Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by miek on Thursday January 19, 2012 @05:03PM (#3487025)

I agree with your thought process-- however, there is no reason to talk about what % of the service was used for piracy and what % wasn't. Non-owner/operator users should be viewed as completely separate from the owners and operators' and their actions. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of the users are pirating content, as long as the owners & operators were not engaging in illegal activities (including knowingly aiding pirates). The issue is that MegaUpload does't have the ability to determine what a user legally owns.

With that said, even if MegaUpload complied with legally-sufficient take-down requests, I imagine those who were arrested could easily be nabbed for simply having pirated content on their personal/work boxes... that's probably the fallback plan.

Side note- Google hosts a lot of pirated content on Gmail. It would be interesting to know how much pirated music is sent through Gmail in a day.

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Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by troll24601 on Thursday January 19, 2012 @05:43PM (#3487229)

I'm pretty sure that the Feds didn't get copies of emails from Eric Schmidt saying that they need to fix the audio/video synchronization on the Sopranos... or that they need to rate-limit DMCA takedowns so they don't interfere with growth... or that they should ensure that when they do takedowns that they don't take EVERY copy down.

It's a specious comparison, made possible only because almost nobody on HN bothered to read the indictment before they got mad.

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Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by miek on Thursday January 19, 2012 @06:29PM (#3487460)

Thanks for letting us know; you are correct- I didn't see the indictment. I read the article quickly and came here to see what people were saying. I saw a lot of debate about "% of piracy," so I commented.

Wow the executives were deep in blatant piracy. It's fair that the site was shut down. Amazing, not surprising though.

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Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by troll24601 on Thursday January 19, 2012 @10:07PM (#3488110)

Thank you. It's nice that at least ONE person recognized that maybe their uninformed reaction to a short article might not be 100% correct, and was willing to go read the indictment and learn a bit more.

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[dead]

Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by troll24601 on Thursday January 19, 2012 @11:55PM (#3488386)

Arrests for large-scale commercial copyright infringement and money laundering schemes aren't new. This simply isn't an example freedom getting more and more restricted.

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Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by makomk on Thursday January 19, 2012 @06:32PM (#3487467)

Have you looked at how all the popular open source media players handle bug reports? Pretty much all of them don't care whether the file in the report is pirated or not and a surprising amount of bugs seem to be found and fixed because they break pirated content...

Also, trying to take every pirated copy down has a huge false positive problem.

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Re:Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy by troll24601 on Thursday January 19, 2012 @07:20PM (#3487648)

You are grossly misconstruing the nature of the emails whilst avoiding the other points entirely.

Read the indictment.

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