Kim Dotcom knowingly ran a criminal origination with the intent and purpose of turning piracy into a money maker for him/the company. The US indictment lays this out very clearly, with proof.

EDIT: RE "Why is it a bad thing for Kim Dotcom to make money by using copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright holders, but a good thing for Microsoft to do it?"

Well, for one thing, the works that Kim was making money off of have valid legal protection - proven, codified into law.

The real reason is malice - MS inadvertently failed to include the licenses. Kim structured Megaupload so as to reward the users who uploaded pirated content in great scale. Employees were aware of this usage of Megaupload - that it was effectively the only use of Megaupload, that the site was funded by the money piracy generated, etc etc etc.

Instead of stopping this criminal act, employees emailed links to pirated content hosted on Megaupload to one another. Does any of this sound like what, say, Dropbox would do?

RE RE:

No, your works do not have the same protection that the works of the massive companies that Megaupload victimized have.

Depending upon your license, your works may have no protection at all. Copyright does not protect you - if you release X and the license for X is invalid in whole, you have released X with no terms of use. The Follow? That's a gross simplification, but it will suffice.

I wanted to see Microsoft deliberately violate GPL, but that does not show malice; I want X, but they did not do X.

RE RE RE:

Not quite right. Rights do not automatically default back to you in an instance of your license being restrictive in an illegal matter. A Judge makes that call, and the call very well may be to allow the existing userbase rights to the work in question.

The 'default' does not necessarily apply in instances of abuse.

RE RE RE RE:

You established an install base through an unlawful license. The users do not automatically lose rights to given to them under that unlawful license. There is a human involved here. The human is unlikely to punish your users to resolve your wrongdoing.

See, the license in question gives users X set of rights and one restriction: 'include my name in derivative works'

Your license is illegal in whole, but your intent was to assign this set of permissions/restrictions.

The license in question could be written so as to comply with the law, but as it stands it does not appear to do so. The exact same 'credit me' thing is possible to do legally.

As such, I don't see a human striking the license down without further action resembling a requirement for the software to be relicensed, with users able to acquire this new license if they so choose. In the real world, the one creator does not matter any where near as much as the army of users. Decisions are made to protect the users interests.

RE RE RE RE RE:

"Edit the last: so your theory is that the part of my license which says "you can redistribute this" is legally valid, but the part which says "under the following conditions" is not? That's certainly an interesting legal theory. I am not convinced, to put it mildly."

Both parts could be valid, but in the form they are written are not. As it stands, neither part is valid. A human being (judge) would/should look at the license, see the intent of the creator and resolve the issue.

RE RE RE RE RE RE:

I am not prepared to tackle that massive task.