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Filesonic Removes Ability To Share Files
Ihmhi writes "In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, Filesonic has elected to take preventative measures against a similar fate. The front page and all files now carry the following message: 'All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.' Whether or not this will actually deter the U.S. government from taking action remains to be seen."
Because the owners of these sites are only punishable under US law so long as they're doing business here and they are in a country that extradites to the US. The moment someone sets up an operation like this in a US-unfriendly country (and makes absolutely sure not to conduct any business in the US), there will be no way for the US to shut them down by going after the owners.
Thus SOPA. You can't shut the site down, but if you can prevent them from engaging in transactions with US residents, you've effectively achieved the same thing.
We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we?
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Some curiosity:In Bulgaria and also most other eastern European countries there used to be a funny practice amongst ISP's:Each internet provider used to have a NAS/LAN server, accessible only to subscribers/customers, loaded with warez, pr0n and movies, in a catalog type of way, year by year. This was way back in 1999- 2005. So You basically see what your monthly fee is, now much Mbps you get up/down, and also what kind of "bonus" warez this particular ISP has to offer, lol! I almost canot believe this was the de facto standard for many years! After some time the laws got changed and the ISPs were forced to quit this practice. But then torrents came in place. So what i am thinking is - we have at least a dozen trackers that are registered/hosted in Switzerland, Netherlands and other locations, like offshore islands or that Transnistria in Russia, where our local Bulgarian/EU laws do not apply. The servers/trackers themselves are configured to answer to requests only from Bulgarian peering IP addresses. So basically those servers remain unseen for the rest of the internet, including authorities, unless you use a Bulgarian proxy. My humble guess is that this kind of "localized" trackers will never go away, also i know for a fact that in Russia they have the same private trackers, DC hubs, and other p2p based ways of sharing warez. Just my 2 cents on this subject - i don't really care about the Filesharing hosts like MegaUpload, WUpload, Hotfile, RapidShare and so on, because they want money, because they have their pages bloated with ads and because of the crappy CAPTCHAs. Yeah.
...to the rest of the world: we don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here. We're going to make this the most hostile nation to internet and technology start ups by bullying anyone who dares defy our notion of imaginary property.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
You're making a strawman argument. No where does it say on that site that it's for making backups.
I assume they're only making the files available to the original uploaders (so that no one can come and later claim that they've lost important files because of them). You know how people are. If gmail were to suddenly shut down tomorrow and allow no one to retrieve anything from their account. 100% of all gmail users would claim that they had lost irreplaceable files and data on it (even if they hadn't).
...and this facade (of legal file sharing) will be completely stopped...
Sure, the facade of illegal file sharing may shut down, but at the cost of the legal file sharing as well. I don't know about you, but for me if everyone of those filesharing sites shuts down, that means I'm relegated to using gmail for sharing files (and that usually means a limit of 5 MB to 25 MB depending on who I'm emailing the attachment to). Either that, or I can use meetup.com site which has a limit of 10 MB (plus I think they manually inspects each upload, even for paid customers, so that means there is a delay there as well before anything actually shows up).
If these sites can be shut down with lawsuits now, why do we need SOPA and PIPA?
Like I said, I hope this doesn't shut down all file-sharing web sites, which would make my life difficult, but I think that was the original point of SOPA and PIPA, and that was to eventually shut down without due process any and all user file-sharing web sites that are easy to use (no matter what collateral damage this would create on the legitimate and legal usage that goes on there).
The concept of liberty is so 1790s.
>Filesonic becomes useless.
Internet within US jurisdiction becomes a little more useless.
FTFY
You know that piracy isn't bothered by what the US does to it's own Internet businesses, right?
Morality aside, since everything on the net is copyright by default it IS my right to download and keep anything I can find (obvious exception is pedo-candy). AFAIK downloading (leech style) is not illegal in any western country, it's uploading that's the problem.
Seems to me that over the last 10yrs or so the MAFIAA have been very successfully in their campaign to convince people (including way too many slashdotters), that downloading is illegal. From a moral POV, I would really like to see the authorities take them to task over what amounts to a seriously fraudulent advertising campaign. A just punishment would be to fine them twice what they spent on the campaign and give it to a court appointed executor to spend on correcting the misinformation....one can dream, right?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I wanted to also point out that uploaded.to pretty much completely blocked the United States. Just my luck, I find out a half-hour after I submit the story.
The reaction of non-Americans (on Reddit, at least) seems to be "Ha, now you have to deal with the same shit we deal with from the BBC, Netflix, etc.".
Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Some time ago I contacted the RIAA to get permission to play music in public in a specific setting. I got sent off on a 6 week long wild goose chase with no-one able to tell me how to get permission and how much it would cost. The bears repeating: no one at RIAA or any of the labels could tell me how to get permission to play music in my setting.
What this means is that in spite of all their noise making, the *IAA is not set up to let people do what they want; they still want to control not only the distribution but also the who, when, and where. They just tell you that if you don't have permission, you can't play. But they don't have a mechanism, at any price, to let you play when and where you want.