratch my back I'll scratch yours kind of a thing if New Zealand starts running around saying no we're not going to enforce your seizure order the next time they're there for obvious reasons you know they all want to catch bad guys and so they try not to second guess each other when it comes to those kind of things you can pick someone go ahead let's go for this gentleman there in the red shirt in the back the question is whether they were starting to do deals with content owners on mega upload and how does that go for the case and I'm not familiar with specific things like that and so often on the internet is build your user base like crazy and then figure out how to monetize it later and this is what YouTube did they had tons of stuff up there including infringing videos for many years they built this user base and then as the services evolved now they have a lot of deals with you know copyright owners who view that as a legitimate outlet for those videos it may well be in the no enterprise and that it was racketeering and that the whole thing should be taken down I'm not sure it's going to answer the question of you know mega upload practices in the past necessarily I was going to say I know the video you were talking about there's right before they got taken down there's that big video where like a bunch of music artists were like we use mega upload and it's awesome blah blah blah the thing with musical artists though he actually owns the copyrights to that song I mean just because he's on some video saying yeah share my stuff and mega upload I mean there's people who wrote the song there's his label they may actually own the copyrights so yeah I might indicate there's some non infringing uses but I don't think it's great evidence that there was some sort of permission that they could share that kind of thing okay so we have time no no no what he was saying is that musical copyright is complicated and there are many different copyrights in it and the fact that the artist gave you the video doesn't mean you have rights to all the copyright so let's take one more we'll take this gentleman right here in the front direct is you yourself did the copy did the reproduction did the distribution and the conspiracy is that you are responsible for all the copyright infringements of everybody else they would do something illegal you're responsible for all of their illegal conduct I would argue I argue there's evidence of also account too that they were some sort of overall conspiracy well maybe that's an agreement among the mega people as opposed to agreement between mega and their users the indictment's not really clear and we agreed that they probably are guilty of direct infringement in a deeper room across the way for people who still have other stuff they want to talk about thank you for coming and thank you for voting particularly for those of you who voted for me thank you very much