Yes, I guess it could be argued that this is part of the way they managed their deduplication system, and that once all links had been removed the context would be removed. Certainly similar arguments could probably be used for copyrighted material on Dropbox, and I imagine there maybe a deduplication on Youtube, and similar issues also.

If this really is the only issue it seems like quite a weak case to me, as with more diligence the copyright holders could have removed all copies. But I guess we'll never know all the details.

Well, it literally cost a user nothing to create a new link to the same data. Meanwhile the copyright holder would have to submit a DMCA take down for every single link before a new link could be created. Also, MegaUpload changed their policy to only allow one request at a time. So you couldn't, for example, submit a list of the thousand links to your movie. You'd have to submit 1,000 DMCA take downs. I think it's pretty obvious they were doing everything in their power to drag their feet and facilitate copyright infringement.

"Dragging one's feet" isn't a crime.

Dragging your feet is a crime if it's reasonable to believe that the purpose of dragging your feet is to facilitate crime. And I think anyone with a brain recognizes that's what was going on.

Try to figure out how his service was fundamentally different than Youtube except for later being owned by superrich Google. Let's bet that Google earned more money by distributing unlicesed material than Kim could in 10 of his lives.

Then consider how much years Google needed to start to be even slightly effective. Wasn't that dragging the feet?

The justice for small guys and superrich is not the same. Kim is a small guy in this comparison.

No, google meaningfully acted to abide by the DMCA take downs and over time progressively improved its tooling to facilitate that. Mega did the exact opposite.

Not only was it reachable by the other links to the file, the file ID which had been DMCA'd could regenerate links via the premium account API. So warez sites could automatically regenerate megaupload links everytime a file gets a DMCA. Surely this is incriminating?

IANAL but I think not, he's still complying with the DMCA.

All Megaupload needed to do was allow copyright holders to play the cat and mouse game of takedowns to be within the law. A DMCA takedown doesn't have the oversight from a judge or anything, it can be totally wrong and there's really no reprocussions (as we've seen on youtube multiple times, this occurs frequently.)

You cannot expect Megaupload to delete the content from their servers, as their business is data retention. You also cannot expect Megaupload to flag files as DMCA'd and not allow them to ever be downloaded, the fact that their entire business model is people sharing content and the sheer amount of DMCA requests they recieve makes it impossible for them to investigate each case properly.

The DMCA protects him by simply allowing takedowns of a single link. The content can stay, and he can stay within the bounds of the law by some external individual creating an additional link to be inevitably DMCA'd again.