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Author Topic: MegaUpload  (Read 5706 times)

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Mongrel

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #20 on: January 19, 2012, 12:07:08 PM »

Hm.  Wonder if they've got the money/stamina to fight it in court.  Certainly UMG's takedown notices on Youtube were verifiably illegal.

I think Megaupload already has a lawsuit going against Universal Music.
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Thad

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #21 on: January 19, 2012, 12:27:42 PM »

Oh, it does.  My question is whether this changes anything.
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Shinra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #22 on: January 19, 2012, 02:04:30 PM »

Hm.  Wonder if they've got the money/stamina to fight it in court.  Certainly UMG's takedown notices on Youtube were verifiably illegal.

Supposedly, megaupload was one of the top fifteen most poular sites on the web for some time. Kim dotcom apparently has many millions of dollars. Fighting the charges in court shouldn't be impossible for them.
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sei

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #23 on: January 19, 2012, 07:40:27 PM »

It's still disgusting that he can be thrown in the slammer over US law when he lives in NZ.

We're getting far enough from 1942 that bullshit like this is increasingly painting the US "world police" as less friendly a figure than an Orwellian one.
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Shinra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #24 on: January 20, 2012, 01:57:29 AM »

It's still disgusting that he can be thrown in the slammer over US law when he lives in NZ.

We're getting far enough from 1942 that bullshit like this is increasingly painting the US "world police" as less friendly a figure than an Orwellian one.

What shocks me is that the NZ government is capitulating like this. I get that international law, etc, but can't they object? Isn't that part of what being a member of the UN is all about?

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Lottel

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #25 on: January 20, 2012, 03:10:51 AM »

Sounds to me like they're just going along with it like a bunch of sheep.
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Rico

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #26 on: January 20, 2012, 04:36:00 AM »

I would imagine part of it is due to the immense amount of money Hollywood has poured into filming in New Zealand and being afraid that not extraditing the guy could get them on a blacklist.
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Mongrel

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #27 on: January 20, 2012, 05:35:47 AM »

Is Megaupload actually registered in the US, or is it a NZ company?

I think if it was a NZ company, they might've put up a bigger fight.

EDIT: Hmmm, looks like it's registered in Hong Kong.
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Zaratustra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #28 on: January 20, 2012, 06:01:52 AM »

The actual accusations against MegaUpload are failing to uphold DMCA (by not deleting files that got a takedown notice) and paying providers of pirated content

here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

Also, the site has 500 servers in Virginia. That's hardly off shore, last I checked.

Thad

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #29 on: January 20, 2012, 07:22:53 AM »

Quote
For instance, the “abuse tool” allegedly does not remove the actual file being complained about by a rightsholder. Instead, it only removes a specific Web address linked to that file—but there might be hundreds of such addresses for popular content.

Am I misreading, or are they saying that a takedown notice should go after every copy of the same file?

Because that might sound like a reasonable request to a layman, but it's a little trickier than that to go after duplicates in real life.

I guess you could keep a checksum for every file and have a blacklist -- hash collisions don't exactly happen very often.  But really, that's one more thing that's trivial to circumvent; change one bit and you get a different checksum.

Quote
they claim that Megaupload purposely offers no site-wide search engine as a way of concealing what people are storing and sharing through the site.

Sure, but the flipside of that is that it makes it INCONVENIENT to use MegaUpload for piracy as opposed to, say, Pirate Bay.

Now, the bit about knowing about specific files, knowing they were infringing, and not taking them down -- not much to defend there.  That DOES sound like it waives the safe harbor provision.  Whoops.
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Mongrel

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #30 on: January 20, 2012, 08:42:41 AM »

There are also charges of money laundering and fraud, though I haven't seen any details on those.
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Zaratustra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #31 on: January 20, 2012, 08:56:53 AM »

megaupload really is napster 2.0. They'll end up being bought by someone, the rich guys will stay rich, all the other sides will learn a few more tricks to go around the law, and piracy will be reduced in no way whatsoever.

Mongrel

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #32 on: January 20, 2012, 09:01:07 AM »

That's what I was thinking this morning.

Anyway, fun quote from a friend on the news articles:

Quote from: artificial
"Still at large are Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, the site's graphic designer"

good lord, what evil has this man done
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Smiler

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #33 on: January 20, 2012, 10:55:26 AM »

I would like to remind everyone that Swizz Beatz is the CEO of Megaupload.

Not for any particular reason, but Swizz Beatz

Edit: Nevermind.
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TA

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #34 on: January 20, 2012, 01:10:05 PM »

Here's the indictment.

Skip ahead to page 30 or so.  This isn't a frivolous takedown to flex muscles after the SOPA blackouts, this is actual extreme shady shit that's been under investigation for a long time.
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Mongrel

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sei

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #36 on: January 20, 2012, 01:31:45 PM »

Quote
For instance, the “abuse tool” allegedly does not remove the actual file being complained about by a rightsholder. Instead, it only removes a specific Web address linked to that file—but there might be hundreds of such addresses for popular content.

Am I misreading, or are they saying that a takedown notice should go after every copy of the same file?
That's not quite it. They kept one internal copy that never got deleted, even when abuse took down a URL. If someone attempted to reupload it, it shortcutted to use the same file from before. I assume this was to cut down on redundancy when many people stored stuff.

TorrentFreak explains it well:

Megaupload’s “Abuse Tool” to which major copyright holders were given access, enabled the removal of links to infringing works hosted on MegaUpload’s servers. However, the indictment claims that it “did not actually function as a DMCA compliance tool as the copyright owners were led to believe.” And here’s why.

The indictment claims that when a copyright holder issued a takedown notice for content referenced by its URL, only the URL was taken down, not the content to which it pointed. So although the URL in question would report that it had been removed and would no longer resolve to infringing material, URLs issued to others would remain operational.

Furthermore, the indictment states that although MegaUpload staff (referred to as Members of the Conspiracy) discussed how they could automatically remove child pornography from their systems given a specific hash value, the same standards weren’t applied to complained-about copyright works.

In June 2010, it appears that MegaUpload was subjected to a something of a test by the authorities. The company was informed, pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing movies were being stored on their servers at Carpathia Hosting in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Other file hosts will probably learn from this mistake. The expensive, but seemingly legal kosher, solution would be to have multiple copies of the files and not redundancy check, perhaps getting some kind of plausible deniability; this may need to be augmented by some form of encryption trick that would fuck up checksums or otherwise make it impossible to do a dumb, cheap comparison of files. E.g., "We believe in user privacy, so only users with a PK can download/extract this. We don't store the PK, so we can't check unless it's somehow provided with a report. We can remove things on a case-by-case basis, as we're notified, but we have no mechanism for internally checking one file against another."

Slightly less naive, though probably legally perilous, would be to maintain a copy only while some non-reported links remain.

The safest legal solution. If you have 5 links to X, and one of them is DMCA-reported, all 5 of the links die and the file is removed. Slightly less safe, but more conducive to re-uploads of pirated content: once the infringing content is gone, you nuke the local copy and its checksum, so if someone else uploads it again, there's nothing to check against.

Either way, there's a good chance more releasers will start doing silly shit like having an archive file containing the content, but also an additional "downloaded from domain" text file, so as to change the checksum and other mechanisms which would be caught by the dupe-checker.
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Shinra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #37 on: January 20, 2012, 04:05:41 PM »

Here's the indictment.

Skip ahead to page 30 or so.  This isn't a frivolous takedown to flex muscles after the SOPA blackouts, this is actual extreme shady shit that's been under investigation for a long time.

This still feels like the timing was done specifically to give a middle finger to the American people. I can't help but feel that this is the entertainment industry's way of saying that we matter less to our government than they do.
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Zaratustra

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #38 on: January 21, 2012, 06:37:37 AM »

Half of the things in there -should not- stick once a judge looks at them, since MegaUpload really has no legal need to police its own users. The edge case is the repeat-same-file issue, and the real problematic case is their personal use of files and self-imposed cap on takedowns.

"Yeah we're only going to let people return 5 thousand defective items a day now. It's policy."

Thad

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Re: MegaUpload
« Reply #39 on: January 21, 2012, 08:32:03 AM »

Half of the things in there -should not- stick once a judge looks at them

That's how you do a lawsuit, though -- go after everything you can, no matter how much of a stretch, and then winnow it down to just the stuff you can actually get.

since MegaUpload really has no legal need to police its own users.

The argument is that they waived safe harbor because their E-Mails prove that they knew about illegal files and didn't take them down.  That strikes me as a plausible case, and a case for willful infringement besides.

The edge case is the repeat-same-file issue, and the real problematic case is their personal use of files and self-imposed cap on takedowns.

"Yeah we're only going to let people return 5 thousand defective items a day now. It's policy."

Yeah, that's pretty damning too.
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