15 ms·

Contrast this: "wildly popular pirating website Megaupload" and "the victims of Megaupload" With: "After their 2012 arrest, Dotcom and the other two men se

Contrast this: "wildly popular pirating website Megaupload" and "the victims of Megaupload" With: "After their 2012 arrest, Dotcom and the other two men set up a legitimate cloud-storage website called Mega." Maybe I'm a little bit soft on the whole copyright infringement thing, and maybe time has blurred my memory, but I don't really separate Megaupload and Mega. I thought they were both just online storage lockers. The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega. I also think Kim Dotcom isn't exactly the kind of person we'd encourage our kids to grow into, but what the US and NZ authorities did to him, raiding his home, where there were children present, with semi-automatic weapons out, is a far worse criminal act than any scale of copyright infringement. KDC isn't someone I would ever want to feel sympathy for, but the US authorities made it happen.

yreg 3y ago
>I don't really separate Megaupload and Mega As far as I understood Megaupload's business plan was selling "fast" download access to pirated material. I don't care much about piracy, but intentionally making money on it seems somewhat disgusting to me. I consider Mega a legitimate cloud storage service. Nevermind what I think about the fiunder, I find it to be one of the most privacy minded services, so I support it and wish it well.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  The business model was selling bandwidth subscriptions and revenue was shared with file uploaders according to download bandwidth.
  - yreg 3y ago
    And this was designed with piracy in mind, was it not? It's pretty obvious in my opinion, even though I have no way to prove intention.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Yes. The prosecution was able to present conversations between the owners of the site talking about how piracy was the goal of the site. It was basically Netflix, without the pesky IP licensing.
    - roel_v 3y ago
      In the court cases, there was communication between Dotcom and van der Kolk that essentially said (paraphrasing here) 'hey, downloads are going down, we should add movie x or album y somehow, people search for those a lot'. There was a lot of evidence (in the form of emails and chat logs) that showed that their 'file sharing' angle was just a front to their actual business which was distributing copyrighted material.
    - lgl 3y ago
      It was very obviously for piracy and copyright infringement. The Mega*.com indictment [0] even reported that one of Kim's wishes was to make a 1-to-1 copy of youtube and were in the process of scraping videos from youtube to megavideo so as to make people assume megavideo was a user generated content website and not video storage for pirated/copyrighted content. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/megaupload-indictment.pdf#page=34 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/meg...
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  I think you're correct in that it was captured communications between the Megaupload creators along these lines that really sealed their fate. However, what formerly_proven says is correct for the public face of Megaupload. The interesting case study would be whether, if the public facing business plan wasn't corrupted by private communications indicating the encouragement of privacy, would Megaupload have been a successful, profitable, and lawful enterprise? Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study? If yes, then is the only difference that the founders learned their opsec lessons? (This is kinda where I struggle to separate the two)
  - yreg 3y ago
    >Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study? The infrastructure might be similar, but the packaged product is different. "Pay us and you can upload your files and access them anywhere / share them" vs. "Upload files that other strangers will be interested in so much that they will pay for access". Also, unless I'm wrong Megaupload was indexed and searchable. While to access a Mega file one needs a direct link and these are usually not posted around on the public web. At least I don't see them that much. Although I believe you that a record of communication proving intent is the most damning part in the eye of the law.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  Just Dropbox with different marketing.
causi 3y ago
Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega. Its loss is a terrible shame; it served as an archive site for loads of material that existed nowhere else. Webcomics, music, videos from dead sites. Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then.
- krisknez 3y ago
  Megaporn was good too, RIP
- rgbrenner 3y ago
  Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega The indictment said it was not searchable by the public.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    I think what the GP means is that "megaupload" is easier to search in a search engine than "mega", with the latter being more likely to return irrelevant results first.
    - causi 3y ago
      No, just that there a lot of searchable index sites that maintained huge lists of URLs for material on Megaupload.
- giobox 3y ago
  > Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then. I'm still amazed the IA is getting away with hosting some of the stuff it is right now, honestly. I love it, but I am mentally preparing myself for it changing substantially eventually. All it's going to take is probably something like the wrong Nintendo IP appearing in the site for a while and the scent attracting Nintendo's lawyers, or similar. If there's content you want, I'd download it while you still can. Longer term, I'd love for the IA to get recognized in US law and some rules to make it easier to archive/share certain types of older software/digital IP without the worries we have today, but probably a pipe dream.
lagniappe 3y ago
[flagged]
- aaomidi 3y ago
  I’d prefer the Donald Trump treatment for people who don’t have a history of killing people.
- 2023throwawayy 3y ago
  I personally would prefer not raiding a home with weapons.
- alsiola 3y ago
  Civilised society might prefer no weapons?
- fluoridation 3y ago
  Dotcom was at worst a white collar criminal. He wasn't a drug trafficker or anything of that nature. There was no reason to expect violent resistance to an arrest. Two or three uniformed officers would have been enough to make him go quietly.
  - yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - drno123 3y ago
      It is better than invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and droning kids in villages * droning = killing a person by shooting iz from a drone
      - yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Onavo 3y ago
New Zealand chose their bed. They could have been like France and placed more emphasis on diversification and independence (the French does not extradite their own people), or be like Switzerland and accumulate high technology and dominate finance. Instead they let themselves become yet another junior partner in the anglosphere. Their only export of value is their real estate which provides excellent sanctuary for billionaires seeking refuge from geopolitical uncertainties. They could also have been like India and remain non-aligned, or been like Israel and have lobbyists that punch above their weight. Instead they chose to let themselves to be walked over, and let their citizens be extradited at the behest of foreign powers. The country places more emphasis on liberal popularism than effective governance. Clearly giving hugs on camera and issuing mask mandates is more important than solving the real estate crisis.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  In actuality, New Zealand leaders have often spoken out against nuclear proliferation and climate change, putting them at odds with allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone#Impact_on_diplomatic_relationships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone#...
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > junior partner in the anglosphere They're literally one of the Five Eyes...
SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
Mega was a re-thinked Megaupload trying to accomplish the same thing but they are very different as Mega is built with a different tech/business architecture to try avoid crossing the lines into illegality that Megaupload crossed. The original Megaupload was built to take advantage of the market opportunity existing in the grey area between copyright infringement and personal sharing. They were not trying to make something illegal, instead they were trying to make something as close as possible to illegal while still being able to argue that they are technically legal, which they failed, as the powers-that-be decided that they crossed the line into illegality and persecuted them. After the failure of Megaupload they tried to do the same thing again with Mega, but armed with the new knowledge of what is now considered clearly illegal, what will get the persecutors knowing on your door, they redesigned the new product to not cross those new lines. More specifically, Megaupload fell because it was provable that they knew about the individual instances of piracy, so they designed Mega around end-to-end encription, so Mega users can still pirate things but Mega can always claim ignorance as a defense. There was/is no difference in persecutor priority in regards to copyright (copyright infringement is still a top priority evil today), just a difference in what they can prove against those two different companies.
- matthewaveryusa 3y ago
  The main argument was that megaupload wasn't providing personal storage because seldomly downloaded files would be automatically deleted, and all the incentives were geared towards maximizing downloads where they would get ad revenue. Therefore their system was not a storage system, but a download system, and a download system that incentivized illegal downloads by making zero efforts into trying to curb piracy. They had advanced and aggressive systems in place to remove CP that they could have used to curb piracy and they obviously didn't decide to use that technology. It's a pretty weak case with _horrible_ execution, but given the magnitude and size of mega/rapidshare at the time, something had to be done because it was getting out of hand.
- jahnu 3y ago
  Are you using persecute instead of prosecute on purpose or is it just a typo?
balls187 3y ago
Fun fact: I had my house raided by police with semi-automatic weapons on Thanksgiving while I was hanging out on the couch with my kids. It wasn’t about money or any illegal activity. Just a very very mentally unstable ex-wife.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  It happened to my buddy as well, but it turned out that they had the wrong apartment (same number, except the first one that indicated the floor). But that didn't stop them from charging him for possessing a few joints worth of weed. And as a bonus, he had to pay for the damage to the door frame.
  - givemeethekeys 3y ago
    Happened to a rapper buddy of mine too. He released a popular song about it.
    - ngai_aku 3y ago
      For those who don't get the reference: Afroman - Will You Help Me Repair My Door https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
      - MikeDelta 3y ago
        Is that the case where the cops tried suing him from showing the home footage in his videoclip, claiming breach of privacy?
        givemeethekeys 3y ago
        Sure is.
  - vlod 3y ago
    Wondering if that wouldn't fall into a warrantless search.
moralestapia 3y ago
>The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega. It also had to do with popularity, I recall reading back then that MU was like a two-digit% of internet traffic, it was BIG. I don't know about other countries but in Mexico everybody was downloading stuff from there, some (pirate obv.) movie websites were nothing more that a shitty frontend that streamed content right from MU. When the US (RIAA and whatnot) shut down MU it was a huge blow against piracy. Mega(.co.nz) could have been an exact clone of MU including the content and still no one really cared to move there, so the copyright mafia didn't even bothered.
TechBro8615 3y ago
I do find it frustrating how news articles will often describe a complex case and refer to the "victims" of the guilty party, while omitting any discussion of who those victims were, and (sometimes maliciously) leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. For example, if all you knew about Theranos was that Elizabeth Holmes was an archetypical sociopath CEO who ran a fraudulent blood testing company, then an uncritical reading of a headline like "Elizabeth Holmes appeals compensation payments to Theranos victims" might pull on your heartstrings - that damn sociopath sold fraudulent blood tests to cancer patients and now she's stiffing them for the compensation she owes them! But if you have a bit more context on the case, then you know that her "victims" were actually some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, like venture capitalists with billions of dollars under management, and war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former members of the Intelligence Community. They failed to do any due diligence, and were duped into investing other people's money into a founder selling vaporware. Instead of cutting their losses, they leveraged their power to weaponize the media and justice system to enact their retribution on her. The same applies here. The only "victims" of Megaupload are massive corporations with teams of lobbyists who have spent decades capturing politicians to protect their monopolies by legislating barriers to entry and criminalizing threats to their otherwise fragile business models. Meanwhile the users of Megaupload just want to watch some movies, but the corporations can't figure out how to distribute their content in any reasonably usable or affordable way. So instead of fixing their business model, they deputize their pocket politicians to prosecute the only people who managed to provide what the users actually wanted. So yes indeed, it's hard to muster much sympathy for the "victims" of Megaupload, aside from the innocent users of the service who just want to pay some reasonable amount of money to watch movies and TV shows.
tdullien 3y ago
The big mistake Megaupload made was charging copyright holders a fee to delete a link to their copyrighted content, but not deleting the content on the backend. This was what allowed the prosecutors to bring out racketeering charges, bring the full RICO act to bear, etc.

yreg 3y ago

>I don't really separate Megaupload and Mega As far as I understood Megaupload's business plan was selling "fast" download access to pirated material. I don't care much about piracy, but intentionally making money on it seems somewhat disgusting to me. I consider Mega a legitimate cloud storage service. Nevermind what I think about the fiunder, I find it to be one of the most privacy minded services, so I support it and wish it well.

formerly_proven 3y ago
The business model was selling bandwidth subscriptions and revenue was shared with file uploaders according to download bandwidth.
- yreg 3y ago
  And this was designed with piracy in mind, was it not? It's pretty obvious in my opinion, even though I have no way to prove intention.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Yes. The prosecution was able to present conversations between the owners of the site talking about how piracy was the goal of the site. It was basically Netflix, without the pesky IP licensing.
  - roel_v 3y ago
    In the court cases, there was communication between Dotcom and van der Kolk that essentially said (paraphrasing here) 'hey, downloads are going down, we should add movie x or album y somehow, people search for those a lot'. There was a lot of evidence (in the form of emails and chat logs) that showed that their 'file sharing' angle was just a front to their actual business which was distributing copyrighted material.
  - lgl 3y ago
    It was very obviously for piracy and copyright infringement. The Mega*.com indictment [0] even reported that one of Kim's wishes was to make a 1-to-1 copy of youtube and were in the process of scraping videos from youtube to megavideo so as to make people assume megavideo was a user generated content website and not video storage for pirated/copyrighted content. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/megaupload-indictment.pdf#page=34 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/meg...
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
I think you're correct in that it was captured communications between the Megaupload creators along these lines that really sealed their fate. However, what formerly_proven says is correct for the public face of Megaupload. The interesting case study would be whether, if the public facing business plan wasn't corrupted by private communications indicating the encouragement of privacy, would Megaupload have been a successful, profitable, and lawful enterprise? Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study? If yes, then is the only difference that the founders learned their opsec lessons? (This is kinda where I struggle to separate the two)
- yreg 3y ago
  >Is the continued existence of Mega the equivalent of such a case study? The infrastructure might be similar, but the packaged product is different. "Pay us and you can upload your files and access them anywhere / share them" vs. "Upload files that other strangers will be interested in so much that they will pay for access". Also, unless I'm wrong Megaupload was indexed and searchable. While to access a Mega file one needs a direct link and these are usually not posted around on the public web. At least I don't see them that much. Although I believe you that a record of communication proving intent is the most damning part in the eye of the law.
2devnull 3y ago
Just Dropbox with different marketing.

causi 3y ago

Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega. Its loss is a terrible shame; it served as an archive site for loads of material that existed nowhere else. Webcomics, music, videos from dead sites. Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then.

krisknez 3y ago
Megaporn was good too, RIP
rgbrenner 3y ago
Megaupload was much easier to search than Mega The indictment said it was not searchable by the public.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  I think what the GP means is that "megaupload" is easier to search in a search engine than "mega", with the latter being more likely to return irrelevant results first.
  - causi 3y ago
    No, just that there a lot of searchable index sites that maintained huge lists of URLs for material on Megaupload.
giobox 3y ago
> Putting copyrighted stuff on the IA wasn't as common back then. I'm still amazed the IA is getting away with hosting some of the stuff it is right now, honestly. I love it, but I am mentally preparing myself for it changing substantially eventually. All it's going to take is probably something like the wrong Nintendo IP appearing in the site for a while and the scent attracting Nintendo's lawyers, or similar. If there's content you want, I'd download it while you still can. Longer term, I'd love for the IA to get recognized in US law and some rules to make it easier to archive/share certain types of older software/digital IP without the worries we have today, but probably a pipe dream.

lagniappe 3y ago

[flagged]

aaomidi 3y ago
I’d prefer the Donald Trump treatment for people who don’t have a history of killing people.
2023throwawayy 3y ago
I personally would prefer not raiding a home with weapons.
alsiola 3y ago
Civilised society might prefer no weapons?
fluoridation 3y ago
Dotcom was at worst a white collar criminal. He wasn't a drug trafficker or anything of that nature. There was no reason to expect violent resistance to an arrest. Two or three uniformed officers would have been enough to make him go quietly.
- yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - drno123 3y ago
    It is better than invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and droning kids in villages * droning = killing a person by shooting iz from a drone
    - yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
      [flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Onavo 3y ago

New Zealand chose their bed. They could have been like France and placed more emphasis on diversification and independence (the French does not extradite their own people), or be like Switzerland and accumulate high technology and dominate finance. Instead they let themselves become yet another junior partner in the anglosphere. Their only export of value is their real estate which provides excellent sanctuary for billionaires seeking refuge from geopolitical uncertainties. They could also have been like India and remain non-aligned, or been like Israel and have lobbyists that punch above their weight. Instead they chose to let themselves to be walked over, and let their citizens be extradited at the behest of foreign powers. The country places more emphasis on liberal popularism than effective governance. Clearly giving hugs on camera and issuing mask mandates is more important than solving the real estate crisis.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago
In actuality, New Zealand leaders have often spoken out against nuclear proliferation and climate change, putting them at odds with allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone#Impact_on_diplomatic_relationships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone#...
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> junior partner in the anglosphere They're literally one of the Five Eyes...

SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago

Mega was a re-thinked Megaupload trying to accomplish the same thing but they are very different as Mega is built with a different tech/business architecture to try avoid crossing the lines into illegality that Megaupload crossed. The original Megaupload was built to take advantage of the market opportunity existing in the grey area between copyright infringement and personal sharing. They were not trying to make something illegal, instead they were trying to make something as close as possible to illegal while still being able to argue that they are technically legal, which they failed, as the powers-that-be decided that they crossed the line into illegality and persecuted them. After the failure of Megaupload they tried to do the same thing again with Mega, but armed with the new knowledge of what is now considered clearly illegal, what will get the persecutors knowing on your door, they redesigned the new product to not cross those new lines. More specifically, Megaupload fell because it was provable that they knew about the individual instances of piracy, so they designed Mega around end-to-end encription, so Mega users can still pirate things but Mega can always claim ignorance as a defense. There was/is no difference in persecutor priority in regards to copyright (copyright infringement is still a top priority evil today), just a difference in what they can prove against those two different companies.

matthewaveryusa 3y ago
The main argument was that megaupload wasn't providing personal storage because seldomly downloaded files would be automatically deleted, and all the incentives were geared towards maximizing downloads where they would get ad revenue. Therefore their system was not a storage system, but a download system, and a download system that incentivized illegal downloads by making zero efforts into trying to curb piracy. They had advanced and aggressive systems in place to remove CP that they could have used to curb piracy and they obviously didn't decide to use that technology. It's a pretty weak case with _horrible_ execution, but given the magnitude and size of mega/rapidshare at the time, something had to be done because it was getting out of hand.
jahnu 3y ago
Are you using persecute instead of prosecute on purpose or is it just a typo?

balls187 3y ago

Fun fact: I had my house raided by police with semi-automatic weapons on Thanksgiving while I was hanging out on the couch with my kids. It wasn’t about money or any illegal activity. Just a very very mentally unstable ex-wife.

stronglikedan 3y ago
It happened to my buddy as well, but it turned out that they had the wrong apartment (same number, except the first one that indicated the floor). But that didn't stop them from charging him for possessing a few joints worth of weed. And as a bonus, he had to pay for the damage to the door frame.
- givemeethekeys 3y ago
  Happened to a rapper buddy of mine too. He released a popular song about it.
  - ngai_aku 3y ago
    For those who don't get the reference: Afroman - Will You Help Me Repair My Door https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
    - MikeDelta 3y ago
      Is that the case where the cops tried suing him from showing the home footage in his videoclip, claiming breach of privacy?
      - givemeethekeys 3y ago
        Sure is.
- vlod 3y ago
  Wondering if that wouldn't fall into a warrantless search.

moralestapia 3y ago

>The primary difference, as far as my understanding, being that the US was really focused on copyright infringement as a top priority evil back when Megaupload existed, and a low-level annoyance in the time of Mega. It also had to do with popularity, I recall reading back then that MU was like a two-digit% of internet traffic, it was BIG. I don't know about other countries but in Mexico everybody was downloading stuff from there, some (pirate obv.) movie websites were nothing more that a shitty frontend that streamed content right from MU. When the US (RIAA and whatnot) shut down MU it was a huge blow against piracy. Mega(.co.nz) could have been an exact clone of MU including the content and still no one really cared to move there, so the copyright mafia didn't even bothered.

TechBro8615 3y ago

I do find it frustrating how news articles will often describe a complex case and refer to the "victims" of the guilty party, while omitting any discussion of who those victims were, and (sometimes maliciously) leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. For example, if all you knew about Theranos was that Elizabeth Holmes was an archetypical sociopath CEO who ran a fraudulent blood testing company, then an uncritical reading of a headline like "Elizabeth Holmes appeals compensation payments to Theranos victims" might pull on your heartstrings - that damn sociopath sold fraudulent blood tests to cancer patients and now she's stiffing them for the compensation she owes them! But if you have a bit more context on the case, then you know that her "victims" were actually some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, like venture capitalists with billions of dollars under management, and war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former members of the Intelligence Community. They failed to do any due diligence, and were duped into investing other people's money into a founder selling vaporware. Instead of cutting their losses, they leveraged their power to weaponize the media and justice system to enact their retribution on her. The same applies here. The only "victims" of Megaupload are massive corporations with teams of lobbyists who have spent decades capturing politicians to protect their monopolies by legislating barriers to entry and criminalizing threats to their otherwise fragile business models. Meanwhile the users of Megaupload just want to watch some movies, but the corporations can't figure out how to distribute their content in any reasonably usable or affordable way. So instead of fixing their business model, they deputize their pocket politicians to prosecute the only people who managed to provide what the users actually wanted. So yes indeed, it's hard to muster much sympathy for the "victims" of Megaupload, aside from the innocent users of the service who just want to pay some reasonable amount of money to watch movies and TV shows.

tdullien 3y ago

The big mistake Megaupload made was charging copyright holders a fee to delete a link to their copyrighted content, but not deleting the content on the backend. This was what allowed the prosecutors to bring out racketeering charges, bring the full RICO act to bear, etc.