peawormsworth

> In general, audiences have NO idea how much time, effort, etc. it takes to produce decent work. I stopped listening to commercial music and watching commercial movies when industries started suing private individuals. I was surprised how easy it was. The only time I hear or see commercial content is when it is pushed on me through advertising and other expensive marketing techniques. I wish hollywood and big distribution would vanish tomorrow. Do you really think that talented artists would simply disappear and stop producing quality work if they're wasnt the possiblity of becoming a star behind it? Nonsense. Art is from the heart. I hear quality all the time from local street buskers and playing in bars in my city. Everywhere in the world there is great quality work that is having money taking out of there mouths by big industry who would rather have a huge fan base for a minimal set of artists. The reason it costs so much to produce what you consider 'decent work' is because that is what you have been convinced to believe. Quality is not expensive, and yet its rarely paid because most of the money is being funnelled through distribution companies who simply cannot possibly handle the many millions of people around the world who deserve a piece of the entertainment revenue pie. I listen to Jamendo, Soundcloud and CCmixter. I watch videos on youtube and vimeo. I am entertained. So when megaupload was taken down... for me it had nothing to do with losing the ability to break someone's copyright, but rather it was simply another example of big distribution shutting down an alternate channel of distribution. For me, the sooner distribution companies die, the better. They have no purpose anymore because distribution costs are $0. We all pay for distribution ourselves when we pay our ISP for bandwidth. The only remaining purpose for distribution companies is to sue for their lives in order to limit the number of artists who receive income for their work.

In order to maintain the plausible deniability, Mega cannot store an decryption passphrase. Meaning they will not have the links to the unencrypted files. As the URL will contain the passphrase within it. The only thing required to make this private is to plug a Tor hidden service onto the front end. That way the direct link to the data is not known by the download user and Mega will not store this link without losing plausible deniability. Win win. Bad part is that all downloads now have to go through Tor (slow).

Gmail shows me ads related to the content of my email. Worse, it shows ads related to the content of emails sent by my friends and family.Some of which have no relationship or agreement with Google. Google does this to maximize advertising revenue. Google is profiting off the original works of my friends and family without their permission and provides them absolutely nothing in return. Now you may complain about the moral and ethical practice of distribution rights. But sharing with people you know is not distribution. Most countries have different laws for sharing then distribution. In my country it is naturally legal to share music and other recorded content. Your country may convince you that this immoral, but in the natural sense, sharing is never immoral. In fact it is compassion.

No artist is ever paid when Vevo displays an artists music video on Vevo. Yet, google pays artists who post their own work. That means Gangnam Style has probably make over a million dollars from advertising on Youtube. So who is stealing more? The distributors or Google. The answer is: they are all stealing. The largest portion always goes to the content manager. Pulling distribution from the hands of companies and putting it back into the artist control will see a much fairer distribution of wealth. Thus the conflict and artificial moral discussions we see pushed from media about this. Sharing is a moral act.

I dont think the content can be accessed by mega without the full URL. The URL probably contains the information about the location of the data plus a passphrase to unlock the key to decrypt the data. In this way mega could hold the data without knowing the URL to access and decrypt it. The full URL would only be retrievable through the user interface, which mega would not have access to unless their servers are storing your login password. Which I assume they are not for legal reasons. I am making assumptions here.

Tell that to the valid copyright holders hosting their content on MegaUpload. Regardless of whether the system is used for legal or infringing purposes, the reality is that distribution companies have the ability to take down both when they claim some are using it to infringe. The concern for copyright holders is not the encryption per say, but the ability for big business to NOT be able to take down their legal content under the guise of a moral cause.