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First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

mega-search.me

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Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#61

Post by AnthonyMouse »

telecuda wrote: post #12
agopaul wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption is only a legal defense for Mega and their partners, but i'm really waiting to see how the Dotcom campain will change after the first bust

I believe encryption will buy them some time until the law catches up, then poof.

What do you expect the law to prohibit? Encrypted data?

The issue with file lockers is this: The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is. It would be totally impractical for e.g. YouTube to preemptively screen all uploads for infringement by hand. It's just not economically possible.

So YouTube has a lot of infringing stuff on it. They also have a screening system which does fingerprinting etc., which keeps a lot of infringing stuff off (and also keeps plenty of non-infringing stuff off when there are false positives.)

But you can't even do that when your service is general purpose rather than specific to video. You don't know what a password-protected RAR archive has in it, you can't fingerprint it. So there is a ton more infringing stuff on the general purpose sites. The file locker takes it down as soon as the copyright holders identify it, but then the infringers just upload it again in ten minutes.

So you say, go after the uploaders. Okay, they're in non-extradition countries or are using anonymizers. Now what?

There are two fundamental facts that make stopping copyright infringement extraordinarily difficult: First, sending bits is very, very much cheaper than identifying what they represent and whether it's infringing. Second, normal law-abiding people have a legitimate interest in the privacy of their communications. In other words, good people need the same encryption that bad people abuse, and even if they didn't, there is too much volume to economically sort it by hand anyway, and the algorithmic methods are unreasonably inaccurate. (See: huge list of all the stupid nonsense YouTube ContentID does.)

So we have a problem without a good solution. What law do you propose could fix it?

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#62

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wmf wrote: post #54
watty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow - how are they legally being willfully blind? They can't offer private encrypted hosting AND know what they're hosting at the same time. Those two things are mutually exclusive.

We're talking about blindness of the search engines. Arguably they know the search engines exist and thus have some kind of duty to notice the rampant copyright infringement taking place and stop it.

>Arguably they know the search engines exist and thus have some kind of duty to notice the rampant copyright infringement taking place and stop it.

Are you serious? You expect them to scour the internet for third party websites and then scrape them for links? How are they even supposed to know whether a particular instance is infringing or licensed? What happens when the third party site prohibits scraping?

It isn't their job to be the copyright police. You cannot fix the problem of copyright enforcement being too expensive by foisting the cost onto a third party -- that doesn't fix that it's too expensive, it's just a textbook case of copyright owners engaging in the economic pollution known as externalizing costs.

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#64

Post by ghubbard »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #37
jmaygarden wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, RIAA has to pay the $25 fee to send an infringement notification. Therefore, they want the fee to be lower.

What they really mean is they want to have automated systems do it for them without worrying.

If each infringement "costs" them $150,000 then $25 is a small price to pay...

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#65

Post by khkwang »

jhuckestein wrote: post #45
bbx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find these gears icons funny because it is implied that all 3 gears touch each other mutually . But obviously, such a setup would prevent the whole machinery to work at all.

This is true for the Stripe one. The Mega one works (otherwise they couldn't have animated it ;))

Except the top and bottom left gears are rotating in contradicting directions. In fact none of the gears are even connected and are just rotating on their own accord. What's the point??

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#66

Post by bbrizzi »

codemac wrote: post #3

Firefox 19.0 (a beta release) is too old to download a file? Can someone explain this to me? I wish they'd tell me exactly which API they're using..

Mozilla explains why they don't support the FileSystem API on their blog: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#67

Post by agopaul »

sergiotapia wrote: post #49
dewey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, that's the file key and you can choose between appending it to the URL or transfer it to a friend through a secure channel.

Thank you for answering so quickly. So where is this scraper getting the URL's from? A forum or something?

None of these are scapped i suppose. It's all user submitted stuff

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#68

Post by RobAley »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #27

The site features an "Infringement" button at the top of the page. Can I report the entire contents of the first page as infringing, since every item I see is obviously infringing? Can I then repeat that for each subsequent page?

They may all be "obviously" infringing, but they're not all "actually" infringing. For instance, one I clicked on with the name of a well known movie led to an .exe file, which was a virus and not the movie in question. There's also one called "Gay.zip", how is that "obviously" infringing?

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#69

Post by telecuda »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #61
telecuda wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe encryption will buy them some time until the law catches up, then poof.

What do you expect the law to prohibit? Encrypted data? The issue with file lockers is this: The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is. It would be totally impractical for e.g. YouTube to preemptively screen all uploads for infringement by hand. It's just not economically possible. So YouTube has a lot of infringing stuff on it. They also have a screening system which does fingerprinting etc.,…

Great response. I'm not proposing any new laws, but my belief is that a judge will ultimately disagree with your statement that "The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is."

You're correct that an automated service can't identify/fingerprint these digital files, but if I go to mega-search.me and see tens of thousands of copyrighted movies/music/software, it's impossible to say, "I didn't know there was illegal material on my server."

Where YouTube keeps the rights holders at bay is by having those screening mechanisms in place. If Mega's design can't make that possible, and they as a company don't take actions to protect copyright holders, then I see the courts finding a basis to shut them down - on what basis I don't know, but I don't imagine major copyright holders sitting idly by.

Re: First mega.co.nz indexer and search engine

#70

Post by AnthonyMouse »

telecuda wrote: post #69
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect the law to prohibit? Encrypted data? The issue with file lockers is this: The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is. It would be totally impractical for e.g. YouTube to preemptively screen all uploads for infringement by hand. It's just not economically possible. So YouTube has a lot of infringing stuff on it. They also have a screening system which does fingerprinting etc.,…

Great response. I'm not proposing any new laws, but my belief is that a judge will ultimately disagree with your statement that "The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is." You're correct that an automated service can't identify/fingerprint these digital files, but if I go to mega-search.me and see tens of thousands of copyrighted movies/music/software, it's impossible to say, "I didn't know th…

>You're correct that an automated service can't identify/fingerprint these digital files, but if I go to mega-search.me and see tens of thousands of copyrighted movies/music/software, it's impossible to say, "I didn't know there was illegal material on my server."

Sites like mega-search.me are operated by different people from the ones who host the data. In any given case the data hosts don't even necessarily know they exist, much less the content of the links or whether they're licensed. They have no better ability than the copyright holders themselves to discover the links and a far, far worse ability to know which links the copyright holder has licensed, which is why we put it to the copyright holders to identify them.

Meanwhile the link sites are extremely lightweight. You don't need a CDN with regional caching or any of that, you can host the whole thing from a single location for the whole world. So shutting down the link sites is whack a mole. Shutter one and a different one will be up and running in less than a day.

Again, it's an economic problem. It's not about the structure of these entities or who knows what. Changing the laws might move around the pieces on the board but it doesn't change the nature of the game. It doesn't change the fact that it costs millions of times less to send bits than to accurately filter them. You can't change economic reality so easily.

In theory we could put the genie back in the bottle, but that doesn't mean "shut down The Pirate Bay and mega-search.me," it means "shut down the Internet and stop having computers." Because computers are what create the underlying economic conditions that lead to the issue. And I have to hope that nobody is seriously suggesting that would be an acceptable trade off.

I am not one of these people who thinks we should get rid of copyright. But you can read the Das Capital as a mostly accurate criticism of the failings of capitalism without accepting Marx's conclusion that communism is preferable. The facts on the ground have changed. Copyright has to change to adapt. "Change" doesn't have to mean "abolish" but it certainly means that trying to change the modern world to fit copyright is a stupid idea when we can far more sensibly change copyright to fit the modern world.

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