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Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

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Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#71

Post by surement »

rorrr wrote: post #65
rplnt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am glad that someone finally went for the big guys. Rapidshare should be next in my opinion. They only make money on piracy and they know it. On the other hand, I hate when p2p networks are targeted (thepiratebay for example). Sure, they too make some money but nowhere close to paid sites like the megaupload and they don't even host the pirated content.

Rapidshare is Swiss based, and it responds to DMCA claims. I doubt it will go down any time soon.

Megaupload is Swizz based, and it went down.

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#72

Post by wavephorm »

Like the War on Drugs, it's almost quaint how the US government either isn't aware, or doesn't care that they're playing a game of whack-a-mole. As long as the the bureaucracy is strengthened, and the lobbyist checks keep rolling in, and everyone keeps their jobs, then everything is good.

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#73

Post by rbanffy »

AlexMuir wrote: post #39

At the risk of megadownvoting here... Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response. The site charged for access to, and provided advertising around, pirated content. The site paid people (users/staff - it's a fine line) to provide popular content. It went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of its operators. Now if people believe that…

> It is, pure and simple, a piracy site full of pirated material.

Yes, but it was also full of absolutely legal content uploaded by law-abiding users. Many people don't have the expertise needed to set up a file server and not everything is small enough to be attached to an e-mail.

> I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business.

As I understand, they had problems of DMCA compliance. If you subtract the illegal files, theirs is a perfectly legal and quite useful business.

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#75

Post by sp332 »

rorrr wrote: post #60
AlexMuir wrote: post #39

At the risk of megadownvoting here... Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response. The site charged for access to, and provided advertising around, pirated content. The site paid people (users/staff - it's a fine line) to provide popular content. It went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of its operators. Now if people believe that…

> fill it with full length DVD rips As long as users do it, and the site takes them down when requested, I'm pretty sure it's legal under DMCA.

As stated in your parent and elsewhere, Mega rarely responded to DMCA requests.

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#77

Post by sophacles »

AlexMuir wrote: post #39

At the risk of megadownvoting here... Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response. The site charged for access to, and provided advertising around, pirated content. The site paid people (users/staff - it's a fine line) to provide popular content. It went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of its operators. Now if people believe that…

Now if people believe that anyone should be allowed to set up a site, fill it with full length DVD rips,and then charge $10 a month for access then no wrong has been committed. But I think most right-minded people would say that is wrong - otherwise we'd all be doing it.

Just not true. I don't think there is anything wrong with videotaping police going about their business (without breaking any other laws, hindering them at their job, and such), but you WILL NOT find me doing it in my home state (Illinois) due to such actions being zealously prosecuted felonies. Many other people agree with me here. A cost/benefit analysis making me choose not to do an action is much different than me thinking that action is wrong.

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#78

Post by julian37 »

adestefan wrote: post #15
brador wrote: post #3

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?

No. MegaUpload lost their safe harbor status by doing the following as spelled out in the DoJ press release: 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. F…

the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place

I might be reading too much into this, but to me this sounds like ten people uploaded the same movie (maybe with different filenames, maybe different encodings/file formats), the DMCA request only named one of these files, and MegaUpload removed only that one file.

(I know the quote says "link" not "copy" but it wouldn't be the first time people get confused over the distinction.)

If so, this sets a dangerous precedent for other (maybe more legitimate) file sharing sites: firstly, if you host millions of files, detecting which files are copies of another file, or deciding which filenames are similar to other filenames, is not a trivial task. Secondly, as far as I understand the DMCA, it doesn't even require you to go to these lengths.

Of course, I might be totally off base and they might really have kept the very same file in place and just removed a link to it on some pages while keeping the link on others.

Does anyone know more details about this?

Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

#79

Post by e1ven »

surement wrote: post #71
rorrr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rapidshare is Swiss based, and it responds to DMCA claims. I doubt it will go down any time soon.

Megaupload is Swizz based, and it went down.

Elsewhere in the thread, people are saying MU was from Hong Kong.

Where do you see it as Swiss?

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