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Megaupload Drops Lawsuit Against Universal Music
bs0d3 writes "Not so long ago, a legal video was taken down by repetitive DMCA requests to YouTube. In response, Megaupload filed a lawsuit against Universal Music. This past week, Megaupload was raided by U.S. authorities and forced offline, which is costing Megaupload millions of dollars in damage. Today; while employees are in U.S. custody, Megaupload has mysteriously dropped their lawsuit against Universal Music."
But only if NZ actually extradites them. Please also note the DMCA is valid for the US only., the rest of the world (rightfully) wipe their asses with this piece of legal sh**.
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
Megaupload paid to create a video promoting/defending their site and posted it on YouTube. Universal Music (who had no legal claim to the video) abused the take-down agreement they had with Google (and possibly the DMCA) to pull this video off of YouTube simply because they didn't like it. That is a cut-and-dry case of censorship if I have ever heard it.
If the information in the indictment is true then Megaupload is guilty of copyright infringement and should be held accountable for it. However, Universal Music should also be held accountable for their abuses of the law.
The lightweight framework of copyright enforcement it created kept huge workloads away from the courts without creating unworkable levels of abuse
Lightweight framework of enforcement? You mean like having the entire DOJ work for the media giants leaning on every country in the world to violate their own laws and arrest people and surrender them to US authorities?
No unworkable levels of abuse? You mean like millions of take down notices filed every day against thing that have no pirated content what so ever, beyond simply mentioning a word in the title?
Tell me, what hole have you had your head in for the last 5 years?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Only in the eyes of misguided fucktards like yourself Princess. The original legal case was about illegal use of the DMCA to take down material. It had nothing to do with "censorship" nor "free speech", despite what you and the tinfoil hat brigade may like to think. Why don't you leave the legal and technical discussions to the men who know what they are talking about instead of getting your pretty little head confused about such basic concepts?
BTW, shouldn't you be in the kitchen baking?
Oh see, it's funny, because it's intentionally sexist. Now, ignoring all the sexist bullshit, because it's just not worth getting into, because it's a total tangent to the real issues at matter...
Illegal use of the DMCA is considered a form of censorship in colloquial speech. I noted in my post that it wasn't about "pure" censorship, which is a government making specific speech illegal. However, it is colloquial censorship in that it is someone blocking access to someone else's content with or without legal authority.
Also, the original filing of the suit commented that it were an abuse of the DMCA, but Universal Music Group the original defendant in the case, pointed out that not only were they not actually responsible for the offending action, (it was UMG which is a subsidiary company of Universal Music Group, but not jointly-liable) but as well, it wasn't even an abuse of the DMCA, as UMG was making use of the tools that they were granted access to by contract with YouTube, that allowed UMG to bypass even the DMCA process. Thus, the whole situation was chalked up to, "YouTube granted UMG that access, and the only injured party in this abuse of tools provided was YouTube, and thus MegaUpload has no valid standing to file suit in the first place in a breach of contract between UMG and YouTube."
But getting back to the point, colloquially "censorship" is used by the general public, and in this case the slashdot categories to refer to anything where a non-first-party effects the removal of speech of another person without their consent. But you know, enforcing legal definitions of words on an informal forum such as slashdot seems like a way much better idea than using the same jargon, dialect and register as the audience of that forum.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Promoting copyright infringement is a crime in quite a few countries (hence one reason why MegaUpload was blocked in a few countries even before this happened). The DMCA is just a specific law that attempts to set rules for US citizens for what is and isn't copyright infringement on the Internet.
There, fixed that for you.
Ezekiel 23:20
Schmitz' globulous ego
i prefer schmitz's globulous ego. because, schmitz's globulous ego is not buying laws to restrain MY freedoms for HIS profit. schmitz can queue up to 100 mercedes, bmws if he wants to. as long as he doesnt interfere with my freedoms for the sake of his own profit.
Read radical news here
This SOPA thing must be really awful if it's making people say the DMCA is good!
Note that Dotcom is not originally New Zealander. Countries sometimes refuse to extradite people born in their country, but such usually isn't the case with foreign nationals.
Doesn't matter - the alleged act still needs to be a crime in the country granting the extradition.
And I'm pretty surprised you would support him either
I'm not supporting the person, I'm supporting a company that provided a valuable service to the public. MegaUpload helped people all over the world to exercise their fair use rights.
For example, in my country, I could rip my music CDs and put them on MegaUpload, and then listen to them anywhere, since format shifting is legal here.
Of course, the American media companies didn't like that, so they demanded that MegaUpload delete all copies of a file, even the copies that were uploaded legally.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
A thousand times this. It's about time the rest of the world stands up and tells the Americans to go fuck themselves.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world..
As an American, I'd like you to know that most of us are tired of this, too. The same goes for our government.
Unfortunately far too few of us have yet to make the connection that we put those assholes there in the first place and maybe we should do something about it. But we're working on it, really. A lot of us are trying very hard.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
There are lots of people under the jurisdiction of US law who aren't US citizens. So no you didn't fix it.
2 weak neighbors?
No. You have a neighbor to the north which is not an imperialistic war machine.
There is a difference. We don't have to pour an insane amount of money into our military budget because we don't practice insane foreign policy just to line the pockets of the men that own the politicians.