Did someone know the email address of the fbi to sue the people I don't like? How much it cost? Are they going to use fire weapons?
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
131–140 of 357 posts
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#132What about MegaUpload's legitimate users? Surely some people used it to store backups and other important (legal) data and are now denied access to it. It is unlikely they will ever be able to get their files back.
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#133At 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…
First they come for the sites that are 90/10 pirate to legit. Seems reasonable. Then 80/20. Then 70/30. Now they're getting the process streamlined. How far will they go? 20/80? 10/90? When will it be too much? When does it become un reasonable?
Slopes aren't always as slippery as you may believe. The point of this is that the site actively promoted and profited from piracy. This isn't Facebook with someone posting a few lines from a song, this is The Pirate Bay.
Think of it like this: have you ever successfully argued to a cop that you only drive over the limit 10% of the time? What matters is the deliberateness of the speed you were doing when you got caught.
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#134[deleted]
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's worse that dropbox dedupes files, which means that they(dropbox) already have infrastructure that could seriously combat their use in infringement. I do wonder how this plays into the whole Swizz Beats is CEO news.
I don't think dedupe seriously combats use in infringement - it just forces pirates to repack/recompress their infringing content into many different forms, which pretty much happens anyway since lots of "torrent warez" groups like to put their names and spam links on everything. From a legal/rights-holder standpoint that's a double-edged sword - it could be argued that because Dropbox dedupe files, they have a head…
it does because I'm fairly sure they aren't deduping at the file level - which means they're doing significant introspection into exactly how different copies of the same file are. This is why dropbox is so fast - they only need to send unique diffs.
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I being downvoted because people think you should be able to earn money on pirated content, or because you think they should operate such sites at a loss (if at all)?
I'd think it might be the line "However, I do not believe you should profit off the content of others.". That's a blanket statement which probably has been misinterpreted as you being against any form of distributor or reseller business model.
Oh, I see. Thank you for pointing that out to me. My intention was to say that I do not believe that you should create a business-model around earning money on only pirated content. Helping artists getting their name and songs out there is a good thing, but without their approval I don't think you should profit off it.
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not trying to be offensive, but seeing the RIAA thrown around as this big boogeyman is annoying, and also seeing it stand in for labels, artists even more so. One of the biggest foes for MegaUpload was porn, who have much more money but less lobbying clout than the RIAA.
The RIAA and major labels are one and the same. It is disingenuous at best to try and distinguish one from the other, when the board of directors consists entirely of label representatives. Meanwhile, precious few artists whine about piracy like the RIAA does, you hear a lot more whining about the labels, because they're the ones screwing artists.
The RIAA represents WMG, UMG and Sony Music. Each of those has a bunch labels. They themselves are not labels. For instance, WMG corporate has no A&R staff.
The business of music is different than the practice of it, and lumping it all into the "label" itself is disingenuous. The politics within those companies usually means the labels at the very edge (where marketing and A&R are) are often at odds with corporate/RIAA.
When I'm on better a better connection I'll post some examples.
I don't mean to be pedantic about it, but the ecosystem around music is much more complex than "sue them all"
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#138At 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…
[deleted]
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#139So 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…
Multiple people upload the same file with the same name and the same content. The file is hashed as it comes in and only one copy is kept.
If the provided link is private, not index by megaupload or search engines, then it can be thought of a private locker with the key being the link. In this case it should not be Megaupload's job to know who is supposed to have the key and who does not and it seems reasonable that they would only remove the link complained about and not the content. Those other links after all could be for personal backup/use which is allowed.
Can anyone verify/deny that the links Megaupload provided were private?
Re: Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Unless they were paying their employees to knowingly submit pirated content, however I unaware evidence in support of this.
It's absurd that they'd have to pay their employees to submit pirated content when there's droves of people online who would willingly submit it for free.
This accusation is as absurd as saying TPB had to pay its employees to upload trackers of pirated content.