As a ‘content provider’ of both software and music, I haven’t ever downloaded warez.
But, I understand why others would and defend the right of the Internet to be as free of this kind of interference as possible.
What a crazy world we live in!
Incidentally, I get all of my music from youtube or Napster. I have a subscription to Napster that allows me unlimited downloads onto my MP3 player for only $10 a month.
Good golly, that is a deal!
See, that model will work. It already does.
Taking down a huge FTP site that contains some illegally derived content seems really over the top.
This should have gone to trial first with due process and the usual sequence of events.
Instead, this was treated like a drug sting.
Bullcrap.
I wonder if they confiscated all the money they found at this nefarious headquarters as well.
“Mega Conspiracy" is such a lame name. Criminy, why not name yourselves, “Evil, Incorporated” or “We Want Your Children’s Souls, Inc.?”
Yes. How often does the government react to a business allegedly engaging in some illegal activity by shutting the whole thing down without even a trial? If say, Ford or GM were caught engaging in tax evasion or selling dangerously unsafe vehicles, would the government shut the whole company down without warning? Of course not.
This isn’t really about the law. It’s about the copyrights-are-sacred, piracy must be stopped at any cost crusade.
And that is what the whole ‘Oppose’ movement is about at root level: outrage that the folks who are supposed to be protecting the general welfare of the nation have seen suborned into some kind of meta-police who defend the wealthy and attack everyone else.
Meh. Flooding a website is not exactly a shot, is it ? It’s more like a fart in the DoJ’s general direction.
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What no due process? No charges, trial or anything before pulling the plug on the owner’s livelihood?
I’ve used this site before and got some legit shareware. It was by no means exclusively a pirate site.
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It was not a pirate site at all. It was a public file sharing service with millions of customers. Yes, many many users uploaded pirate stuff on their servers, but the site owners would take it down almost as fast and were very reactive to copyright infrigement notifications.
I don’t really see how they could have prevented pirate files to be uploaded in the first place, short of hiring tens of thousands of people to pore through each user uploaded file before agreeing to put it up. Not remotely realistic, or reasonable, or palatable.
According to the indictment, they weren’t particularly responsive. The State of VA complained about 40 infringing videos in 2010 and 36 of them were still up in 2012. Also if more then one link led to a infringing video and a copyright holder complained about one link, Mega* would just break the one link instead of removing the content.
It’ll be interesting to see how the case goes, but I think the defendants are going to be (correctly) found guilty on at least a few counts.
Still; normal procedure is to try them, then fine them. Not shut down the whole business without a trial. And the Feds are talking about these guys like they are SPECTRE or something; “The Mega Conspiracy” indeed.
That doesn’t mean much in a vacuum. How fare YouTube, Veoh, Hulu, videobb and other similar GLOBAL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES on that score ?
That actually seems like prudent, customer-oriented design to me - that way they don’t risk deleting content that was mistakenly (or mischievously) flagged as offending that the user may or may not keep a local copy of. Plenty of people use the site as a sort of proto-Cloud external hard drive.
A shared file without any links pointing to it is functionally not different from an inexistent file. If there are multiple links, then report all of them, don’t whine that the hosting provider didn’t do your job for you or bent over far enough when you snapped your fingers. Mega*'s first obligations are to their customers, not RIAA or Universal.
Youtube complies quickly with take-down notices. Hulu pays creators for their content. I’m not familiar with the other services that you mention.
There first obligation is to obey the law.
The person filing the complaint has no way of finding out about other links. And the issue isn’t “files with no links”, those were erased. The issue is files with multiple links, if one link is taken down, the infringing material is still there and still accessible.
Yes, they sure as hell do. The content is discovered by bots that should find it no matter what the link says. As far as I know, the law does not say they have to take down all copies of a file if one is reported.
Think about it: for all they know, the other people also uploaded it actually did have the rights to it. That’s the entire idea of the DMCA: to prevent content providers from being liable for discovering whether the uploader has the rights, as long as they will take things down when asked.
I don’t know about Megaupload, but Megavideo was very good at taking stuff down, which was obvious by the number of Megavideo links that no longer work. Most people I know don’t even still use it because it’s so unreliable.
Last I checked, the state of VA is not a copyright holder, so I am unaware if they can send a DMCA takedown. Without that, no site is really going to do anything. I know for sure YouTube specifically says when you try to report infringing content that only the content owner can file a claim, and they aren’t being shut down.
Also, was it the same video from the same uploader? Or is it that 36 new uploads of the old video were made? Because, like I said, I’ve definitely seen a lot of links go dead in that time period.
According to the indictment, all links need to be removed to be in compliance with DMCA.
The indictment says otherwise.
My understanding is that a host is criminally liable if they knowingly host copyrighted material. Complying with DMCA just protects them from civil suits, its not an absolute protection against all forms of penalty for infringing copyrights.
Agree its probably not a slam-dunk, but the Mega* owners seem to have left themselves pretty open to this kind of action. According the the Feds, they not only ran the file hosting site but some of them personally uploaded copyrighted material to it.
As **BigT **says, in my experience Megavideo was pretty darn consistent about spiking pirate streaming. On any given streaming site for any given show, the MV links were the most reliably broken ones.
“So and so reported 40 links and only 4 were taken down” really doesn’t mean squat when a company handles thousands upon thousands of files per day. It’s statistically meaningless.
I’m not aware of any law stating that, upon receipt of a DMCA notice for a specific item, the recipient is to hunt down any *other *related items, or links, or even delete the offending file. They’re required to prevent further access to what they’re specifically asked to take down pending further review, that’s it. It’s entirely up to the copyright owner to do due diligence AFAIK.
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The person filing the complaint has no way of finding out about other links.
Err, yes they do ? They have just as many ways to find X links to a file as one with their automated crawlers. And the file hoster doesn’t have any more ways to find them than anyone else AFAIK.
It’s unreasonable to expect a global file provider to monitor all of the content uploaded by all of their users, many of which will be accounts re-created by bots the minute they’re banned or otherwise taken down ; or to scour the web for any mirror links pointing to this or that file. That is the RIAA’s self-appointed job. Let them do it.
Its not legally meaningless though. You can’t be statistically innocent. If one case of not taking down the file is illegal, then you broke the law. (reminds me of Herman Cain pointing out that there were thousands of woman he knew whom he didn’t sexually harass.)
If there are other links to the same file, then further access isn’t being prevented.
Obviously the crawlers don’t find 100% of the pirated versions.
Yes they do. Thats actually discussed at length in the indictment. The owners had access to which links overlapped with the same file, and also had hashes created to tell which files were unique.
I’m not sure this is true. The hosting software created unique hashes of files being uploaded, which indicated which files were unique and which were already on the system. This method was used to prevent child-porn from being uploaded, I suspect it could be used pretty easily to block copyrighted content. But just because they can do so doesn’t mean they have an obligation to do so, so I don’t want to make to much of that. The point of the case seems to be not that they should’ve found copyrighted material on their own, but that they didn’t remove such material once it was brought to their attention.
The IP address quoted is listed as belonging to Worldstream, which isn’t listed among the defendants but appears to be a server leaser. Doubt it’s the real deal anyway, that .bz page doesn’t scream professional to me.
Point granted.
Still, if a standard proves to be statistically irrealistic judging by the average performance of hosting providers, ISTM that it’s a bad idea to base law, and law enforcement, on that standard. It also seems to me that holding one company to that standard when others aren’t bothered is… well it’s sort of like privileges, isn’t it ? What was that canned sentence about law unevenly applied, durnit ? Now it’s going to bother me all evening.
I’d also like to know the answer to BigT’s question, whether the reported videos in question hadn’t been touched at all, or had simply been continually re-uploaded ; and whether they had been reported by their copyright owner or just a third party (in which case not only would MegaVideo not have been legally compelled to do anything, it would have been horrible policy to do anything).
Purely for brain teasing purposes:
It’s been a while since my CompSci days, but ISTM that it would be trivial to defeat such file comparisons. Upload a movie, when it’s taken down append a couple red frames at the end (or a 5 sec. snippet of some other flick or whatever), re-upload it, voilà. Computer can’t tell it’s really the same file, since the checksum won’t be identical.
I guess a systematic check would force the pirates to expend token effort to code an app to do it automatically, but…
Remember when Chiquita, the Banana Barons, were done under post-9/11 terrorist financing laws? Still peddling their fruits today. Smuggled weapons to Columbian revolutionaries and death squads, paid them millions of dollars, hired them to intimidate workers. Got a fine of $25 million.
Like when they took down MegaUpload’s video advert because of Universal’s fraudulent copyright claim, still being contested through the courts.
I’m not sure what your referring to. What specific file-hosting site has not been prosecuted for similar behavior? And if the Government had gone after that site first, would you be making the same argument, since then Megavideo wouldn’t have yet been prosecuted? Someones going to get caught first, I don’t see that evidence of the law being “unevenly applied”.
The DMCA safe harbor provision only protects hosts that are unaware of having infringing material. In this case, the AG of Virginia made them aware of the material and they didn’t do anything about it. (I read the indictment as the material two years later was the exact same as that in 2010, but its not 100% clear (sorry no quote, my browser won’t let me cut and paste the language out of the indictment, but its item #25). The case goes on to list many more cases where the company was made aware of specific infringing files and didn’t do anything. I think thats probably where they’re in the most trouble.
There are algorithims that are robust in the face of small changes to the files (consider the ability of Iphone aps to recognize mp3 tracts over noise and audio defects just by holding getting a sample from the phones microphone). Not sure how easy or hard it would be to set up such a thing. But in anycase, I think we both agree that Mega* wasn’t legally obligated to set up such a system on their own initiative.