3 ms·

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...