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So the RIAA are going after their own artists for allegedly stealing money from their own artists? What a weird industry this is...
Why did they charge the graphic designer and the developers?
Why did they charge the graphic designer and the developers?
SOPA and PIPA would help how? This appears successful without them.
So in terms of precedent, if dropbox can be used to store copyright files, could they also be shut down on a whim like this?
As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.
Of course this is only a grand jury indictment and they have not been found guilty in a court. But the Feds don't bring a case if they aren't damn well sure they can win.
Why did they charge the graphic designer and the developers?
This actually makes sense if you consider that these laws are aimed at the mafia, and that there is no penalty to the U.S. government for being wrong.
EDIT: I find it interesting how everyone always jumps to the "OMG EVIL" conclusion with these things. From what I've seen, American law enforcement can be overzealous, heavy-handed, and cause a lot of collateral damage, but they are rarely "evil."
"wrong" =/= "evil"
So in terms of precedent, if dropbox can be used to store copyright files, could they also be shut down on a whim like this?
Yeah, The Dropbox Conspirators now probably must implement a public search function and the list of top files. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users. Oh, a…
The indictment of Megaupload actually uses their lack of search function and censorship of copyrighted material from their "top content" list as marks against them. This means most other file sharing services which focus on one-to-one or one-to-many sharing and hence omit search and a "trending" list (looking at Dropbox, here) are vulnerable.
Good thing I'm not the paranoid kind.