6 ms·

Megaupload could spawn caselaw more destructive than SOPA

103 points by davidbanham 15y ago

jean_valjean 15y ago
Am I missing something, or is this just another guy who isn't a lawyer giving us "legal analysis"? What's next, are we going to swap out hacker-based content for technology content written by lawyers?
pflats 15y ago
This article is a little hyperbolic. First, the item in question was Overt Act #28 out of 103. Case law is not going to rest entirely on this French Sopranos episode. Even then, overlaying a copyrighted work with translated subtitles isn't transformative. What's Up Tiger Lily is transfomative. Fansubbing is not. Finally, any website that allows public upload and sharing knows that copyrighted works will eventually end up on their servers illegally. It's how the company handles it from that point forward that matters. This (among numerous other examples): ppp. On or about January 28, 2010, in an e-mail entitled “activating old countries,” a user of a Mega Conspiracy site asked BATATO: “where can we see full movies?” BATATO replied “You need to go to our referrer sites. Such as www.thepiratecity.org or www.ovguide.com[.] There are the movie and series links. You cannot find them by searching on MV directly. That would cause us a lot of trouble ;-)" is not the way to handle it.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  Wow. I have yet to read the entire indictment, but the pieces and parts I see scattered around the internet are pretty damning. If they get extradited, they are sunk.
  - pflats 15y ago
    It's pretty amusing to take the half hour or so and at least skim the Overt Acts section (it goes from a. to yyyy.)
- Natsu 15y ago
  It's odd that our best hope in avoiding some crazy precedent lies in the fact that they've got so many things to charge MU with that they don't need to pick anything the least bit unorthodox.
roel_v 15y ago
I just wished people who have obviously no expertise whatsoever in law yet consider themselves to have enough of it to publish about it because they've read a few Wikipedia articles and a judgement here or there would stop said publishing already. With nonsensical statements asking 'if fansubs would be derivative enough to warrant fair use protection' it's a dead giveaway that the author has no clue whatsoever about copyright law, or law in general for that matter. If a lawyer started posting here on HN or on a programming forum elsewhere claiming that obviously programming language X is better than Y because X has pointers and Y doesn't we'd laugh him/her out of the room too. Why do we think it's acceptable to do the equivalent to other fields?
- randomdata 15y ago
  If you want to use an analogy, it seems more akin to a lawyer publishing his very first PHP program, full of bad structure and MySQL exploits. But everyone has to start somewhere. We all made those mistakes at one point or another and by publishing more and more software, we eventually saw the error of our ways, developed better habits, and eventually could be considered "experts." This is no different. The article may very well be full of errors, but as he continues to work on his law skills, he will get better. The flaw is our thinking that everyone should be perfect on day one. It takes a lot of time to become good at what you do. We should be nurturing his early efforts, not scolding him for trying.
  - roel_v 15y ago
    Writing articles claiming x y and z is not 'working on your skills'. He's claiming things that are flat-out nonsensical, and portraying it as if he knows what he's talking about. One doesn't learn about law by writing a lot of articles on it. He could write 20 articles like this every day for 20 years and still be writing nonsense. "Early efforts" are not writing blog posts acting as if you know stuff, it just wastes everybody's time. As is evidenced by the upvotes this is apparently getting - there are probably people believing what he's writing!
    - randomdata 15y ago
imgabe 15y ago
I'm not a lawyer. I've only read a lot about SOPA. The problem with SOPA was never that it allowed copyright owners to take down infringing content (well, that was SOME people's problem with it, but not the majority I think). The problem with SOPA was that it allowed said copyright owners to completely ignore due process, and disabled websites in a way that introduced a huge security risk to the rest of the internet. In the Megaupload case, due process was followed, as far as I know. Grand juries were convened, warrants were obtained, etc. etc. The plaintiffs were forced to prove that they had a valid case before action was taken, rather than the "shoot first and let the website owners figure out why they were taken down later, maybe" approach that SOPA entailed.

103 points by davidbanham 15y ago

Am I missing something, or is this just another guy who isn't a lawyer giving us "legal analysis"? What's next, are we going to swap out hacker-based content for technology content written by lawyers?

pflats 15y ago

This article is a little hyperbolic. First, the item in question was Overt Act #28 out of 103. Case law is not going to rest entirely on this French Sopranos episode. Even then, overlaying a copyrighted work with translated subtitles isn't transformative. What's Up Tiger Lily is transfomative. Fansubbing is not. Finally, any website that allows public upload and sharing knows that copyrighted works will eventually end up on their servers illegally. It's how the company handles it from that point forward that matters. This (among numerous other examples): ppp. On or about January 28, 2010, in an e-mail entitled “activating old countries,” a user of a Mega Conspiracy site asked BATATO: “where can we see full movies?” BATATO replied “You need to go to our referrer sites. Such as www.thepiratecity.org or www.ovguide.com[.] There are the movie and series links. You cannot find them by searching on MV directly. That would cause us a lot of trouble ;-)" is not the way to handle it.

Karunamon 15y ago
Wow. I have yet to read the entire indictment, but the pieces and parts I see scattered around the internet are pretty damning. If they get extradited, they are sunk.
- pflats 15y ago
  It's pretty amusing to take the half hour or so and at least skim the Overt Acts section (it goes from a. to yyyy.)
Natsu 15y ago
It's odd that our best hope in avoiding some crazy precedent lies in the fact that they've got so many things to charge MU with that they don't need to pick anything the least bit unorthodox.

roel_v 15y ago

I just wished people who have obviously no expertise whatsoever in law yet consider themselves to have enough of it to publish about it because they've read a few Wikipedia articles and a judgement here or there would stop said publishing already. With nonsensical statements asking 'if fansubs would be derivative enough to warrant fair use protection' it's a dead giveaway that the author has no clue whatsoever about copyright law, or law in general for that matter. If a lawyer started posting here on HN or on a programming forum elsewhere claiming that obviously programming language X is better than Y because X has pointers and Y doesn't we'd laugh him/her out of the room too. Why do we think it's acceptable to do the equivalent to other fields?

randomdata 15y ago
If you want to use an analogy, it seems more akin to a lawyer publishing his very first PHP program, full of bad structure and MySQL exploits. But everyone has to start somewhere. We all made those mistakes at one point or another and by publishing more and more software, we eventually saw the error of our ways, developed better habits, and eventually could be considered "experts." This is no different. The article may very well be full of errors, but as he continues to work on his law skills, he will get better. The flaw is our thinking that everyone should be perfect on day one. It takes a lot of time to become good at what you do. We should be nurturing his early efforts, not scolding him for trying.
- roel_v 15y ago
  Writing articles claiming x y and z is not 'working on your skills'. He's claiming things that are flat-out nonsensical, and portraying it as if he knows what he's talking about. One doesn't learn about law by writing a lot of articles on it. He could write 20 articles like this every day for 20 years and still be writing nonsense. "Early efforts" are not writing blog posts acting as if you know stuff, it just wastes everybody's time. As is evidenced by the upvotes this is apparently getting - there are probably people believing what he's writing!
  - randomdata 15y ago

imgabe 15y ago

I'm not a lawyer. I've only read a lot about SOPA. The problem with SOPA was never that it allowed copyright owners to take down infringing content (well, that was SOME people's problem with it, but not the majority I think). The problem with SOPA was that it allowed said copyright owners to completely ignore due process, and disabled websites in a way that introduced a huge security risk to the rest of the internet. In the Megaupload case, due process was followed, as far as I know. Grand juries were convened, warrants were obtained, etc. etc. The plaintiffs were forced to prove that they had a valid case before action was taken, rather than the "shoot first and let the website owners figure out why they were taken down later, maybe" approach that SOPA entailed.