5 ms·

Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

77 points by AlexBlom 15y ago

wmf 15y ago
We need to distinguish between primary storage, syncing, backup, distribution, and other cases. I wouldn't even call MegaUpload "cloud storage"; I would call it more of a CDN. If Akamai went down, people wouldn't complain about losing data, because Akamai isn't used as primary storage. Likewise, the US DOJ makes a distinction between uploader-pays and downloader-pays business models, so we must also.
bgeorgescu 15y ago
How about using some common sense? Megaupload was primarily focused on enabling, and even incentivizing, piracy. Although bashing on the government is popular in our community, I don't think there is very much precedent that would indicate they would close something like Dropbox out of the blue.
- tomp 15y ago
  How about being innocent unless proved guilty? Megaupload went down without any trial, and even though the site was obviously used for piracy (was it really?), that should still be proven in court and then only the illegal section of the website should be removed from web.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    There's really nothing unique about that. If you were accused of selling drugs via a restaurant front, it'd be shutdown while you're standing trial too.
    - nknight 15y ago
      There is no general authority for the police to abruptly shut down a business. Once a warrant has been executed, the police leave and the business can reopen at its leisure, even if it might need to replace some equipment and staff. The authority given to courts and federal authorities to behave as they are for suspected copyright infringement is extremely abnormal and cause for great consternation as to the direction of our legal system.
newhouseb 15y ago
Does anyone know if all Megaupload content was defaulted to being publicly available? This seems to me the most obvious signal for suspicious behavior. I'm aware that with Dropbox, you can publicly post things, but in this case it's the individual user which is "choosing" to distribute the content and thus it would make sense that the user would be the one held liable. I'm not a lawyer, just exploring what might appear to clarify some of the distinctions that might help prevent abuse of anti-piracy laws. Edit: Youtube, as a counter example, (I think) makes everything public by default, but they enforce the DMCA pretty heavily.
- codesuela 15y ago
  once you uploaded something you got a link with a unique ID which you could share. Other people could not access your file without knowledge of this unique link as you could not search for specific files (unlike Youtube). As far as I know there was also a list of Top Downloaded files but those didn't resemble the truth as they were carefully selected by Megaupload (to make sure that only legal content would be listed)
  - furyofantares 15y ago
    Youtube supports unlisted videos that behave the same as you're describing.
hemancuso 15y ago
The author, like many other commenters in the past week or so, is wasting words by saying "this is scary - what if it happened to Dropbox and I lost access to all those files!" Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a very legitimate business with tens of thousands of legitimate customers (just like Dropbox). Articles like these portend to get you thinking about the broader implications of a takedown, but in truth they cloud clear thinking with what are essentially scare tactics.
- udp 15y ago
  > Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. Well, every Dropbox account has a `Public` folder with direct HTTP access.
  - hemancuso 15y ago
    Sure. But Dropbox could be taken down and you lose nothing
- kijin 15y ago
  Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, no thanks. Dropbox is also an apt comparison because part of the MegaUpload indictment has to do with their deduplication system. Dropbox is also very good at deduplication, which means that a single court order can cause all copies of an offending file to be remotely deleted from everyone's Dropbox folder.
  - hemancuso 15y ago
    The primary difference with your 1984 example is in that case the content originated at Amazon. In the Dropbox model you provided it to start. If mozy was taken down do you think that it's possible they would wipe the drives of all users? I don't. Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across all buckets?
twelvechairs 15y ago
> I’m the first to agree that any website obviously engaged in piracy (vs. having independent users leverage the platform in unintended ways) should be shut down So if you wanted to start a website like this and maximise your business and legality - the simple answer is to just let people use it for piracy and pretend you dont know it is happening? This seems slightly silly to me..
literalusername 15y ago
The Megaupload indictment reads that they removed links to the illegal file, but did not remove the actual file. To those blissfully unaware of how the internet works, this makes sense. It has nothing to do with the Internet. In the context of file-systems, the word "remove" actually means to "unlink". Doesn't this technicality invalidate the indictment?
- AlexBlom 15y ago
  Internet was a general statement on my part, since corrected. It will be interesting to see how the "unlink" plays out in the indictment.
__s3 15y ago
They were not trying to stop storage f copyrighted material. They were trying to stop transfer of it. "Links" to a file, provided to the public, were the method of transfer. Dropbox is used as a method of transferring files. Thus is it is very similar to Megaupload. If Dropbox (or, say, YouTube) has many customers who may not be transferring copyrighted material, how relevant is this? If that is the distinguishing factor, then perhaps all future pirates should upload copius amounts of noncopyrighted material to their services, and encourage others to do so. As long as they have a good ratio of "legtimiate content" to "illegimate content", then they will have a "Dropbox" defense.
nikcub 15y ago
this assumes that Megaupload will lose in the courts, and it might not. all that we have so far are the claims of a handful of federal agents and their interpretation of the law plus some very weak search warrants with little PC. I agree that interpretation is scary, but I hope it turns out that it isn't right.
- wmf 15y ago
  Like the Netscape antitrust case, if they win in the courts they'll still have been out of business for years.
es_tee_eff_you 15y ago
Summary: a kneejerk reaction inspired by his fear of a legal precedent where a "physical file must be deleted where one of many users with ‘links’ engages in illegal activity"

77 points by AlexBlom 15y ago

wmf 15y ago

We need to distinguish between primary storage, syncing, backup, distribution, and other cases. I wouldn't even call MegaUpload "cloud storage"; I would call it more of a CDN. If Akamai went down, people wouldn't complain about losing data, because Akamai isn't used as primary storage. Likewise, the US DOJ makes a distinction between uploader-pays and downloader-pays business models, so we must also.

bgeorgescu 15y ago

How about using some common sense? Megaupload was primarily focused on enabling, and even incentivizing, piracy. Although bashing on the government is popular in our community, I don't think there is very much precedent that would indicate they would close something like Dropbox out of the blue.

tomp 15y ago
How about being innocent unless proved guilty? Megaupload went down without any trial, and even though the site was obviously used for piracy (was it really?), that should still be proven in court and then only the illegal section of the website should be removed from web.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  There's really nothing unique about that. If you were accused of selling drugs via a restaurant front, it'd be shutdown while you're standing trial too.
  - nknight 15y ago
    There is no general authority for the police to abruptly shut down a business. Once a warrant has been executed, the police leave and the business can reopen at its leisure, even if it might need to replace some equipment and staff. The authority given to courts and federal authorities to behave as they are for suspected copyright infringement is extremely abnormal and cause for great consternation as to the direction of our legal system.

newhouseb 15y ago

Does anyone know if all Megaupload content was defaulted to being publicly available? This seems to me the most obvious signal for suspicious behavior. I'm aware that with Dropbox, you can publicly post things, but in this case it's the individual user which is "choosing" to distribute the content and thus it would make sense that the user would be the one held liable. I'm not a lawyer, just exploring what might appear to clarify some of the distinctions that might help prevent abuse of anti-piracy laws. Edit: Youtube, as a counter example, (I think) makes everything public by default, but they enforce the DMCA pretty heavily.

codesuela 15y ago
once you uploaded something you got a link with a unique ID which you could share. Other people could not access your file without knowledge of this unique link as you could not search for specific files (unlike Youtube). As far as I know there was also a list of Top Downloaded files but those didn't resemble the truth as they were carefully selected by Megaupload (to make sure that only legal content would be listed)
- furyofantares 15y ago
  Youtube supports unlisted videos that behave the same as you're describing.

hemancuso 15y ago

The author, like many other commenters in the past week or so, is wasting words by saying "this is scary - what if it happened to Dropbox and I lost access to all those files!" Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a very legitimate business with tens of thousands of legitimate customers (just like Dropbox). Articles like these portend to get you thinking about the broader implications of a takedown, but in truth they cloud clear thinking with what are essentially scare tactics.

udp 15y ago
> Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. Well, every Dropbox account has a `Public` folder with direct HTTP access.
- hemancuso 15y ago
  Sure. But Dropbox could be taken down and you lose nothing
kijin 15y ago
Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, no thanks. Dropbox is also an apt comparison because part of the MegaUpload indictment has to do with their deduplication system. Dropbox is also very good at deduplication, which means that a single court order can cause all copies of an offending file to be remotely deleted from everyone's Dropbox folder.
- hemancuso 15y ago
  The primary difference with your 1984 example is in that case the content originated at Amazon. In the Dropbox model you provided it to start. If mozy was taken down do you think that it's possible they would wipe the drives of all users? I don't. Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across all buckets?

twelvechairs 15y ago

> I’m the first to agree that any website obviously engaged in piracy (vs. having independent users leverage the platform in unintended ways) should be shut down So if you wanted to start a website like this and maximise your business and legality - the simple answer is to just let people use it for piracy and pretend you dont know it is happening? This seems slightly silly to me..

literalusername 15y ago

The Megaupload indictment reads that they removed links to the illegal file, but did not remove the actual file. To those blissfully unaware of how the internet works, this makes sense. It has nothing to do with the Internet. In the context of file-systems, the word "remove" actually means to "unlink". Doesn't this technicality invalidate the indictment?

AlexBlom 15y ago
Internet was a general statement on my part, since corrected. It will be interesting to see how the "unlink" plays out in the indictment.

__s3 15y ago

They were not trying to stop storage f copyrighted material. They were trying to stop transfer of it. "Links" to a file, provided to the public, were the method of transfer. Dropbox is used as a method of transferring files. Thus is it is very similar to Megaupload. If Dropbox (or, say, YouTube) has many customers who may not be transferring copyrighted material, how relevant is this? If that is the distinguishing factor, then perhaps all future pirates should upload copius amounts of noncopyrighted material to their services, and encourage others to do so. As long as they have a good ratio of "legtimiate content" to "illegimate content", then they will have a "Dropbox" defense.

nikcub 15y ago

this assumes that Megaupload will lose in the courts, and it might not. all that we have so far are the claims of a handful of federal agents and their interpretation of the law plus some very weak search warrants with little PC. I agree that interpretation is scary, but I hope it turns out that it isn't right.

wmf 15y ago
Like the Netscape antitrust case, if they win in the courts they'll still have been out of business for years.

es_tee_eff_you 15y ago

Summary: a kneejerk reaction inspired by his fear of a legal precedent where a "physical file must be deleted where one of many users with ‘links’ engages in illegal activity"