>Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the conten

>Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the content? IANAL so maybe the plausible deniability here is enough legal protection, but this is an argument that rings hollow to me from a technical perspective. Usually content ripped from physical media is not stored in its original format, especially during the timeline of MegaUpload's existence. The data is going to be encoded in a different format and therefore could have a variety of different potential hashes. A bunch of people having exactly the same version of this media indicates that it is a single encoding being repeatedly shared.