The word ‘they’ in that sentence is a bit ambiguous. I suspect you mean it to refer to Kim .com & MU not being merry men.

They rest of us are reading it as the people supposedly sticking up for Kim .com & MU.

The second interpretation will help you understand why you’re getting a pile on. no one is particularly defending Kim .com and MU as the kind of person one would like their daughter to bring home after a date, and your repeated attempts to imply that is the case is a rather feeble strawman.

For the record:
Kim .com is a douche.
Kim .com has comitted various crimes and misdemeanors in the past.
MU was used by users for infringing behaviour.

However:
To date everyone using MU has lost everything they had stored there.
Not everyone using MU was using it to infringe.
A lot of the material seized – and under imminent risk of deletion – was NOT infringing material. In fact, the only material that is not at imminent risk is a selected portion which supposedly shows infringing behavour. In a few days time it could be literally true that “all material on MU servers is infringing material (because we deleted all the other stuff)” 
In this particular case Kim .com and MU had done nothing wrong – or ilegal – in the relevant jurisdiction.

“We had to burn the village down to save it” has never been a very sound justificaiton.

Wow.  I quite genuinely completely agree with everything you are saying and thus I’m astonished that it is being used to disagree with me since I stated “I didn’t remotely mean in the criminal justice sense”.  I never at any point said that they don’t deserve due process  (see: “they should have the right to defend their company in court”) and  I also never said that the staff deserved to lose their jobs.  I also stated, I feel quite clearly, in both posts that I don’t agree with how the US have interfered in this matter.  How my comment is being interpreted as support for “inverted totalitarianism” I don’t know.  So as such I’ll just say sorry again and clarify two points I’ll take from this:

1) I should have said “OFF TOPIC” at the start of the original comment and from now on I’ll remember on the internet that unless my comment is strictly referring to the exact content of the original post I shouldn’t meander off into only slightly related subjects questioning some of the people involved.

2) I never should have used the word “defend” as in my “worth defending” comment since clearly there is only one possible interpretation of that word and that is strictly with regards to legal connotations.  Obviously if I asked “Why is fish flavoured ice cream worth defending?” I mean that anyone who likes fish flavoured ice cream deserves to be arrested, put in prison and not be allowed any contact with the justice system.

Sorry for the sarcasm.  (Bloody record store day yesterday has made me tired)

Maybe I would have been better to just have stuck to purely mythical* based questions and posted this:

“[OT] Why are people making out that Kim and Megaupload are like Robin Hood and his Merry Men? They are not.”

Sorry again. Clearly short and to the point didn’t work after my fingers hit the keys.  I am not Concisemouse.

(*I say “mythical” because, whilst we’re being completely specific here, you might have thought that I meant the hypothetical Robin Hood comment “historically” and, of course, in reality John signed the Magna Carta and I wouldn’t want people to think that my comment meant that I didn’t agree with habeas corpus)

Imagine if, after BP destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, rumors came out that they were criminally negligent in cutting corners which led directly to the disaster.  If the government had, at that point, taken possession of every asset that BP owns worldwide, fired all of their employees, essentially destroying the company, it would have been equivalent to what happened in this case.  BP would, of course, demand a trial before the rumors could be taken as fact, and would demand that restitution be in some way proportional to the damage caused.  Of course, because BP has powerful friends it did not suffer anything remotely like this and has, in fact, been forced to pay a puny $20 billion to cover all of the damages caused by the spill.  I say its puny because destroying the Gulf and all of the livelihoods that depend on it, not to mention a priceless and massive ecosystem, is, well, priceless.  Even if BP had been forced to pay all of its future profits for the next 50 years it would not fix the problems it caused.  Yet BP still exists, and hasn’t even been forced to change its business practices, let alone face criminal prosecution of any kind for its criminal acts.  

The world you are defending is one where might makes right, there is no such thing as justice, and government can and will take anything they want from anyone they feel like it, on the merest unproven assertion that crimes were committed.  Its called inverted totalitarianism.  

Its totalitarianism because the people have no rights and there is no law that will protect you from government abuse, destruction of livelihood and even murder.  Its inverted because the government is the lapdog of powerful private interests and exists to do their bidding.  This is, in fact, the current system in the USA, and has led directly to acts like the Megaupload travesty.

I salute you for words that need to be said. Constantly.

Anyway, the US has the authority under US law to charge MegaUpload criminally.  What it lacks is the power, as a PRACTICAL matter, to follow through with it.  That’s what the judge refers to the fact MegaUpload can’t be “served.”  Insufficient service of process is a jurisdictional defect – US courts can’t hear the matter unless the defendant is properly served.  That’s a limit the US legal system puts on itself.  But this defect has nothing at all to do with whether whether MegaUpload broke US law.

Of course, the bully can never accept that idea, whether we are talking about The War On Drugs, The War On Terrorism, The War On Poverty, or any other War which gives the powers-that-be an opportunity to dance around common sense.