3 ms·

>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

by 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.

by yreg 3y ago

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.