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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."
Filesonic becomes useless.
US government requires written permission for moving files on your desktop.
The sharing scene for the music I listen to mainly transitioned from P2P networks or Bittorrent sites to indexes of Megaupload/Rapidshare/whatever uploads. The advantages cited were the inability to track IPs and more dependability since one didn't have to wait around for seeders. These recent developments might be enough to send people back to Bittorrent, especially as legal challenges have not sufficed to bring down The Pirate Bay, let alone some of the (IMHO more useful) lesser known torrent communities.
If things go back to Bittorrent, remember that the community depends to a degree on you, so please seed.
This is the new thing. Make a shit ton of money from customers (advertisers, publishers), and after you've hit your goal, close down and never pay anyone or refund any of the advertising money. Etology (of etology.com) did the same thing about 5 months ago - stole advertisers money and essentially stole money that publishers were owed (for displaying their ads). Megaupload cut off their affiliate program and didn't pay anyone out some time ago. Rapidshare.com went through 5 different version of billing and affiliate methods a couple of years ago - in the end, screwing everyone in the same way rapidshare.de did a year or two earlier. The only company that I've dealt with that has actually paid out what they owed, after cutting off their affiliate program, was Wupload.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
Because it was really useful for collaborative projects.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
Because it was really useful for collaborative projects.
Because it is my freedom to do what the hell I want with *my* files, including backup files.
Which is exactly why things like DropBox are so useful. But the key is to only support sharing with specific users. And, of course, to not have a business model (like MU) built around pirated material.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Actually, even Dropbox and SpiderOak have "sharing" support on their free offerings (at least, assuming they don't follow this lead themselves).
We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we?
Dilbert RSS feed
Ever emailed yourself a 600+MB file?
Megaupload is being taken for a ride in the Party Van and Filesonic has chosen self obliteration, though there is no shortage of competing services. On first glance Wikipedia lists 70+ of the most popular file hosting services.
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.
This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?
File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
...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
And where exactly is it going to end? Files can be "shared" via github, savannah, and sourceforge too. In fact, that's the primary purpose of those sites - legal sharing of files containing open source code. Setting up an account on those sites to share things the user doesn't own is just as easy and could go unnoticed for quite a while before some RIAA/MPAA/etc lawyer decides to nuke an open source hub off the net for the actions of a handful of users. First they came for megaupload ...
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).
Github's public repositories can of course be used for illegal file sharing, and some infringing material probably exists right now, because it is impractical for the site operator to monitor all uploaded data. However, without such functionality, participating in (or even just forking) an open source project will be much more cumbersome.
Well, an hour spent writing open-source (or other) software is an hour not consuming MAFIAA's stuff, so maybe this is what they actually want...
Youtube also has checks in place to figure out whether the soundtrack matches a copyrighted one. Of course, it's relatively easy to fool (change tone a bit or alter the soundtrack just a tiny fraction), but unaltered songs get automatically silenced. I know because I tried uploading a World of Tanks Clan Parade video I made which had "Diesel Power" by Prodigy as soundtrack. As soon as the upload finished, I received a notification that the soundtrack was copyrighted and bang, movie with no sound.
Interestingly, the same algorythm they use made me stop uploading Audiosurf captures; Audiosurf is a game allowing you to "race" a track uniquely generated from a song you choose. After ending up with a few nice captures which were muted, I said screw it and stopped.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I wouldn't really consider the contents of r/jailbaitarchive to be "children", either. Adolescents, for the most part. Legally, yes they are "children", biologically, no.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Yes, we need a Stop Our Politicians Act.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
From the other side of the world, it is appalling how copyright law likes to screw everything over the entire globe.
Here in Australia, there is only one main source of multimedia online - iTunes. And it has a limited selection compared to the US version, and massive markups. What costs you guys 99c-$1.69 costs us $1.69-$2.19 (AUD and USD are practically at parity)
Amazon doesn't work outside the US.
Google Music doesn't work outside the US.
Zune only started in Australia recently - but there are DRM restrictions.
Also, with TV episodes, there is a large delay between US availability and AU availability. At least months difference, and it is still overpriced and DRM locked on iTunes. We can't access iTunes US without a credit card. We aren't allowed to pay for it basically. So what is the easier option? Just download it.
Another common example among friends of mine:
We all love k-pop. But we can't get Korean music in Australian music stores. We can't buy it online from iTunes. We can't set up an account for iTunes Korea. We can't order the CDs online either. So what is the obvious solution? Download it.
As long as the Music/TV/Movie industry make it extremely difficult to pay, there will be a large amount of people who pirate around the world because they aren't given the option to pay for it easily. However if paying for music was easier than downloading, there would be more people paying for music.
In the US, forcing someone to give up encryption codes is generally considered to run afoul of the self-incrimination principle. So once the police ask someone for their codes, which they can do, they lose the ability to convict that person for what they find. So, given the prevailing legal opinion on the matter, and giving the fact that most congressmen and senators are either lawyers or judges or other parts of the legal system, I doubt this will come to pass. Even if it does, the US has precedent, and the self-incrimination thing is established by precedent and is part of the constitution, so it's unlikely judges would play ball.
Add to that that it's not necessary. You can "bait" p2p networks. At some point, no matter the encryption or routing tricks, you have to tell someone you don't know about the content you want. It is prohibitively expensive not to use direct routing once you get past a certain file size (so while tor is useful for downloading hacker texts, it's not useful for movie downloads). How do you know you're not asking an MPAA server ? You don't. 2 or 3 states consider that to be entrapment, but most don't, and that'll be enough.
Of course, most other regions like Europe or China don't consider the self-incrimination thing to be a problem at all. Nor do they consider forcing Americans in their jurisdictions to give up codes even the slightest bit objectionable (you don't have the right to private encryption anywhere in Europe, and let's just shut up about China and the rest).
Copyright is a thing of the past. Information is freely shared by everyone. There is nothing that set a movie or a song apart in this regard.
As far as piracy is concerned, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, short of shutting the internet down. If people have access to the internet, they will be able to communicate with everyone else that is on the internet. That's the definition of the internet.
People will also go undetected. That's the definition of encryption. You just set the key size to whatever suit your needs, and nobody will ever be able to decrypt it - unless they have the key.
Make encryption illegal and you kill e-commerce right there. Still make encryption illegal? Encryption can hide itself very easily: watermarking, hidden volumes, etc.
Nah. As long as people will be able to communicate, they will be able to pirate. Internet empowers everyone with almost unlimited (as far as songs and movies are concerned) communication. That comes with unlimited piracy. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's what the internet comes with.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The sooner we, as a society, recognize this, the sooner the next great leap in human civilization can occur. .
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.