Yeah, people do tend to forget that most media consumption startups essentially got bootstrapped with a huge amount of copyright infringement. YouTube, Spotify, ...

The difference is of course that those startups end up making their content legal. But I don't see how what MU did is not okay, but what YouTube and Spotify did is fine.

> But I don't see how what MU did is not okay, but what YouTube and Spotify did is fine.

What Spotify did?

not exactly. the studios and distributors sue everyone, even YouTube. then the one that becomes market leader and gets all the eyeballs usually gets a deal for the lawsuits and the studios have them on a leash for cheaper advertising (remember that a Disney film will spend more on advertising than production over the course of its international release life)

MU was paying the people that upload illegal content, specifically because they were uploading illegal content.

How is that different to having your employees scraping torrent sites for music to add to your library?

who did that?

Spotify during their early years. This is pretty well known.

Citation needed. Are you sure you're not thinking of Grooveshark?

Sorry, I can't find an actual citation - if you ask any Spotify employee though, it's pretty much an open secret that Spotify's initial collection was scraped from the pirate bay.

What is public knowledge is that CEO Daniel Ek was the former CEO of uTorrent. He has certainly made millions from online copyright infringement, if only perhaps, less directly than Kim-dot-com.

I didn't know uTorrent was a company! I haven't used Windows in forever, so I've been using Transmission for a long time, but I feel like that's the equivalent of foobar2000 being a company or something.

I mean YouTube gives content creators a slice of ad revenue, so...

I don't know if this program was implemented before the copyright crackdown, though.

I actually have an unpublished draft post on my blog titled "Is Megaupload as guilty as YouTube?".

The idea of the post was to compare and contrast the internal YouTube emails[1] that came out as part of Viacom vs YouTube with the internal Megaupload emails[2] [2.5].

The reason why the post remained unpublished is because after reading the relevant indictments and court rulings I found that there were clear distinctions between the cases.

Namely it was that YouTube were grappling with how to deal with the situation and not sure where they stood while Megaupload knew exactly where they were and what they were doing - they were actually assisting users in locating pirated content when support was emailed.

Google also implemented ContentID to help identity content, while in contrast Megaupload placed a cap on the number of takedown requests a content owner could file and internal emails show Kim Dotcom being angry at employees for taking down copyright content that wasn't explicitly cited in an DMCA request. The employees also discussed how they built their filtering system to take down child pornography but not affect copyrighted content.

In the latest appeal court decision in Viacom vs YouTube the judge vacated all counts against YouTube and found that the company had no knowledge of specific infringements of copyrighted works. The judge also found that there was no evidence that YouTube induced its users to upload infringing videos, or "interacted with infringing users to a point where it might be said to have participated in their activity."

MegaUpload did exactly that. Reading the MegaUpload indictment[3] and contrasting it to the appeals court decision[4] in Viacom demonstrates the same with every count or claim (being willful, having knowledge, inducing users, etc.)

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/1588353/steal-it-and-other-intern...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-what-made-it-a-rogue-sit...

[2.5] http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/1/9436735/megaupload-prosecu...

[3] DOJ vs Megaupload: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/mega...

[4] Viacom vs YouTube district appeals court decision: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/New_York_Southern_District...

When looking at the emails from both cases, have you taken into account that the adversarial nature of the Viacom vs YouTube vs non-adversarial nature of the emails from the MegaUpload case?

Specifically, emails from the YouTube case are available from both sides (emails that show YouTube in a good light presented by YouTube, and emails that show YouTube in a negative light presented by Viacom), but in the MegaUpload case the only emails are from the indictment (and thus are likely to be hand picked for the purposes of helping secure the indictment).

...and there is more pornography, pirated audio and video content on YouTube than there has ever been at any time before.

You can add that to your post to complete it.