Megaupload down?

[applegirl]

My friends, family, and I are basically the most technology illiterate people you can think of, so I just asked my co-workers for recommendations. Boy did that bite me in the butt in the end But yeah, I luckily saved an earlier version of my work info on another site, so I'm not completely dead in the water. Sigh...

But yeah, reading up on the site makes me realize its a pretty shady place. Jeez and I felt reassured not that long ago because there was a fancy music video with all these celebs promoting it, lol.

[jack_norton]

Well luckily lots of GOOD/RELIABLE cloud services are popping up now:
http://www.apple.com/icloud
http://explore.live.com/skydrive
you can be sure that both Apple and Microsoft won't be taken down anytime soon

[papillon]

And it takes a lot longer than 30 seconds to "turn up thousands of inappropriate links and kill them."

No - it takes thirty seconds to go to A PIRATE BLOG/FORUM and fetch thousands of inappropriate links using your service and kill them, if you wanted to make pirates lives a headache. And if that taught them to hide their links better so that thirty seconds of looking couldn't turn them up, that would be AWESOME.

So no, they aren't 'forced' to sit and wait for people to report files. They could do some looking on their own and take out the most obvious targets if they wanted to, making life more difficult for pirates trying to use their system. Since I know nothing about their inner operations, I have no idea if they currently employ anyone in such a capacity. I also do not believe they were legally required to, as I've said.

(Man, why in these threads does it never matter how often I repeat myself, nobody listens?) Obviously this would not stamp out all pirated files. I wouldn't even WANT it to. I've said that every single time I've posted and yet you keep arguing with me that it wouldn't get rid of all pirated files. YES I KNOW THAT. THAT'S NOT THE POINT! But some people are acting like it's IMPOSSIBLE for them to locate ANY pirated files and that's just not true.


As for why they went after MU and not TPB - they have gone after TPB in the past, the problem is that the way it's set up it's much harder to shut down. Which countries you base yourself in and how you structure yourself makes a difference to what even international cooperation can easily achieve.

[dott.Piergiorgio]

First of all, my apologies for the confused post of yesterday....

Now, on the MU takedown and the rather immediate anon reprisal....

my broad view on the general issue, in my Italian perspective, this is what can happen if the basic tenet of managing societes, bread and circus, is utterly ignored for mere greed. people can endure with few food and/or confort, but can easily get mad if don't have means of entertainment and/or escapism. Seems strange, but millennia of history, not only on this boot, seems to prove it.

Taking the issue from the most important perspective here, that of tiny/small business of creative works, I agree that putting tabs on cloud computing (MU technically is a cloud computing site) is much more in the interest of big/huge corporations than small & tiny enterprises.

Now, the point of checking the legality of the content. another political wisdom from my country can illustrate effectively the issue: Who will guard the guards ? and putting it in a global perspective, one can understand the major mess: I'm totally against forms of cloud computing & online storage, not because I have things to hide, but because I understand that legality differ wildly from country to country, and isn't possible to harmonise different cultures and way of lives, notwhistanding the celebrated (or vaunted ?) american "melting pot"; and here we have long debates on what is to be considered acceptable (or legally safe) or not in publishing in Hentai works. So, with many people in the world having a low view of US society and mores, whose aren't only cultural or religious, but also on politics economy and social issues (mainly welfare, perhaps), USA, and esp. US corporations simply can't be trusted on the point of storing other people's data & information. and this crackdown will surely be perceived as "right of might" with the obvious (and already seen) consequences.

the interesting news is that instead of the usual "chilling effect" we have seen the opposite, an "heating effect", and indeed there's already attempts to FUD on the issue of the anon rampage.

Since circa 2007 I known that this 2012 will be a rather interesting year and seems that I wasn't wrong on the point.

This is all, for now, and

Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.

[papillon]

According to this more detailed article, the MU employees regularly searched for and shared pirated material among themselves using their own services, and did often peer at the accounts of people they were paying referrer fees to, noted they were pirates, and paid them anyway.

It includes a note that the DMCA does not provide safe harbor protection to a business that specifically knows files are infringing and chooses to do nothing about them - and the email records show that they were, in fact, aware.

[Celianna]

It includes a note that the DMCA does not provide safe harbor protection to a business that specifically knows files are infringing and chooses to do nothing about them - and the email records show that they were, in fact, aware.

By that argument, YouTube should be taken down, too! As if they don't realize there's plenty of illegal content distributed on YouTube. They know, they are very aware. They just turn a blind eye, it's the copyright holders that file DMCA claims and get the videos taken down (they also abuse it). It's them that have that responsibility, to protect their own work, the DMCA gives them that right.

That doesn't mean they can shut down and seize entire websites. Basically that means any website that hosts user content should be shut down, because it could be used as a place to share and download pirated works.

To further LateWhiteRabbit's analogy: it's like shutting down the post office because it was used for criminal practices by its customers.


Also, the Pirate Bay is still there because it operates in Sweden, the FBI has no legal right to take that down. SOPA wants to give them that right though, they hate the Pirate Bay with a passion.

[papillon]

By that argument, YouTube should be taken down, too! As if they don't realize there's plenty of illegal content distributed on YouTube. They know, they are very aware. They just turn a blind eye, it's the copyright holders that file DMCA claims and get the videos taken down (they also abuse it). It's them that have that responsibility, to protect their own work, the DMCA gives them that right.

You're not understanding. 'Safe Harbor' status doesn't protect you if you personally know of specific files on your system that are infringing and do nothing about them.

By that policy megaupload would have been okay if they had simply not been paying attention. However, when emails reveal them looking directly at infringing content, talking about it, using it for their own purposes, and not deleting it, that's quite a different story.

If you know about it, you have to act on it.

That rule applies to all kinds of criminal matters! If you actually *know* someone is committing a crime and you help them (like by letting them hide at your place) you are an accessory to the crime even though you didn't commit the crime yourself. In many locations just knowing about it and not reporting it is enough to make you an accessory.

[Seven]

We Malaysian can't use Megaupload anyway...The goverment say there are dirty things in that website.
It is a bit unconvenient without Megaupload too .

[J. Datie]

No - it takes thirty seconds to go to A PIRATE BLOG/FORUM and fetch thousands of inappropriate links using your service and kill them, if you wanted to make pirates lives a headache. And if that taught them to hide their links better so that thirty seconds of looking couldn't turn them up, that would be AWESOME.

Well, that would probably work pretty well the first time, but it isn't really a long term solution by any means. As soon as they notice all their forum's publicly displayed Megaupload links are down, any pirate worth their sea salt will probably realize what's happening pretty quickly and just switch over to tinyURL, or whatever URL obfuscating methods the kids are using today.

And did they really have to take the site down right now, no warning!? I mean, personally, I couldn't tell the difference between Megaupload and every other countdown-CAPTCHA-speedometer file site, so I wouldn't have known that it was a "seedy place" or some "haven for pirates". It just looked like the orange version of 50 other sites, and I doubt people who were using it to host pictures of family vacations would know of its reputation on pirate sites. Couldn't they have put up some notice for a week before taking it down, or is there some legal thing preventing that?

[LateWhiteRabbit]

According to this more detailed article, the MU employees regularly searched for and shared pirated material among themselves using their own services, and did often peer at the accounts of people they were paying referrer fees to, noted they were pirates, and paid them anyway.

It includes a note that the DMCA does not provide safe harbor protection to a business that specifically knows files are infringing and chooses to do nothing about them - and the email records show that they were, in fact, aware.

I have been listening to you Papillon, and I've heard everything you've said. We just disagree on whether such methods to curb piracy would be worth it for a company. As you've said, a company has no legal requirement to do so. And many of the piracy sites that list links require accounts or invites to join, and with thousands of new pirated content files uploaded daily, it would still take man hours far in excess of potential gains. And the same problem of what to search for and what is illegal and what is a fan game or ebook still requires research on the companies part. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the sites will be in a different language like Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc. meaning you'd have to employee international teams. A great monetary expense for the filesharing site with little benefit to them, especially since a lot of the movie studios and game developers already have their own teams of people doing just that and sending notices to the filesharing site to take down the files.

My point this entire time has been instead of filesharing sites stepping up and doing a little more (which I really don't believe is possible in any significant way), copyright holders and businesses need to adapt and adopt different strategies where piracy is assumed and accepted as a fact of life. Just as a fruit or crop grower assumes some part of the harvest is going to be bad no matter what they do, businesses need to accept that a certain number of copies of their product will be pirated no matter what they do. Piracy of plays existed in Shakespeare's day, book piracy was always a big deal, the phonograph enabled piracy of music, tape recorders enabled piracy of radio, VCRs enabled piracy of TV, camcorders enabled piracy of movies, and computers and the internet enable piracy of all of it. Piracy has always existed and will always exist. We need to evolve our business models to account for the technological and economical realities of the present instead of continuing to operate off the rules of "meat space". And no, I don't have an answer, because if I did I would be rich.

The problem isn't an easy one, and the economic model to solve it will be revolutionary. When getting my business degree, in my economics courses we were given a theoretical (at the time) problem, that all economists had been asked to solve for hundreds of years. "What happens if your product could be reproduced infinitely at no cost beyond the first product?" The closest answer we good get that didn't involve the collapse of the company producing such a product is to bundle a service with the product that cost money. Skilled services can't be replicated in product form, and thus can't be copied - think a dentist. You can't pirate dental services for your teeth. But that is a hard model to make work, and not a complete solution. There is a nerdy economic joke that goes like this: "What should scientist do first after inventing the replicator? (Star Trek)" Answer: "Invent something that can't be replicated."

And if Megaupload indeed knowingly provided safe harbor for pirates, that is different. Just as a bank can be held liable for willing laundering mob money to get rich off the interest. Megaupload deserved to go down if such is the case. You can't stop piracy, but if your high-fiving it and wearing a jolly roger on your sleeve you've got a problem.

@J. Datie:
No, if Megaupload was truly involved in illegal practices, they couldn't give a notice before shutting it down. The authorities are likely using the files on the servers as evidence, and if notice was given it wouldn't just be people with family vacation pictures pulling their files down, but pirates covering their tracks.

[jack_norton]

And if Megaupload indeed knowingly provided safe harbor for pirates, that is different. Just as a bank can be held liable for willing laundering mob money to get rich off the interest. Megaupload deserved to go down if such is the case. You can't stop piracy, but if your high-fiving it and wearing a jolly roger on your sleeve you've got a problem.

Yes, that's what all blog reports:

In a 72-page indictment unsealed in a Virginia federal court, prosecutors charged that the site earned more than $175 million since its founding in 2005, most of it based on copyright infringement.

As for the site's employees, they were paid lavishly and they spent lavishly. Even the graphic designer, 35-year-old Slovakian resident Julius Bencko, made more than $1 million in 2010 alone.

This is not a case of piracy like the pirate bay, those people were actually making lot of money using other people's IP. It's not just two friends, or even a group of friends sharing a game, is a big criminal corporation, as the figures clearly suggests.

[LeandroP]

They are working on a legal way to get their servers back and the domain up and running again, but...

After seeing the amount of jets and the capital the founder has, I don't feel bad about he losing a couple of bucks

I feel that this is a threat to sites like Wikipedia and Reddit to stop messing with SOPA, but it turned out again them. And I am glad, now everything to be falling like a Jenga tower...

[LVUER]

They are working on a legal way to get their servers back and the domain up and running again, but...

Really? That's good to hear. I hope the files are still there... lots of people upload their precious file into megaupload.

After seeing the amount of jets and the capital the founder has, I don't feel bad about he losing a couple of bucks

Me too. They are stinking rich anyway...

I feel that this is a threat to sites like Wikipedia and Reddit to stop messing with SOPA, but it turned out again them. And I am glad, now everything to be falling like a Jenga tower...

I love the power of democracy!

[LeandroP]

They are working on a legal way to get their servers back and the domain up and running again, but...

Really? That's good to hear. I hope the files are still there... lots of people upload their precious file into megaupload.

Don't forget about megaporn!

[ScottySeng]

File sonic and Uploaded.to are also down for US citizens. Filesonic has disabled sharing, while uploaded.to does not allow users from US to access the downloads. I hope mediafire doesn't go down...