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Megaupload Shutdown: Should RapidShare and Dropbox Worry?
An anonymous reader sends in an article discussing whether other commonly used file storage sites are in danger of being shut down now that Megaupload has been closed. Quoting: "In the wake of the crackdown on the file-sharing website Megaupload, sites offering free content-sharing, file linking and digital locker services, such as RapidShare, SoundCloud and Dropbox, could be next in the crosshair of anti-piracy authorities. ... RapidShare and MediaFire are two of the biggest services left after Megaupload's exit. However, these sites have undergone a revamp, and now ... no longer host pirated content that could lead to a permanent ban. Others in the line of fire are DropBox, iCloud and Amazon S3, which support hosting any file a user uploads. Though their intention of supporting open file-sharing is legitimate, there is really no control over the type of content being uploaded."
Yes they should.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
And if the Germans can do one thing, it's MAKE WAR !!
Rapidshare, yes. Dropbox, no.
no longer host pirated content that could lead to a permanent ban
Don't make me laugh while I'm eating, you inconsiderate bastard! Who is going to clean up this mess now?
Not unless the company is conspiring to have copyrighted material on its website.
Not unless they're paying users for posting popular pirated content like Megaupload was.
Paying pirates for pirating stuff is illegal, and it left MU without the excuse of "We didn't know." At least the other sites, as long as they don't reward pirates, can claim they're doing all they can to keep the site clean.
if they close it I've still got my files locally
Megaupload was the very blatant in it's disregard for copyright. I wonder why pirates don't post their stolen movies on youtube? Perhaps because Google is extremely diligent in removing copyrighted material and banning users who post it. If Megaupload did the same it would still be up.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
There are lots of supporters of SOPA. If you are going to declare war on them why don't you start with Teamsters and other unions (especially entertainment industry related ones) who openly supported it. Perhaps you trust them to know what's good for American jobs?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Are the MPAA and RIAA next going to target highway administrators (e.g. NJ Turnpike, Garden State Parkway) to control what is carried on their roads? Are they going to target public storage facilities to control what is stored therein? Safe Harbor must be protected. And while we're at it let's protect all linking.
If I were American perhaps I would start with them. Since I'm not, however, that would be rather rude.
They are not targeting those sites for storing but for distributing, so storage facility analogy doesn't work. A store that distributes stolen goods would be a better one.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
If you are going to use any of these sites, make sure you keep a backup somewhere under your personal control, and then encrypt the data BEFORE it is uploaded to the site. If you are going to share it, provide some means for trusted downloaders to get the key. That makes it pretty/very difficult for anyone to know exactly what was uploaded without the key - not impossible, just expensive and time-consuming.
Are the MPAA and RIAA next going to target highway administrators (e.g. NJ Turnpike, Garden State Parkway) to control what is carried on their roads? Are they going to target public storage facilities to control what is stored therein? Safe Harbor must be protected. And while we're at it let's protect all linking.
If a public storage facility start paying people to spread illigal content from open storage boxes and profit from ensuing activity, like Megaupload paid users to post the most popular pirated movies, then yes, I do believe that storage facility will be targeted next.
Megaupload was targeted because they did the absolute minimum they could to comply with the DMCA and other US legislation. It's probably true that they quietly encouraged uploading digital copies, even when they knew that material was illegal, and they were slow in taking it down. Things such as having de-duplication in place, but only removing the one specific link to a file, not removing all the copies, when a takedown notice was sent. It's those actions that will mean they might lose in court unfortunately.
.... will we say nothing and hope they don't come for us too?"
I'm sure Dotcom is hoping to get other tech companies to support his case though. Dropbox, Amazon, even Google will be asking "First they came for the dodgy upload sites
Apologies for the spam but since this is related (for the most part) to the article, this video needs to be seen by as many people as humanly possible.
---- Mega Upload Dangerous Secrets affect YOU, Mike Mozart JeepersMedia ACTA / PIPA / SOPA --- ... AAAAAAAAAA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tD1yaE0
Please spread this to as many websites/forums as you can as this affects YOU!
Good point.
Good try with affiliate link. Let us know how well you do ;)
I support the core idea of SOPA while opposing the bill, and I suspect many others do too. If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online." Sure, that's great. There are many reasons why people should have to really look if they want a pirated copy of The Hangover 2.
BUT: it's all the details that make SOPA / ProIP terrible ideas. Taking down sites on suspicion without a proper day in court is a TERRIBLE idea. We already have examples of legitimate sites caught in the crossfire, who never had due process before being destroyed. Breaking our DNS is a TERRIBLE idea. Giving law enforcement powers to US Companies is a TERRIBLE idea. And all of this is to take power away from our courts, bypassing what they can already do anyway. Oh, let's not forget that the distinction between a "US" site and a "foreign" site is ill-defined.
I'm sure there are many intelligent people who support the idea of reducing online piracy. I just wish they had read the bill.
The ______ Agenda
How am I suppose to download free HD porn without a site like megaupload?
Bullshit - all the people from other countries who keep claiming that this is a U.S. issue are just burying your heads in the sand. Start standing up for global rights already before it's too late.
Then I guess they won't have problems.
(try placing a picture of a nude person in your private folder on skydrive and see what happens)
Then allow me to rephrase: "they pander for uploads of notable copyrighted material." In this market, notable copyrighted works are predominantly non-free. There are a few exceptions, most notably free software and Wikipedia, but these are nowhere near the majority of the works uploaded to sites under the pay-for-popular-downloads program.
Jazz singers are really singing about going poop?
How you prove that you don't have copyrighted content? Giving access to all private files and show that there is no private content there. They could require that kind of services that they get full access to the files, and the information about their users.
Probably they have a copyright on the phrase "who watches the watchers" so will end closing any media that dares to complain about the abuses that this kind of policy will enable them to do.
If I make a work, copyright it, and share it freely expecting / allowing others to do so, we're sharing copyrighted works legally.
Not if you end up discovering later that your work is substantially similar to an existing non-free copyrighted work.
There are many huge corporations which spent good money to try to push through SOPA and here you are hurrsterbating over a Union which supported it, combined with your derptastic sig you must be nothing more than a right wing bootlicker.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Not RIAA or MPAA, but Konami sued Roxor for patent infringement for making an arrow stomping game. Now patent infringement is not copyright infringement, but the SOPA and PROTECTIP proposals cover both. Within copyright, The Tetris Company has sued Biosocia, developer of a game with original graphics but the same rules as Tetris, despite that game rules can't be copyrighted (US Copyright Office form letter, citing 17 USC 102(b)). Both cases ended up settling out of court. And within the music industry, see Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, successful lawsuits over accidental copying.
Don't you think its a little bit abusive to not allow the original content creators and artists to determine themselves the terms of the trade?
Let's bisect this policy debate: start by taking the idea to an extreme and working in from there. Do you think William Shakespeare's heirs and John Milton's heirs should still be collecting royalties?
A store that distributes stolen goods would be a better one.
No, such a store would be charged with crimes related to theft:
http://www.redding.com/news/2011/jan/21/redding-motorcycle-owner-arrested-chop-shop-charge/
Garyâ(TM)s Motorcycle Services Center owner Gary William Kenerson, 61, was arrested Thursday on drug- and theft-related charges.
On the other hand, Megaupload was charged with:
As anyone who bothered to read the actual indictment would have known:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
Palm trees and 8
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that's hosted by apple? Do you honestly think the feds are going to even so much as TRY to bust apple for anything?
Uh... I don't support the core idea of SOPA at all. Because the core idea there is this: Lets make new laws to cover events we've already got laws to handle, but this one lets us do it with less abuse prevention baked in.
The core idea is not to make society better by reducing the harm done by piracy. Because the harm done by piracy is ... pretty fucking close to zero. The media companies have ... really only themselves and that crazy competition nonsense to blame. The amount of available media is so staggering and is growing so much that nobody is going to be buying a notable percentage of it. There are those who just won't buy, can't buy, and those who can't buy everything they have. Those who won't, won't even when there isn't anything to pirate. Those who can't, won't even when there isn't anything to pirate. And those who can't buy everything, still won't be buying the things they weren't buying. New media will come out and they'll go after the new stuff, not the older releases that didn't make the cut before.
The harm done by rampant unchecked government is staggeringly high (hyperbole, it works both ways). First, its expensive. Second, if politicians wanted to make society better, they'd get the boot heel off everybody's throat. Cure is worse than the disease. Piracy is just a fact of internet life. Like shoplifting is a fact of retail life. We don't have laws letting police go bashing in doors of shoplifters just because some twit says 'yep, that's the guy. ..Maybe. We don't need due process for this, right guys?' Shoplifting is more damaging than piracy. Yet we get laws that are far more aggressive against piracy than shoplifting..
I wonder if they'll shut this one down, too? Or is it a fake frontended honeypot?
Newzbin / Newsbin
http://sc3njt2i2j4fvqa3.onion/
if we had a court system that did what it actually is supposed to, the answer would be no. Now we have to wait multiple years for it to get to that point, thanks to the DOJ.
Dropbox, iCloud, Facebook, and virtually every other US-based service will drop their trousers for the FBI or the RIAA and give them full access to your files, no questions asked. MegaUpload didn't. The people controlling the US economy (and government) won't be happy with any company that doesn't give them a backdoor.
I'm a DMCA agent and this may well make my job harder. Megauploads was incredible with their response time to DMCA notices. There are a lot of other sites out there, like Oron.com, that straight up ignore them, and many more that take quite a lot longer. It's absolutely absurd that they'd go after Megauploads.
Here's the full list of Reddit comments relating to that topic: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/onplj/feds_shut_down_megaupload/
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Why not move the servers out of the US and somewhere abroad where this nonsense won't reach them?
I read the indictment, one aspect I found interesting were the emails that referenced their attempts at ripping all of youtube for megavideo. I was under the assumption that all of those videos are protected by copyright. Why is the DOJ not charging them with the willful copyright infringement of each and every video that was ripped from youtube and broadcast on MegaVideo? It seems clear to me the DOJ is only interested in protecting the copyright of the big businesses, those youtube users don't matter.
I use uploaded.to to serve my 100% legal firmware files, and yesterday when I checked my account the service is now not offered in the USA. I'm guessing most of the other similar file sharing services will follow suit soon.
Here's the full list of Reddit comments relating to that topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/onplj/feds_shut_down_megaupload/
God help us when people cite reddit as a source of truth.
That's as stupid as the argument that iPod and MP3 player owners in Canada should pay a levy on their devices because they store music. It's not the same as the CD levy, where once burned, the music is PERMANENT.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Going after services like Dropbox, iCould, and S3 is clearly the correct approach. Shutter every one of them, once and for all! Storage is not a [pick your god or lack thereof] given right. You know who stores things? Terrorists. Have you ever been in The Container Store? It reeks of death and conspiracy.
I support the core idea of SOPA while opposing the bill, and I suspect many others do too. If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online."
But why would reducing piracy be a good thing? Because the RIAA and MPAA lobbies are claiming trillions of dollars in imaginary losses? How can they be reporting record profits at the same time?
The fact is, piracy has been reduced to an emotional issue, where the beneficiaries of these laws claim ridiculous losses and lobby legislators for more regulations to "save the starving artists". SOPA, PIPA, ProIP, the DMCA and every other copyright law of recent years were flawed from the get-go, as they were based on shaky, emotional assumptions, not evidence of a real problem. But heck, I'm still waiting for evidence that the copyright monopoly itself is a net positive to society, let alone its various overreaching extensions.
And God help us even more, when that knowledge turns out to be more truthful than a Slashdot post which also doesn't cite any reliable sources. For the record, that post isn't the only place I've heard that Megaupload was very good with this kind of thing. Yes far from proof, but one has to be careful.
On a related note, I've heard in two different places with one place saying that vast majority of stuff on Megaupload was perfectly legal personal storage stuff, and another place saying the vast majority is pirate stuff. It's pretty hard to know what to believe even with the whole internet at one's fingertips.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Your analogy is good for most hosting sites but doesn't work for Megaupload. I hate to cite reddit as a source but this guy did a pretty good summary of why MU was shut down. I think the others are quite safe for now.
If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online." Sure, that's great
That does not sound too great if you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about the situation. Let me make one think perfectly clear: most people never have and never will take copyrights seriously.
In life, there are laws which do not stem from the moral zeitgeist but which still affect everyone. I doubt that anyone seriously thinks it is morally questionable to park their car in the wrong place; it is illegal, sure, but not immoral. When people violate these sorts of laws, we write them a ticket and that is that -- because drawn out court proceedings over parking spaces not only sound absurd but are also a complete waste of judicial resources.
Unlike parking violations, copyright cases must be heard in court. A judge needs to decide if a particular use of a copyrighted work was illegal or protected by the fair use doctrine. This was once a perfectly reasonable way to handle things: only industrial operations could violate a copyright, and industrial operations can be expected to be rare enough and well funded enough to argue cases before a court. Lots of people have cars and therefore lots of people park illegally; before the mid seventies, very few people had copying equipment.
These days it is more common to own a computer, which can be turned into a rapid copying machine, than it is to own a car. The proper response would be to either change copyright law so that people receive tickets when the copy things illegally, or to throw copyrights out entirely and come up with a new system for promoting access to science and useful arts. For some reason, though, we are sitting here talking about how terrible it is that people are "stealing" movies.
Copyrights are not part of the moral zeitgeist and they never will be; whether or not a copyright is being violated is far too complex for it to ever be a moral issue (contrast with murder, which is usually easy to decide), and far to complex to expect people to think about in the course of living their day-to-day lives. The "Happy Birthday" song is copyrighted; practically everyone in America has sang it many times, without paying royalties and without bothering to check to see if there is a copyright on it. People still view copyright as an area law that relates to businesses and industrial operations, which is why supporters of SOPA have pointed to businesses rather than community-run forums and torrent trackers.
My view is that copyrights are dead; it is impossible to prevent copyright infringement or even curtail it without violating our civil rights. Copyright in the 21st century is simply not compatible with democracy or human rights. Attempts to save copyright will inevitably lead to censorship, police states, and the end of the justice system that protects us from government abuses. Some may disagree, but I say that rather than save an old, dying industry from going the way of the stagecoach driving business, we should be working on new ways to promote science and art.
Palm trees and 8
I think as long as Kim Schmitz isn't involved the other companies should be fairly safe. Can't believe anyone trusted him with their money. Though I suppose it's kim dotcom now not schmitz.
I personally can't wait to hear about the electronic countermeasures he was hiding behind in his home....
All I know is that it seems very likely to me that nothing in the cloud is private; that abrogation of privacy to chase terrorists (remember pre-9/11 when the excuse was always "child porn"? You don't hear it as much recently because they have the magic word "terrorist" to brut about now) has always been extended to snoop into other things, and that a site can be taken down on accusations alone, and for an indefinite time that may stretch into years, even if found innocent.
I just can't handle ANY cloud storage in that environment, unless the files are mere backup or otherwise not valuable. That still leaves a lot of business - at work, we store multiple Terabytes on a cloud service, because we have another copy and because they wouldn't be that "expensive" to lose. But anybody who imagines that "everything is moving to the cloud" feels to me like storing it at the NSA with a sign on the box saying "fishing expeditions encouraged!"
If my attitude bothers those who hope to be the next round of billionaires from the Great Move To The Clouds, they know where to lobby.
That's what we're reduced to, at this point - with no meaningful effect on political outcomes possible for individuals, we must plead for an industry lobby to be on our side.
It wouldn't matter where the servers are.
Deleted
Get screwed as well.
One or two minor teething niggles with cloud services.
Deleted
It is an unsolvable situation.
For digital entertainment to be sucessful, people can't pirate.
For the internet to be a open and free, piracy must be possible.
I would really like to see pre paid entertainment work, something like Kickstarter where people can raise production costs in advance with a promise to make the work public domain after it is complete.
Parking violations can be immoral under some circumstances. For example, parking in front of a hospital in such a manor that it would delay an ambulance from delivering a patient.
One thing that SOPA could do that previous laws can't is take down a site like the Pirate Bay. It doesn't have any kind of presence in the US. SOPA could allow the US government to take down or block access to a website like that. As well as any other website they wanted.
But it says it's from a DMCA agent, doesn't that make it illegal not to believe it?
The more long range question is this - is this the beginning of the end of the "cloud"? As a business, can you afford to do everything on the cloud? Think of the implications. Much like the SOPA argument, if you are a rival business and I know you store your entire business on the cloud (after all, local storage is so 20th century), well, let me get some folks to store some copyrighted files on the same cloud service you use. A few well placed calls to the DoJ and the cloud service is shut down - and you are out of business. Even if the cloud service 'wins' in court 6 months to a year later - you and your business are through! Pretty convenient, eh?
How's that cloud looking now?
Just read what this "Freecoder" has been writing in this thread
I'd bet this guy is from MAFIAA, or similar thuggery groups
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
SideReel might be a honeypot.
The only time I visited them, I got a Copyright Infringement Letter via my ISP about three days later. That chilled me to the bone.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Rapidshare is not in the U.S. nor in Germany. It's in Switzerland! See: https://www.rapidshare.com/#!rsag_contact
Any bank with a 'safe deposit box' service that could be used to store stolen property should be shut down.
Actually, the company that owns the building they're in should be compelled to seal its doors, and the local council should be compelled to close the street.
Oh, and the phone company should be compelled to remove them from all the phone books.
There. That ought to do it.
Even Google ( googledocs ) and Microsoft ( skydrive ) will let you publish your documents to the 'public', which is no different than what mega was doing.
Even my hosting provider lets me share files.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You guys don't seem to get why Mega Upload was shut down in the first place. It wasn't that they were hosting pirated content, it was that the employees of the company knew about it and even encouraged it. The DMCA has a safe harbor provision for sites like drop box, etc.
Companies should worry because the Safe Harbor provisions were denied to MegaUpload based in part on their use of deduplication.
MU was denied safe harbour because they "did not comply" by using deduplication (!!!), by profiteering, and through employee misconduct.
Services such as MegaUpload and Dropbox should protect their customer's data from their own employees. Clearly, stuff like this gets abused all the time - which I feel should result in penalties for those employees, and potentially fines for the company, but it shouldn't destroy the business. Look at how HIPAA violations are handled in hospitals, for instance. Finding examples of employees fired for HIPAA violations over Google is pretty easy, but I don't see many, if any, hospitals that have been shut down for these problems.
All of these problems apply to services like S3 and Dropbox. Don't believe for a second that there hasn't been *someone* at Amazon or Dropbox that hasn't broken the rules. They're good rules, and there might even be enforcement, but, "rules are made to be broken". I've been in the hosting business for over a decade and while I haven't ever broken these rules, I know they're broken all the time.
What we need to take away from this is that:
1) Deduplication, at least in a hosted-services context, should be avoided until we see the results of these trials.
2) Companies need to better police their employees for misconduct with zero-tolerance policies.
3) The law needs to be *loosened* so that hosting/cloud companies can continue to operate, because right now, services like Dropbox and AWS S3 are are immense risk.
You purposely delete all but one link to the file, so that it stays in the system
The service provider needs that one link so that it can put the file back up two weeks after receiving a valid counter-notification.
In my non-lawyer understanding, that fact makes DMCA take-downs bogus since the studio does, in fact, NOT own the copyright to Avatar_screen_rip.torrent
A torrent file could be considered not unlike a listing in a directory or search engine. Such information location tools are subject to the OCILLA takedown procedure in the same way that hosting providers are, according to 17 USC 512(d).
does a site that hosts torrent files but does not contain a tracker (i.e. all the torrents are DHT or use a 3rd party tracker) still subject to this nonsense?
Then the announce URL of the third-party tracker or the key for the DHT is not unlike the URL in a Google search result.
I stored zip'd photos of my kids in the "cloud" or megaupload & I paid for the premium service to keep them safe. Now what? I never stole, borrowed, copied or viewed anything illegal or even knew it existed on the site to be honest. It's easy to jump on the "they deserve it because they made more money then me" bandwagon but just because you steal stuff online doesn't mean everybody else does.
most people never have and never will take copyrights seriously
That's because most people are clueless, period, and don't know how any aspect of modern society actually works. They don't know where chicken sandwiches or anti-biotics come from either. But they actually do take copyrights seriously, indirectly. They want professionally created entertainment, books, software, music, plays, operas, video games, news programs, movies ... and even the leeches who want to rip it all off know that it will only exist if the honest chumps they love to rag on will continue to pay writers, artists, filmakers, musicians, photographers for the works they find worthy. The leeches actually like copyrights because it's the mechanism that allows the market in which other parties gladly create/finance what they want to function, and off of which the leeches knowingly suck using criminal operations like MegaUpload.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Even before the ICE seizures began, Hollywood already succeeded in putting innocent websites out of business due the high cost of defending themselves. Rapidshare has to worry about loosing in court. Everyone else has to worry about being shutdown despite being on the right side of the law.
MegaUpload doesn't pay users to upload content, at least not explicitly. The fact that that may be the case is beside the point. Or else we go to the old argument about whether guns or crazy gunmen kill people.
Let's see, I see some online hard drive spec sheets that list the "humanized" capacities of their various drive models. Typically this would take the form of "holds x movies/mp3s". You can argue that hard drive manufacturers are encouraging piracy because the most "obvious" way you can download 2 TB of such data is through, you guess it, piracy, just as the most "obvious" use for a gun is to kill people.
MegaUpload was an online storage site. Sure they had revenue-sharing schemes. But MU did't require/limit/force users to apply such a scheme only to the latest Hollywood blockbuster or hit stong. Users were given money for total downloads, which could be anything from Ubuntu ISOs, encrypted private files, or fansubbed anime not licensed by any American company and therefore beyond the scope of any FBI investigation (unless that agency is already under the beck and call of the Japanese animation industry).
I'm sure RapidShare and Dropbox ARE worrying. Any legitimate company involved in file sharing, storage, or even companies that are only tangentially related to such services must be shocked by this turn of events. Even if they didn't do anything at all illegal. I'm sure they'll all have to carefully consult with their lawyers to determine how this precedent affects them. Just think, a business can be shut down any time the government feels like it, with no due process! That certainly could throw a monkey wrench in a business model. Hell, even their law-abiding end-users are going to be alarmed. And I can only imagine that investors will forever be much more hesitant to invest in a startup that offers such services.
I support the core idea of SOPA while opposing the bill, and I suspect many others do too. If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online." Sure, that's great. There are many reasons why people should have to really look if they want a pirated copy of The Hangover 2.
Online piracy has been about the same for the past 15-odd years in terms of availability, from what I can see. If anything, there's less of it now due to legitimate online channels for media: online 'app stores' (Apple's, Steam, Microsoft's), and the like. It is trivially easy to find electronic media of one sort of the other online to buy to download immediately, and people use them often.
This has been going on for well over the better part of a generation, with no sign of cultural shift on the horizon. (Meanwhile, the Prohibition lasted only 13 years, and look what good prohibiting access to a social vice which everyone wanted did! It ceased immediately, and nobody went to jail.)
All the while, *PAA has been pushing hard to completely eliminate (and making a mess of people's lives in the process) piracy. They've gotten quite a few laws on the books and have made the lives of common people utterly miserable for things they didn't necessarily know were "wrong" (or call it illegal).
For the most part, the laws necessary to reduce online piracy are already there and have been there for a long time. SOPA isn't needed. DMCA was already stepping over bounds by walking around presumption of innocence. What should be akin to a traffic or parking ticket if you're caught sharing has turned into something with the legal repercussions of organized drug trafficking. It isn't right, and it needs to be dialed back a hell of a lot before any steps 'forward' are taken.
So, no: having read SOPA, there is absolutely no justification for it. What it functionally should be able to provide has already been provided, legally (and then some). We really don't need even more of a Noble Experiment than what we've already got on our hands, thanks.
(Part of me suspects I'm replying to a shill, but what the hell...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Gah. I never said it was not a global issue, merely that I would not START with them. My first post, which seems to be no more, was to point to someone in my own country who went to great lengths to list what a Great Idea SOPA is. *sarcasm included at end there*
Personally, I'm happy support is falling for both SOPA and PIPA. Horribly done bills.
So stop calling file trading piracy. I never understood how some 12 year old boy downloading Katie Perry's latest excursion in abusing her audience's ears - all from the comfort of his mommy's basement - is some how morally equivalent to the forcible seizure of watercraft by a gang of armed thugs hellbent on the slaughter and/or enslavement, rape, and pillaging of the crew, the theft of the boat's contents, and then the final gleeful burning and murderous sinking of the vessel and all left on board.... THAT'S piracy. Downloading "Teenage Dream" is not.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What's reddit?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
One look at Kim and you know the guy didn't miss many meals. Talk about living high off the hog...he was a living example.
I'm betting he'll commit suicide. He's already tried eating himself to death.
I just downloaded the latest episode of Grimm (S01E09) from Rapidshare... So no, they're still hosting pirated content.
I am out of this in Ireland. I am uneasy with breaking copyright. If someone steals my car, that's a simple case and he owes me. If someone steals intellectual property . . .
I also think the idea of a replacement for Hollywood, while sorely needed, needs work. Let me give you an actual serious example:
I would like to make a feature about Jesus Christ - not just the crap Hollywood produces, but a grasp of the man as he was, the real person, and the King that he is now. It would educate adults and kids in their faith and be unquestionably bible based, and directed in line with that alone. Another revenue stream would be teacher's notes & a dvd set for schools. Est. cost for a low budget version would be $10-15 million. The dvd set for schools would facilitate teaching religious instruction.
Do Slashdotters feel like forking that sum into the doubtful investment of a film which may end up being pirated and copied by sites like megaupload? That is a serious proposal which will remain just that unless people express willingness to invest. The $10-15 million is a barrier to me. Then investors really own it. Are they prepared to open source (= throw away) their investment and how are they expected to make money at it?
Many Slashdotters have though this as their access to their files. This might be a problem if you are on the road and use these online services for your cellphone. But, nobody should be stupid enough to do this after what happened today. If you need online file-storage, you should have them on a FTP that you control in addition to an online file storage. There are apps for that. But, this is not what this case is about at all.
There are three more important things to consider: Group access, Legal Presence and Legal Extortion
Group access is when you have a customer base in a cloud service and that service hosts something that is copyrighted. The service gets shut down and you loose hundreds of followers over night. This translates into lost revenue. This was probably intentional by Hollywood. They are known to go after small producers because they hate competition. Or your company are forced to change their procedures over night. Even if this storage was used for temporary files, there might be files that are lost because the storage is emptied at fixed times. Or there might be files that are never uploaded. For a social group this might also translate into problems.
Legal presence means that now we got a confirmation that using a server in US means you got a presence. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, this means any company has a presence there. USA has a legal system that is beyond repair. Payment systems are dominated by USA, so they can directly confiscate your income. They already did this with companies cooperating with Wikileaks. This is one "First they came for the others..."-situation.
Legal extortion means that there are huge amounts of logs potentially incriminating huge groups of people. This is a danger in itself. America is known for its strict laws. There is no central oversight over the amount of laws. People can can choose to think that America has prisons, the truth is probably closer to that they have labor-camps where they detain huge amounts of people. In a prison, there has to be rehabilitation and not any excessive verdicts. A labor-camp has only a profit-motive as well as an interest in political oppression.
This might very well be attacks on American freedom you are witnessing. Brought about by fascists who want more corporate control over America. And less rights to the citizens. I hope I am wrong, only time will tell.
All those seized servers containing vast amounts of information, a lot of it copyrighted content sure... But as people have said what about the private information, photos of peoples families etc and of course company data including trade secrets etc. Anything which any rogue employee going through the seized server's data could easily swipe for themselves and make a good profit on selling to that companies competitors etc! Of course it would be stupid to store such information on MU to begin with, especially if it was in an unencrypted format, but then again since this sort of thing could happen to any File storage service such as Dropbox, the "wrong" kind of people would be able to decrypt the information easily enough given the incentive to do so
Oron.com is also I believe one of the sites that (unlike Megaupload) does actually pay uploaders for files that are blatantly infringing - Megaupload had a reputation for denying payouts and if you read what the indictment against them actually says none of the evidence they list contradicts that. Additionally, they pay referral fees when someone buys a premium upload, they have much tighter restrictions on free downloads than Megaupload or most of the other similar sites in order to encourage users to go premium, and there were plausible rumors that they'd directly paid off major pirate download forums to become Oron-only. They seem to be obviously, directly profiting from copyright infringement as part of their business model in a way that Megaupload never was.
Google Edward de Vere shows me Oxfordian theory. Let me rephrase: Assuming the Earl of Oxford ghostwrote at least some of Shakespeare's plays, do you think his heirs should still be collecting royalties?
"Others in the line of fire are DropBox, iCloud and Amazon S3, which support hosting any file a user uploads."
Doesn't this apply to pretty much any web hosting space out there?
Amazon S3 is mentioned in the post, as they may shut it down. Very very unlikely. If you look closely in where the image on current megaupload resides, you'll see this url
http://usdoj.s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/banner.jpg
Yes. US. Deparment of Justice uses S3 for hosting their files :-)
By this logic, the following should be outlawed/shut down also:
(1) Cars (I could drive a pirated CD somewhere)
(2) All external drives (I could just copy files the old fashioned way)
(3) Printing Presses - I might print something I don't own the copyright to
I can keep going with this, but it is obvious that the tool (file sharing) doesn't engage in piracy.. People do. Just because someone can use a tool to commit a crime, should we outlaw it? I suppose the argument shifts to gun control now. In many cases guns are only used for harm, so controls should be implemented. Is there anything we can learn from that? Perhaps anonymous file sharing should go away and a file transfer should only be allowed to registered users, so there is a way to catch pirates and keep a useful service active for legitimate users.
"Going after these services is treating a symptom, not the root cause."
See: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
The root cause is lack of a basic income, an expanded gift economy, or improved subsistence technology, and/or better government planning (which could all support artists and other creators).
With a basic income (or those other things), creative people would not have to worry where their next meal is coming from, and would not have to engage in the legal, but increasingly immoral (in the internet age), practice of creating "artificial scarcity" to fund future works or repay investors.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Megaupload and rapidshare are services designed for piracy. Dropbox is not
If you're going to steal, go big! You'll get the same prison term stealing a few blu-ray players from your local retail establishment as you will tens of millions through some financial or copyright scheme.
I suspect the part of the plan that failed was thinking he was immune from prosecution by the US by living in New Zealand.
paintball
The comparison to parking violations seems particularly apt. You can never stop parking violations. And everyone parking willy-nilly in big cities is a major problem. But we all have to do it from time to time. Parking tickets will never completely "solve" the problem, but it does a good enough job that most people don't just park in front of everyone else's driveways.
Our copyright regime at the moment fires off $100,000 lawsuits at people who should be getting the equivalent of a parking ticket. But, being a huge expense and a risk to all industries every time they do it, not many can come out. If every now and then people got a $100 ticket for illegally torrenting Herbie: Fully Loaded, maybe they'd think twice about doing it.
Of course, the valuations need to change. And the associated fines need to have the slightest clue of reality. And the companies need to stop being allowed to write the rules of what "fair use" means. And we need to take our government back from the entertainment maffia that values sales over human rights.
But turning the war on pirates into mild parking restrictions seems like a good idea.
The ______ Agenda
1. The MegaUpload case demonstrates that no such bill is even needed.
2. What about innocent folks who have placed their files on the service? Who restores their property to them if the entire site goes down? They have property rights too, which are not currently being addressed, that I've seen.
3. The OPEN bill provides a wrongly accused site no relief, other than dropping the penalties. But they will have suffered financial harm. That needs to be addressed. I have no doubt that Viacom would have used any SOPA-like or OPEN bill against YouTube, which in the end was found not liable for copyright infringement. Why should YouTube be forced into an ITC action, instead of leting it duke it out in litigation in federal courts, with appeals built in and statutes well known? A bill that doesn't restrain such over-the-top complainants can't work.
4. No bill will work anyhow. There is no way to stop copying on the Internet. It's what computers do. You will never find a way to stop it. Criminals are technically smarter than Congressmen. They'll just start up a new site under a new name. Surely Hollywood should have realized by now that they need to invent a new business model or accept a measure of copying as a cost of doing business, just as stores know they can't altogether stop shoplifting. Not every instance of copying is a lost sale. Those folks weren't going to buy from you anyway.
5. Someone needs to think through the property rights of the wrongly accused a lot more than they have. If someone has money in the bank at Paypal or wherever, they have rights to that money, even if only 1% of it is from legitimate sources. A bill that pretends that they have no property rights while fighting for Hollywood's property rights, as they see them and lobby for, is offensively hypocritical. If Iran was theatening to do this to American web sites, how would Congress feel, particularly about them just swallowing up the money? Well, extrapolate.
6. I don't personally believe Hollywood cares about foreign sites. SOPA wouldn't stop sales to the rest of the world, after all. It's instead a chess move to regulate the Internet by forcing regulation on US companies, because they wrongly suppose that is the problem, that the Internet is killing their business model, so they wish to retaliate and block, control, and hobble the new economy so the old economy can survive a little longer. The world is not at consensus that Hollywood is the center of the universe or is to be protected at any cost to the rest of the world. In short, there is a lack of balance in even coming up with a bill like SOPA. A neutered SOPA doesn't address that foundational issue, that this is about regulating US businesses so Hollywood can establish a playing field more slanted in its favor. If you are really interested in jobs, keep in mind that the New Economy creates them, not the Old Economy, which is in a serious decline, despite so many IP laws designed to protect them.
7. None of these bills consider the public's interest as being worthy of protection. There are wide variances in what constitutes copyright infringement. That also is ignored. Where does fair use come in? None of the bills even address that, but it's part of Copyright Law. What about human rights? I mean, who gave Hollywood the right to control the Internet? They didn't invent it or build it. They don't own it. And if the US tells the world that the US owns the Internet, and that US law is to be universally applied or else, there will be serious repercussions and inevitable damage from backlash. It's just a really, really bad idea from the ground up.
8. I have two suggestions. First, Congress members should immediately hire tech support folk to advise. them. Second, if you want to discuss bills like this, get the techies into the discussion to advise you on what US businesses can do technically to protect themselves better than they do now. Trust me, there will be plenty. After that, ask if more even needs to be done.
I don't think piracy would be much of an issue for that idea. Convincing anyone to waste money on it on the other hand.
I've got a few issues with this whole thing.
First, since the main complaint against megaupload was they were doing data-deduplication, at what granularity do you need to dedupe before you become infringing?
This is problematic because of #2: DMCA complaints lie. Like, the majority of the time. They keyword search and send takedown requests to files with names they don't like without ever seeing the content. So, if a service dedupes content like that all you need to do is upload something that's popular and name it "Britney Spears #1 hit poop" and get it DMCAd. Troll heaven.
Third, their "Paying pirates" is a bald-faced lie. Putting up content you own and getting paid for it was a way to make money for independants of all stripes - modmakers, musicians, amateur directors, etc. The fact that some people made money with things they didn't own (And don't forget that takedowns were honored, dispite the misleading wording of the indictment.) doesn't change the fact that it had a massively non-infringing use. As for their "evidence", try to find one ISP where employees don't talk about using their bandwidth to download not-entirely-legit content. It's considered a job perk of a fat pipe.
Lastly, The MU takedown had the intended effect. Filesonic died early this morning as well. If you don't own your own hosting, good fucking luck sharing anything you've created with the world. There's a lot of minecraft mods that are just gone now, for instance.
There is no way possible for any site to police the content people upload. All that is necessary is to upload an encrypted file, and distribute the location and key to your confidants.
Interesting timing or coincidence?
The conspiratorial theory would be that this was timed to prove the absolute need for SOPA / PIPA... get piracy in front of people's face, grab some headlines that the SOPA / PIPA people can use to push their new law enforcement tools.
On the other hand this also demonstrates that law enforcement does quite well without SOPA / PIPA... so perhaps this was badly timed or thought out.
What about software copyright? Without copyright, the GPL doesn't work and Microsoft, Apple, or whoever would be free to take somebody's open-source project and sell it under their own name.
I think that Rapidshare might be next to attack.I believe they host a billion copyrighted things and the government will try and attack them next.
They should take down SoundCloud. So much copyright content is on there. You can even rip the content from the servers and convert them to mp3
Considering how many services are shut down now, I think there are only 2 possible causes. Either somehow the movie industry secretly paid them to stop (not likely), or someone sent them a virus (maybe even the U.S. government).
Rapidshare, Hotfile, and a few other file-sharing sites have been able to show that they can remove suspicious files due to copyright infringement concerns, if one can show that they can remove files out of copyright infringement concerns, they can at least prove somewhat that they are somewhat clean. As for the overall problem with piracy, I see the problem being less severe due to plenty of companies showing great capacity for the digital downloads nowadays. One can get just about any game full version as a digital download, back it up on an external hard drive, and play at full quality, pay for it, and enjoy it almost guaranteed at full quality. Steam, iTunes, GameTree, and more offer plenty of decent proof for this. Plus, it's tricky to try getting into the multiplayer part of pirated games anyways, not to say someone can't be desperate or savvy enough, but not all that many people are. One can try war on piracy, and waste plenty of resources, or one can accept that plenty of businesses, while they're not free, they can give you full digital copies of software, music, and movies, at high quality, and a near-guarantee of being legit and functional. The law isn't all that important because the adaptability is showing through and through.
How many besides me have done this:
Bought a blu-ray player, rented a blu ray movie. By the way a rental BD-rom is not always the same as a purchased BD. Then had to search for a for firmware update to play it. Then find that you also had to add a 16Gb USB stick and connect the thing to upgraded internet connection. After those aggravations have been satisfied find some of the blu-rays freeze, hang or just wont work. Then you buy a bd-rom and try that and go thru same process. cpu does not have horsepower--upgrade it, memory, blu-ray software and mobo. That was not enough-- add add a gpu, but have replace pwr supply because more stuff and more watts and at the end of this,,, same as you are with the player.
Does anybody know of a theater that gives AARP discounts?