Slashdot Mirror
After Megaupload, MPAA Targets Other File Sharing Services
An anonymous reader writes "It is no secret that the MPAA was a main facilitator of the criminal investigation against Megaupload. While the movie studios have praised the actions of the U.S. Government, they are not satisfied yet. Paramount Pictures' vice president for worldwide content protection identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as prime targets that should be shuttered next."
The best way to get these guys is to cut off their revenue stream. Stop buying [1] their crap.
[1] By "buying" I also mean downloading, for by doing so you are endorsing it, giving it further mindshare.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As a smaller, (presumably) independent band, the RIAA wouldn't mind killing you off. The RIAA isn't there for small artists; they're there for the few giant names they can push, and any competition is bad competition in their view.
My band uses these services to facilitate distributing our album and what not
Your label is supposed to handle that for you. If you're not signed with a major label and have the temerity to try to distribute your own music, you're clearly some kind of terrorist socialist pedophile drug dealer pirate, and will be dealt with accordingly.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's vague enough for lawyers to argue over. The problem is that DMCA takedowns are of limited effectiveness in such a dynamic environment: Take one down, someone will upload a new one in a few seconds. The legal case against Megaupload hinged on a technicality: They took the files down on request, but didn't also take down duplicates of the same file uploaded by someone else, even though they could (as they used file-level dedupe) have done so trivially. It isn't entirely clear what the responsibilities of a service provider are any more: The DMCA doesn't get into the technical implications of hashlists, de-duplication, fingerprinting, the countermeasures against them or the countermeasures against the countermeasures. It was written on the assumption that publishing content would be a difficult and expensive task, so if you can get it pulled down you've seriously inconvenienced pirates. The whole model breaks when publishing a file is just a matter of uploading, which it really always was.
The only way to actually stop piracy would be by passing new laws so draconian that I'd rather just see the entire copyright-driven industry destroyed than sacrifice that much freedom or hand so much power to those who can afford lawyers.
MPAA will contact Youtube and get your video removed. They own all music after all.
If you'd click his links, you'd see that they're totally accurate, and also widely accepted practices within the industry. Do you know why all the big stars get a piece of the gross income instead of a piece of the net income? Because, on paper, every movie has lost money, regardless.
Once you hear that such films as Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Tim Burton Batman "lost money" according to their studios bullshit accounting practices, it's hard to take any of their claims of "lost revenue" due to piracy seriously.
And it's not limited to the MPAA, either. The RIAA argued that Limewire caused them $75 TRILLION in damages. How does anybody credibly believe anything that comes out of these guys mouths?