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This begs the question of why Mega was so aggressively targeted. I think it's pretty clear. This was one of the largest and easiest to use file-locker services

by naner 15y ago

This begs the question of why Mega was so aggressively targeted. I think it's pretty clear. This was one of the largest and easiest to use file-locker services. I used it tons of times because it was so convenient and the free service was much better than any of the other file-locker services. If you had an ad-blocker installed, the site was almost too good to be true. You could download huge files after a 30 second wait, at reasonably high speeds, no captcha or any other hoops to jump through, and you could download another file from the site immediately afterwards without wait (most sites make free users wait between downloads). Files would stay up on the site seemingly indefinitely, while other file-locker services would delete a file after it was not accessed for a specific number of days. Also Kim was a larger-than-life target. He was living extravagantly. Right after he was arrested there was a huge Ars article about how ridiculous his lifestyle and persona was. So now the government could say: "Hey look at this asshole, he's getting rich off of piracy and stealing American jobs." They couldn't have hoped for a better target. Unfortunately, Kim was obviously thumbing his nose at US copyright law and he thought he was untouchable because of his location. That might be a workable strategy for someone keeping a lower-profile but if you piss off enough powerful people they will find a way to get at you, legal or not. (As we are seeing here.) That being said, since the guy had a family he really should have found a more respectable way to make a living. This was pretty reckless and selfish on his part.

Karunamon 15y ago
>Kim was obviously thumbing his nose at US copyright law I don't think providing a DMCA takedown process which was removing tens of thousands of files a day counts as "thumbing his nose at US copyright law"
- naner 15y ago
  The site still appears to have been hosting mostly infringing content. Not a business I'd consider getting into if I had a wife/kid.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    YouTube has now and has had far more infringing content than Megaupload ever did. But Megaupload isn't owned by a corporation with Al Gore and other rich politically connected Americans as senior advisors and/or on the board of directors.
    - billpatrianakos 15y ago
      You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not. YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it). YouTube is damn quick and transparent with their takedowns and has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly. MegaUpload, at the very core of the idea behind it, really was a legit file locker service but that's not how it exactly worked in practice. MegaUpload has always been one of the go-to places for pirating media. They had ads on all the popular torrent sites that linked to the same files you'd download as a torrent. Everyone knew what MegaUpload was all about and anyone claiming they were just a poor innocent file locker service must be kidding themselves. I have a hunting knife. I use it to hunt. No one will begrudge me my knife because I use it legitimately. If I kill a man walking down the street with it however someone is going to try to stop me and take my knife. I'll protest "but it's a hunting knife, it has a perfectly legitimate use!" but it won't matter because I crossed a line just like Mega did.
      - tripzilch 15y ago
        > YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it). Yes you can, and most non-tech-savvy people I know actually prefer to do that, than to download their music from torrents or "download sites". Which I can imagine because they're much less likely to get a virus and they just need a firefox extension and everybody knows how to find their favourite tunes on YouTube.
      - joering2 15y ago
        > You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not. What on Earth do traffic numbers have to do with whether a site is infringing copyrights on not?? > has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly. What the Viacom vs YT/Google tough us is that the YT owners were fully aware of the files uploaded being pirated. There have been long emails transcriptions where YT owners talk with each other how long should they keep the files online to "help traffic numbers grow" before putting files down. Lookup the court case, I am short on time to look right now.
- dlikhten 15y ago
  Furthermore he fully complied with DMCA which only required links removed. He followed the law to the letter, more he even gave tools that go above and beyond the law. It is not his fault the industry was not willing to properly police. Now devil's advocate: the MPAA and affiliates CANNOT possibly go over every single website which hosts content and provides different ways of inspecting that information and filter. It is just impossible. They would spend all their money 10x over just policing. Which of course begs the question: are they evolving with changes in tech or just doing everything in their power not to.
  - brazzy 15y ago
    Ha actually did none of that.
    - joejohnson 15y ago
      So he's lying in the interview with TorrentFreak? Can you support this claim?
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Yes: the DoJ built a case for almost 2 years again MU, and subpoenaed and obtained huge amounts of intracompany email in which MU repeatedly admitted knowledge of and financial benefit from piracy. For instance, when an outsider complained that MegaVideo's hosting of the Showtime pay-tv series "Dexter" had desynchronized audio/video, instead of taking down "Dexter", Kim Schmitz fired off mail saying that fixing the AV problem was a priority. That's just one of many many instances; see up and downthread for others.
    - angersock 15y ago
      Care to elaborate? Because, you know, he actually mentions in the article upping the delete quota for Warner Bros.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        I see no mention anywhere in the DMCA of "reasonable limits" to the number of infringement notices a provider needs to deal with, only the statutory language demanding that providers act expeditiously to react to those notices. Why was there a "quota" at all?
- brazzy 15y ago
  A DMCA takedown process with was a sham and was not actaully removing anything counts as exactly that. Especially when internal mails reveal that the daily cap for takedown notices was determined by what wouldn't impact revenue.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    >A DMCA takedown process with was a sham and was not actaully removing anything As described ad nauseum elsewhere, the DMCA only requires removing infringing links. Imagine 5 people upload a copy of a copyrighted song. 4 of those copies are for backup or personal use, one of them ends up on a file sharing site. The 1 is DMCA'd. Why would you remove the other 4? *edit This becomes even more crucial when you have any kind of sane deduping in place, where each link, in effect, points to a single piece of data.
    - brazzy 15y ago
      "4 of those copies are for backup or personal use" If they're for personal use, why are the publically accessible (and actually being downloaded by hundreds or thousands of different users) and not restricted to the account that uploaded them?
      - Karunamon 15y ago
        >If they're for personal use, why are the publically accessible Because it becomes "publicly accessible" the moment the link to the file is generated when the upload completes. I.e. you can access the file if you know the URL. The law does not require you to do this kind of research, besides.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      The DMCA requires service providers with actual knowledge of their hosting of infringing material to act "expedititously" to remove or disable access to the material. I don't know where this argument about "links" comes from. This whole argument seems like a bit of a red herring. What the DMCA actually says is that service providers aren't liable iff (a) they don't have actual knowledge of infringement --- and that if they themselves become aware of infringement they themselves without prompting remove infringing content, (b) don't have a financial interest in infringement, AND (c) respond to takedown notices. It beggars belief that MegaUpload could pass (a) and (b). All three need to apply to avoid liability.
- tptacek 15y ago
  The site had millions of users. Is the allusion to "tens of thousands" of files supposed to be convincing? Why was there a limit at all? This is a site that had to deal with (say) 10,000 takedowns a day; clearly, it had a rampant piracy problem.
  - viraptor 15y ago
    > Why was there a limit at all? Maybe to limit the Warner and other companies' actions. They're trying to sue for obvious test files now. What are the chances that given unlimited access they wouldn't worry so much about verification of what's legal/what belongs to them? It's a completely different thing if they reached the limit every single day, were rejected higher quotas and have a big queue of files to remove... But why didn't they say so?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      You think a jury will reasonably believe that Warner was sending tends of thousands of bogus takedowns every day? I don't.
      - viraptor 15y ago
        I can only hope they kept logs of all takedown requests. Now they only need to find a reasonable sample. Honestly, I believe that even if they tried hard not to make mistakes, at this volume they would get some false-positives - and that's as good explanation as I can imagine. Now the question is - can Mega* guys prove enough of cases like that. Or maybe they have other explanation for the quotas - I don't know - I'm eager to hear more about it.
        onemoreact 15y ago
        Assuming the limit was close to the average number of take down requests it's reasonable protection to prevent a buggy third party script from harming their site.
      - nkassis 15y ago
- Nelson69 15y ago
  There are a lot of missing variables here, 10s of thousands of files a day sure does sound like a lot to a lot of people though, for all we know that's just a drop in the bucket. How many DMCA take down requests does a company like google/youtube get a day? Anyone know? Just out of curiosity. It all sort of proves the point though, Megaupload had a ton of piracy and all parties involved knew it. I think that might matter more than a lot of people think, they may have complied with the literal letter of the law but can't courts deem it not enough? Napster was ordered by a court to monitor it's use and restrict illegal use and they were ultimately unable to. There are already cases on the books for that, the fact that MU gave out access to tools like direct delete just shows that they knew the extent of the problem. Still, no reason to skip due process, but I don't know what all the evidence is either.
badclient 15y ago
"Hey look at this asshole, he's getting rich off of piracy and stealing American jobs." They couldn't have hoped for a better target. The problem with this argument is that the government can make similar arguments about most wealthy people if they have already decided they'd like to bring them down. Does this mean you shouldn't live big purely out of fear of the gov? Sounds pretty ridiculous to me.
rasur 15y ago
In a recent interview (also linked to on HN), he also stated that he provided direct access to (all of) the media companies, so that they could directly delete infringing links themselves.
- brazzy 15y ago
  Yeah, I would also claim that in his situation.
deathwarmedover 15y ago
It's worth pointing out that Dotcom defending himself on this point in an interview recently: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1203/S00018/kim-dotcom-interview-campbell-live.htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1203/S00018/kim-dotcom-inte... And those clips were long before I had a wife and a family and kids, you know, my priorities have changed. I’m a family man, you know, I am not doing these kinds of things – that was childish stuff, and it was fun at the time and I don’t regret it, but that is not me today, I am a different guy.
- majani 15y ago
  I'm not buying that. He had bloody giraffes on his lawn when they were taking him away.
why-el 15y ago
This is a very inaccurate comment. How is he "thumbing his nose at US copyright law"? And since when does copyright infringement pursuit only get triggered when the infringer decides to show off?
powertower 15y ago
> obviously thumbing his nose at US copyright law and he thought he was untouchable because of his location. That and the fact that MU made its profits from tricking people into paying for the download privilege of illegal content and/or displaying ads on those pages. If they did not charge or monetize that illegal content in some way, they would not have made the 100s of millions that they did.
- Dylan16807 15y ago
  Tricking people? They promised and delivered faster downloads.

by naner 15y ago

Karunamon 15y ago

>Kim was obviously thumbing his nose at US copyright law I don't think providing a DMCA takedown process which was removing tens of thousands of files a day counts as "thumbing his nose at US copyright law"

naner 15y ago
The site still appears to have been hosting mostly infringing content. Not a business I'd consider getting into if I had a wife/kid.
- droithomme 15y ago
  YouTube has now and has had far more infringing content than Megaupload ever did. But Megaupload isn't owned by a corporation with Al Gore and other rich politically connected Americans as senior advisors and/or on the board of directors.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not. YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it). YouTube is damn quick and transparent with their takedowns and has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly. MegaUpload, at the very core of the idea behind it, really was a legit file locker service but that's not how it exactly worked in practice. MegaUpload has always been one of the go-to places for pirating media. They had ads on all the popular torrent sites that linked to the same files you'd download as a torrent. Everyone knew what MegaUpload was all about and anyone claiming they were just a poor innocent file locker service must be kidding themselves. I have a hunting knife. I use it to hunt. No one will begrudge me my knife because I use it legitimately. If I kill a man walking down the street with it however someone is going to try to stop me and take my knife. I'll protest "but it's a hunting knife, it has a perfectly legitimate use!" but it won't matter because I crossed a line just like Mega did.
    - tripzilch 15y ago
      > YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it). Yes you can, and most non-tech-savvy people I know actually prefer to do that, than to download their music from torrents or "download sites". Which I can imagine because they're much less likely to get a virus and they just need a firefox extension and everybody knows how to find their favourite tunes on YouTube.
    - joering2 15y ago
      > You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not. What on Earth do traffic numbers have to do with whether a site is infringing copyrights on not?? > has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly. What the Viacom vs YT/Google tough us is that the YT owners were fully aware of the files uploaded being pirated. There have been long emails transcriptions where YT owners talk with each other how long should they keep the files online to "help traffic numbers grow" before putting files down. Lookup the court case, I am short on time to look right now.
dlikhten 15y ago
Furthermore he fully complied with DMCA which only required links removed. He followed the law to the letter, more he even gave tools that go above and beyond the law. It is not his fault the industry was not willing to properly police. Now devil's advocate: the MPAA and affiliates CANNOT possibly go over every single website which hosts content and provides different ways of inspecting that information and filter. It is just impossible. They would spend all their money 10x over just policing. Which of course begs the question: are they evolving with changes in tech or just doing everything in their power not to.
- brazzy 15y ago
  Ha actually did none of that.
  - joejohnson 15y ago
    So he's lying in the interview with TorrentFreak? Can you support this claim?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Yes: the DoJ built a case for almost 2 years again MU, and subpoenaed and obtained huge amounts of intracompany email in which MU repeatedly admitted knowledge of and financial benefit from piracy. For instance, when an outsider complained that MegaVideo's hosting of the Showtime pay-tv series "Dexter" had desynchronized audio/video, instead of taking down "Dexter", Kim Schmitz fired off mail saying that fixing the AV problem was a priority. That's just one of many many instances; see up and downthread for others.
  - angersock 15y ago
    Care to elaborate? Because, you know, he actually mentions in the article upping the delete quota for Warner Bros.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I see no mention anywhere in the DMCA of "reasonable limits" to the number of infringement notices a provider needs to deal with, only the statutory language demanding that providers act expeditiously to react to those notices. Why was there a "quota" at all?
brazzy 15y ago
A DMCA takedown process with was a sham and was not actaully removing anything counts as exactly that. Especially when internal mails reveal that the daily cap for takedown notices was determined by what wouldn't impact revenue.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  >A DMCA takedown process with was a sham and was not actaully removing anything As described ad nauseum elsewhere, the DMCA only requires removing infringing links. Imagine 5 people upload a copy of a copyrighted song. 4 of those copies are for backup or personal use, one of them ends up on a file sharing site. The 1 is DMCA'd. Why would you remove the other 4? *edit This becomes even more crucial when you have any kind of sane deduping in place, where each link, in effect, points to a single piece of data.
  - brazzy 15y ago
    "4 of those copies are for backup or personal use" If they're for personal use, why are the publically accessible (and actually being downloaded by hundreds or thousands of different users) and not restricted to the account that uploaded them?
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      >If they're for personal use, why are the publically accessible Because it becomes "publicly accessible" the moment the link to the file is generated when the upload completes. I.e. you can access the file if you know the URL. The law does not require you to do this kind of research, besides.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    The DMCA requires service providers with actual knowledge of their hosting of infringing material to act "expedititously" to remove or disable access to the material. I don't know where this argument about "links" comes from. This whole argument seems like a bit of a red herring. What the DMCA actually says is that service providers aren't liable iff (a) they don't have actual knowledge of infringement --- and that if they themselves become aware of infringement they themselves without prompting remove infringing content, (b) don't have a financial interest in infringement, AND (c) respond to takedown notices. It beggars belief that MegaUpload could pass (a) and (b). All three need to apply to avoid liability.
tptacek 15y ago
The site had millions of users. Is the allusion to "tens of thousands" of files supposed to be convincing? Why was there a limit at all? This is a site that had to deal with (say) 10,000 takedowns a day; clearly, it had a rampant piracy problem.
- viraptor 15y ago
  > Why was there a limit at all? Maybe to limit the Warner and other companies' actions. They're trying to sue for obvious test files now. What are the chances that given unlimited access they wouldn't worry so much about verification of what's legal/what belongs to them? It's a completely different thing if they reached the limit every single day, were rejected higher quotas and have a big queue of files to remove... But why didn't they say so?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    You think a jury will reasonably believe that Warner was sending tends of thousands of bogus takedowns every day? I don't.
    - viraptor 15y ago
      I can only hope they kept logs of all takedown requests. Now they only need to find a reasonable sample. Honestly, I believe that even if they tried hard not to make mistakes, at this volume they would get some false-positives - and that's as good explanation as I can imagine. Now the question is - can Mega* guys prove enough of cases like that. Or maybe they have other explanation for the quotas - I don't know - I'm eager to hear more about it.
      - onemoreact 15y ago
        Assuming the limit was close to the average number of take down requests it's reasonable protection to prevent a buggy third party script from harming their site.
    - nkassis 15y ago
Nelson69 15y ago
There are a lot of missing variables here, 10s of thousands of files a day sure does sound like a lot to a lot of people though, for all we know that's just a drop in the bucket. How many DMCA take down requests does a company like google/youtube get a day? Anyone know? Just out of curiosity. It all sort of proves the point though, Megaupload had a ton of piracy and all parties involved knew it. I think that might matter more than a lot of people think, they may have complied with the literal letter of the law but can't courts deem it not enough? Napster was ordered by a court to monitor it's use and restrict illegal use and they were ultimately unable to. There are already cases on the books for that, the fact that MU gave out access to tools like direct delete just shows that they knew the extent of the problem. Still, no reason to skip due process, but I don't know what all the evidence is either.

badclient 15y ago

"Hey look at this asshole, he's getting rich off of piracy and stealing American jobs." They couldn't have hoped for a better target. The problem with this argument is that the government can make similar arguments about most wealthy people if they have already decided they'd like to bring them down. Does this mean you shouldn't live big purely out of fear of the gov? Sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

rasur 15y ago

In a recent interview (also linked to on HN), he also stated that he provided direct access to (all of) the media companies, so that they could directly delete infringing links themselves.

brazzy 15y ago
Yeah, I would also claim that in his situation.

deathwarmedover 15y ago

It's worth pointing out that Dotcom defending himself on this point in an interview recently: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1203/S00018/kim-dotcom-interview-campbell-live.htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1203/S00018/kim-dotcom-inte... And those clips were long before I had a wife and a family and kids, you know, my priorities have changed. I’m a family man, you know, I am not doing these kinds of things – that was childish stuff, and it was fun at the time and I don’t regret it, but that is not me today, I am a different guy.

majani 15y ago
I'm not buying that. He had bloody giraffes on his lawn when they were taking him away.

why-el 15y ago

This is a very inaccurate comment. How is he "thumbing his nose at US copyright law"? And since when does copyright infringement pursuit only get triggered when the infringer decides to show off?

powertower 15y ago

> obviously thumbing his nose at US copyright law and he thought he was untouchable because of his location. That and the fact that MU made its profits from tricking people into paying for the download privilege of illegal content and/or displaying ads on those pages. If they did not charge or monetize that illegal content in some way, they would not have made the 100s of millions that they did.

Dylan16807 15y ago
Tricking people? They promised and delivered faster downloads.