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EFF Seeking Information of Legal Users of Megaupload
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, with the assistance of Carpathia Hosting, has issued a call for information on users who lost legitimate data as part of the Megaupload takedown. No promises are made at this point, but Carpathia at least notes: "We have no immediate plans to reprovision some or all of the Megaupload servers. This means that there is no imminent data loss for Megaupload customers. If this situation changes, we will post a notice at least 7 days in advance of reprovisioning any Megaupload servers."
MegaUpload's shutdown didn't need SOPA to pass... it's just a simple DMCA escalation that says if you ignore DMCA Takedown letters, your server farm will be ordered to down your server. The DMCA is still missing the provision for a penalty for an invalid takedown request but that's what we should be telling Congress to work on.
because if enough legitimate users rise up, doesn't it throw the entire position of megaupload only "existing for piracy" into question?
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
MegaUpload's problem is that they never implemented a DMCA Takedown system like YouTube has had for years now. If they do that, they can likely have their servers back quickly... if they don't and nobody steps in to pay the bills then the data is already lost.
If I rip an album and upload it for my personal use later, then thats fair-use as long as I never share said link with anyone else.
The mere presence of copyrighted material in their account doesn't suddenly mean the users were pirates.
The big problem here is that piracy probably _was_ a huge part of megaupload.
Not saying their wern't lots of legitimate users, but lets not ignore reality here.
I didn't lose anything I didn't have backed up locally but what I did lose was the service I was using to send clients the photos I took for them. Plenty of alternatives, obviously, but how do I know which one would be next?
MegaUpload's assets have been frozen, so they can't pay their hosting bills. Carpathia Hosting has several terabytes of web-facing storage that are no longer earning revenue. Eventually, they will sell that capacity to someone else, and the data will be overwritten. This has to be one of the most misunderstood, misquoted, and misdirected stories of the year so far.
There's no FDIC for data, and the bank just closed. Caveat Emptor.
A massive civil lawsuit that proved they were not fully DMCA compliant would had been sufficient.
Surely they would had cleaned up their act if they were indeed found acting unlawful. What happend was completely unnecessary.
While I respect the EFF and don't doubt their intentions, it sounds like this Carpathia Hosting company got itself a PR-out that it needed. The way I understood things, it sounded like MU's assets were frozen and it was assumed that since they couldn't pay Carpathia, the hosting company was going to clear out the data at the stroke of midnight (slight exaggeration, but you get the idea). I'm sure that MegaUpload users were hoping that the hosting company would wait until a trial to delete or not delete out of the goodness of their hearts, but that isn't fair to them. On the other hand, from the comment on the EFF page, it sounds like Carpathia can not get users their data, either for technical or contractual reasons, at the moment.
By giving a small grace period and supporting the EFF here, Carpathia has really put themselves out of "Bad Guy" range. I don't think they would have deserved the label to begin with, but you know some disgruntled users would have bad mouthed the hosting company once their data was lost.
Vol~
I don't get it. Isn't the issue that megaupload customers ARE going to lose their data very soon? In that case, wouldn't the lack of reprovisioning just maintain the status quo?
The issue is that Megaupload doesn't have money to pay the company owning the servers that it uses to store data. If you hire server space, and stop paying, then eventually the data is gone. The server company says "we don't need the space right now, so we won't delete anything right now". Which is very nice of them, because right now their servers are not paid for. However, I wouldn't expect them to restore access to the data until all payments have been made.
Furthermore, what annoys me is they let it go on for 7 whole years while all the industry did was whine about them, before finally getting the FBI to take action.
They had more than enough US presense for a successful civil case, and of course disobeying a court order will be criminal contempt of court. Only then should the FBI get involved.
Suddenly being held liable for hundreds of millions in damages would make them rethink thier flawed DMCA policies.
Surely they would had cleaned up their act if they were indeed found acting unlawful. What happend was completely unnecessary.
While I agree at least partially with the last sentence of your post, the problem was MegaUpload knew they were acting unlawfully, and profited through such behavior, with full knowledge of the illegality of the content they were hosting. They wouldn't have changed. In fact, they didn't, after repeated notifications. Google even ceased doing business with them. Two years ago, which is (probably not coincidentally) around the time this investigation started. When other legitimate businesses stop doing business with you because they think you are breaking the law, that is a good sign you need to clean up.
With that said, the whole mess is blown out of proportion and was taken way too far. I think someone is trying to make an example out of MegaUpload.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
MicroUpload
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Maybe, but there is another distinction here that I don't think is getting enough attention. Unlike Napster, or Limewire, Or Kazzaa, or Torrents, or [insert whatever's next here] where people are just sharing things, as I understand it the people who sourced the copyrighted material could actually make money by posting the stuff. In order for you to actually collect, Megaupload had to know where to send the check. The government now has lots of MegaUpload's records. It seems to me that there could be an argument that everyone who profited this way is subject to the same sort of RICO prosecutions that they typically use for mobsters. Maybe winnable, maybe not, but probably strong enough to get past the threshold that you need to bring charges and begin the legal process. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And don't get me started on the comparison of copyright infringement and terrorism. Unexpectedly, they are remarkably similar: they are both symptoms of a larger problem in society that depriving people of rights will not solve, they are both used to justify unchecked expansion of government with new powers that can be easily abused, and they both reduce to simple law-enforcement issues when you strip away the propaganda.
Is there really a difference between Megaupload hosting infringing content and Carpathis hosting Megaupload?
So who is going to ask Mitt for his opinion on the case? I'm waiting for that soundbite.
I reviewed an academic paper (which unfortunately the others on the PC didn't like, so it wasn't accepted) which examined the economic model of Megaupload, related services, third-party links to Megaupload, and the popular files, especially the "Uploader Rewards", and concluded that the company's business model really was about "Profit from Piracy".
Combined with the email trail that the feds apparently got (eg, emails concerning scraping of Youtube for the creation of MegaVideo, emails about reward payments including clear descriptions of the types of uploads), and the RICO indictments etc are not a surprise. (the indictment)
For example, if its true that their takedown is by URL, but they duplicate based on hash (so one can have multiple URLs for the same file), thats clearly attempting to game the system, as any legitimate takedown system would take down all separate URLs which point to the same file. (Paragraph 23 on the indictment). Especially if this is related to the creation of a "dummy lifetime premium user" to "to prevent the loss of source files due to expiration or abuse reports" (from a Megaupload email).
Also, at least according to the indictment, there really should be very few legitimate files lost in this: Anonymous uploads needed to be downloaded every 21 days or they were deleted, and even free named accounts required 90-day downloads, which is very different from Dropbox and other systems, where persistence, rather than popularity-of-download, is the goal.
Test your net with Netalyzr
They will be contacted by all six of them.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
because if enough legitimate users rise up, doesn't it throw the entire position of megaupload only "existing for piracy" into question?
Your dear little innocent boy bought dirt cheap hosting from a 300 lb fraudster who changed his name to Kim Dotcom and lived like Fat Elvis on an income his legitimate services couldn't possibly provide.
And this is where it gets stupid and proves the judge was most likely paid off.
MegaUpload maintained files in a file system to minimize wasted, duplicated data. A file available by one link might be actually pointed to by a dozen links, each "uploaded" by a different person.
Now, here's where it gets dicey:
- If the file was something known illegal pointed out to them, like child pornography, they took it down AND they nuked the file details so it couldn't be reuploaded later. Because there is NO jurisdiction in which child pornography would be legal.
- If on the other hand it was a DMCA request, they took down the link indicated only.
Why? Because we can easily have the following situation:
1) Person #1, not authorized to put up the file, uploads it.
2) Person #2, who IS authorized to put up the file, uploads it.
This is not out of the realm of possibility, since a legitimate use for MU was to send files to someone that wouldn't fit into email for collaborative purposes.
Now, Person #1's link is taken down by DMCA complaint. But person #2's link is still authorized. The file itself was the same file: one person was authorized, and behaving within the law, one person was not. DMCA is satisfied by making the offending link no longer available.
But they forum-shopped till they found a bribable, brain-dead judge too stupid to understand the principles involved so they could get rubber stamps to have their little Kristallnacht reenactment instead.
> what annoys me is they let it go on for 7 whole years while all the industry did was whine about them, before finally getting the FBI to take action...
If the unknown site XYZ is taken down, nobody gives a fsck.
If the world renowned site like megaupload is taken down, the event makes headlines, and the more controversy it causes in the details of the procedure, the better (e.g. the... ummm... terrorist way to compute damages). It fuels fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Back to topic:
"Hey megaupload users who upped legal material, come out!"
*crickets*
But:
"Hey media corporation who ask material to take down because it hurts artists that you dutifully and accurately award the right amount of money for their worthy original and artistic contribution to society, come out!"
*silence of deep space void at 0 deg. kelvin*
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
You can doubt it all you want... but that doesn't make it any less true. It's fairly trivial to show show that a vast majority content on megaupload was copyrighted, and unlikely to have been uploaded to it with any permission from the copyright holder.
If it's so trivial to prove, why don't you share the proof with us? So far all I see are border-line-trolling comments saying it is "obvious" without stating why. Maybe it's because that's all those commenters have ever used it for, but that's anecdotal not statistical evidence.
Plus, as a recent article about Youtube shows, "likely infringing" and "actually infringing" are two very different things. If you go around claiming that anybody uploading stuff who isn't a big name is by default infringing, you end up trampling on a lot of peoples' rights.
No, there was no way to do that on megaupload. Depositfiles, hotfile, fileserve.... All those shitty sites with 5 minute wait periods had that, but megaupload did not, that's why it was almost never used to upload freshly pirated media, and mostly for people who actually wanted to see it proliferate.
And this is where it gets stupid and proves the judge was most likely paid off.
But they forum-shopped till they found a bribable, brain-dead judge too stupid to understand the principles involved so they could get rubber stamps to have their little Kristallnacht reenactment instead.
Ten points for the latest proof of Godwin's Law.
Ten bonus points for geek fanservice --- the judge had to have been bribed.
This is not out of the realm of possibility, since a legitimate use for MU was to send files to someone that wouldn't fit into email for collaborative purposes.
Mega has been charged with actively soliciting and paying for the upload of high-value copyrighted files while faking compliance with take-down orders by knowingly leaving other links in place --- as documented in internal e-mails.
Many things are possible in this world. But some things are more likely than others.
So, if my site, ThingOneBlogs.com, violates Sharia Law in some other country, and I don't cooperate with the people who literally want to cut my hands off -- would you consider me in the wrong? (By the way, the preceding sentence is an image of Mohammed.)
Does the country you reside in have extradition agreements in place with the country regarding the laws you're breaking? Have you translated your site in to the local language and rewarding people for doing actionable things on a commercial scale? Do you use financial institutions in this country which you use to pay people in the country where what you're doing is illegal? Do you have a business presence in this country where you are agreeing to follow their laws? Do you have 500+ servers in this country with actionable material? Does your company generate millions of dollars of "business" doing actionable things on a commercial scale in of both of your countries?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.