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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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoAre you using persecute instead of prosecute on purpose or is it just a typo?
- zymhan 3y agoI thought they meant "persecute" at first, but this phrase makes no sense in that case: "persecutor priority" so hopefully a typo
- mindslight 3y agoWhen "prosecutors" work as an enforcement arm for corporate authoritarian corruption, it makes sense to refer to them as persecutors.
- hedora 3y agoIt wasn't that they knew about individual instances of piracy (otherwise, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft's execs would be sitting in the same jail cell, since they all run similar file sharing services, and all those services have been used for piracy at scale). The legal problem was that the prosecutors had proof that Megaupload employees were encouraging piracy. If Megaupload were in the US, they'd probably also be in trouble for violating the DMCA takedown process rules, but that law doesn't apply in NZ.