4 ms·

Didn't YouTube get popular on pirated content first? What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? They both went legal later.

tim333 2y ago
I think youtube cooperated with taking pirated content down while Kim was a bit like screw you, I'm offshore, you can't get me.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  More than taking it down, YouTube pretty much gave the media companies a new revenue source, already built-out.
- glzone1 2y ago
  More than that. They gave the media basically a tool to identify music that they owned, then either remove it or take all the money from it. I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored content or product placement stuff in music videos).
colechristensen 2y ago
For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips of things were popular and there were things split between many videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me using youtube for.
- jahnu 2y ago
  It was filled with music uploads.
  - emursebrian 2y ago
    It still is.
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      They have license and royalty agreements with labels now and takedown methods for rights holders who object to things as well as quite capable detection machinery.
      - janderland 2y ago
        I work in this space and there is still a ton of illegal content on YT. As stated earlier, the main difference is that YT complies when infringements are eventually found.
- xnyan 2y ago
  In my social groups at the time(late highschool, early college) it was exclusively used for watching TV shows. The 10min limit was only a minor annoyance, and more than made up for the fact that it was free fast video hosting at time when that was extremely rare. It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked down on TV content.
  - znpy 2y ago
    As a former megavideo user… i watched many American tv shows I wouldn’t have watched otherwise. And i wouldn’t have paid anyway because at the time as a teenager i had no money of my own to spend. Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like extortion, it’s unfair anyway (prices constantly increasing, and you still get ads even if you’re paying… might as well go back to pirating stuff)
    - skeeter2020 2y ago
      you're moving the goalposts from "I didn't have money" to "I have money but it's not worth it".
      - znpy 2y ago
        Yes, because i did not have money when i was a teenager and have money now that i’m in my 30ies.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Also 10 minutes is right about where the commercial breaks would be anyway.
Eumenes 2y ago
> What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts within the DoJ
- more_corn 2y ago
  One of the cool things that lawyers do is that they advise you on how you can comply with the law and avoid such pesky things as “imprisonment” and “extradition”.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  Salty hot-take but not grounded in reality if you remember or look back on the facts. He actively encouraged piracy, of whioch there is ample proof, then doubled-down on this, then tried to frame his own take on "following the rules" - all while continuing to poke the bear. We can debate what the laws and punishements should be, but he's about to feel justice in many different forms.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  YouTube was acquired by Google within two years of it launching. It's life as an independent operation was just too short to get into that sort of trouble.
adrr 2y ago
I am sure if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well. Thats the evidence against Kim Dotcom, emails.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  Funny you should say that, because there are literally such emails all the way up to Google's C-suite. They leaked a few years ago when Viacom sued them for mass copyright infringement on Youtube. In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted? >Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom show that many top Googlers — all the way up to co-founder Sergey Brin — were concerned about YouTube’s copyright piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google’s ethics. >[...] >Google executives — who previously had referred to YouTube as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” — nevertheless agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006. https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-called-youtube-a-pirate-site-2/amp/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-cal...
  - mjhay 2y ago
    Thank goodness that Google execs are too high-profile to be prosecuted!
    - ffhhj 2y ago
      And that's why they'll keep feeding the surveillance machine.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    > In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted? I mean it's actually a pretty good argument. If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be expected to police it? > [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission." --- Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10 times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other links would still let you download that file. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
diggan 2y ago
Spotify too (allegedly) had bunch of pirated content to bootstrap the service. I guess the difference is that they (and YouTube) tried to pivot away from it, compared to Megaupload which seemed to have leaned into it instead.
- RyanAdamas 2y ago
  Sure you're not thinking of Grooveshark which was the original Spotify?
  - diggan 2y ago
    Nope, I'm sure I'm thinking of Spotify. Grooveshark, AFAIK, didn't try to pivot and instead later got shutdown, compared to Spotify which seemed to have been able to navigate the pivot. Edit: found at least one source now when I went looking: https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-become-a-success-180319/ https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b... > When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay. > Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.
- bergkvist 2y ago
  Yeah, I remember in the early days, when I installed Spotify it would scan my computer for music and upload everything it found. I imagine this is basically how they bootstrapped
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    I heard stories of how Spotify used to have obscure death metal records the staff would rip, but which were gone by the time the service gained traction.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
Probably mostly Dotcom's attitude tbh
more_corn 2y ago
DMCA safe harbor says you don’t have to actively police your content but you have to take it down if a copyright holder complains. YouTube had robust tooling to take down content when they received a complaint. They got sued anyway, they won because the evidence showed they always took the content down (and that Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place)
- xp84 2y ago
  > Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.
  - robocat 2y ago
    Referenced here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259611
- ClassyJacket 2y ago
  Does the DMCA apply in New Zealand?
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put everything up in chunks and at the time there weren't many super user friendly options to download them as a batch. You'd often enough have things where one part would eventually be missing and that'd ruin the whole thing. For tv shows it could be okay but for films once you're dealing with 10+ parts, often without knowledge of playlists, it'd get grating fast. Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo
mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
One big (alleged) difference that many folks skip over when mentioning YouTube is that Kim actively and not very secretly recruited pirates to upload known pirated stuff. YouTube may have done a crap job at preventing privacy but they weren't actively soliciting pirates and paying them.
kstenerud 2y ago
Kim was a maverick, and his political connections were weak and easy to break. If you don't have the connections, you shouldn't be playing such a dangerous game.
- blandpiper 2y ago
  he was swedish and thats enough sometimes. the government thinks ahead instead of acting like mobsters after the fact
  - slater 2y ago
    Finnish?
    - LtdJorge 2y ago
      German
      - shmeeed 2y ago
        Both
doctorpangloss 2y ago
It did. YouTube has paid the piper here and continues to do so. It pays a lot of money to record labels right now. TV networks choose to run their own streaming, and YouTube enforces what networks ask for. Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate. Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.
- brian-armstrong 2y ago
  Isn't Apple losing money on their streaming service though?
  - 8338550bff96 2y ago
    isn't costco losing money on hotdogs?
- miffy900 2y ago
  > It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so. Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.
  - BobAliceInATree 2y ago
    I don't think anyone, even the diehardest fans of Apple, thinks that Apple's RAM upgrade prices are reasonable. But we pay it for the same reason that people pay Porsche an extra $10k for a trim package — because you accept the high-margin upgrade as the cost of the item itself.
quitit 2y ago
It was definitely used that way, early YouTube had a download button
DaoVeles 2y ago
My original youtube channel was basically just funneling split up episodes of Daily show & Colbert Report directly onto it. Would get about 100,000 views a day until they started cutting down.
rldjbpin 2y ago
apparently so did crunchyroll (https://restofworld.org/2024/crunchyroll-india-subscription-price/ https://restofworld.org/2024/crunchyroll-india-subscription-...). difference being they went the legal route what seems like even earlier in the lifecycle than youtube.

tim333 2y ago

I think youtube cooperated with taking pirated content down while Kim was a bit like screw you, I'm offshore, you can't get me.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
More than taking it down, YouTube pretty much gave the media companies a new revenue source, already built-out.
glzone1 2y ago
More than that. They gave the media basically a tool to identify music that they owned, then either remove it or take all the money from it. I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored content or product placement stuff in music videos).

colechristensen 2y ago

For the first 5 years videos were limited to 10 minutes. Clips of things were popular and there were things split between many videos, but that's not what I remember the people around me using youtube for.

jahnu 2y ago
It was filled with music uploads.
- emursebrian 2y ago
  It still is.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    They have license and royalty agreements with labels now and takedown methods for rights holders who object to things as well as quite capable detection machinery.
    - janderland 2y ago
      I work in this space and there is still a ton of illegal content on YT. As stated earlier, the main difference is that YT complies when infringements are eventually found.
xnyan 2y ago
In my social groups at the time(late highschool, early college) it was exclusively used for watching TV shows. The 10min limit was only a minor annoyance, and more than made up for the fact that it was free fast video hosting at time when that was extremely rare. It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked down on TV content.
- znpy 2y ago
  As a former megavideo user… i watched many American tv shows I wouldn’t have watched otherwise. And i wouldn’t have paid anyway because at the time as a teenager i had no money of my own to spend. Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like extortion, it’s unfair anyway (prices constantly increasing, and you still get ads even if you’re paying… might as well go back to pirating stuff)
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    you're moving the goalposts from "I didn't have money" to "I have money but it's not worth it".
    - znpy 2y ago
      Yes, because i did not have money when i was a teenager and have money now that i’m in my 30ies.
- Izkata 2y ago
  Also 10 minutes is right about where the commercial breaks would be anyway.

Eumenes 2y ago

> What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts within the DoJ

more_corn 2y ago
One of the cool things that lawyers do is that they advise you on how you can comply with the law and avoid such pesky things as “imprisonment” and “extradition”.
skeeter2020 2y ago
Salty hot-take but not grounded in reality if you remember or look back on the facts. He actively encouraged piracy, of whioch there is ample proof, then doubled-down on this, then tried to frame his own take on "following the rules" - all while continuing to poke the bear. We can debate what the laws and punishements should be, but he's about to feel justice in many different forms.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
YouTube was acquired by Google within two years of it launching. It's life as an independent operation was just too short to get into that sort of trouble.

adrr 2y ago

I am sure if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well. Thats the evidence against Kim Dotcom, emails.

sigmoid10 2y ago
Funny you should say that, because there are literally such emails all the way up to Google's C-suite. They leaked a few years ago when Viacom sued them for mass copyright infringement on Youtube. In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted? >Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom show that many top Googlers — all the way up to co-founder Sergey Brin — were concerned about YouTube’s copyright piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google’s ethics. >[...] >Google executives — who previously had referred to YouTube as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” — nevertheless agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006. https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-called-youtube-a-pirate-site-2/amp/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-cal...
- mjhay 2y ago
  Thank goodness that Google execs are too high-profile to be prosecuted!
  - ffhhj 2y ago
    And that's why they'll keep feeding the surveillance machine.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  > In that case Google even tried to argue that it was ok because it's the content creator's and not the service's fault. When are they getting prosecuted? I mean it's actually a pretty good argument. If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be expected to police it? > [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission." --- Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10 times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other links would still let you download that file. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

diggan 2y ago

Spotify too (allegedly) had bunch of pirated content to bootstrap the service. I guess the difference is that they (and YouTube) tried to pivot away from it, compared to Megaupload which seemed to have leaned into it instead.

RyanAdamas 2y ago
Sure you're not thinking of Grooveshark which was the original Spotify?
- diggan 2y ago
  Nope, I'm sure I'm thinking of Spotify. Grooveshark, AFAIK, didn't try to pivot and instead later got shutdown, compared to Spotify which seemed to have been able to navigate the pivot. Edit: found at least one source now when I went looking: https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-become-a-success-180319/ https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b... > When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay. > Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.
bergkvist 2y ago
Yeah, I remember in the early days, when I installed Spotify it would scan my computer for music and upload everything it found. I imagine this is basically how they bootstrapped
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  I heard stories of how Spotify used to have obscure death metal records the staff would rip, but which were gone by the time the service gained traction.

micromacrofoot 2y ago

Probably mostly Dotcom's attitude tbh

more_corn 2y ago

DMCA safe harbor says you don’t have to actively police your content but you have to take it down if a copyright holder complains. YouTube had robust tooling to take down content when they received a complaint. They got sued anyway, they won because the evidence showed they always took the content down (and that Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place)

xp84 2y ago
> Viacom the party who sued was active in putting the content up there in the first place Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.
- robocat 2y ago
  Referenced here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259611
ClassyJacket 2y ago
Does the DMCA apply in New Zealand?

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago

Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put everything up in chunks and at the time there weren't many super user friendly options to download them as a batch. You'd often enough have things where one part would eventually be missing and that'd ruin the whole thing. For tv shows it could be okay but for films once you're dealing with 10+ parts, often without knowledge of playlists, it'd get grating fast. Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo

mrgoldenbrown 2y ago

One big (alleged) difference that many folks skip over when mentioning YouTube is that Kim actively and not very secretly recruited pirates to upload known pirated stuff. YouTube may have done a crap job at preventing privacy but they weren't actively soliciting pirates and paying them.

kstenerud 2y ago

Kim was a maverick, and his political connections were weak and easy to break. If you don't have the connections, you shouldn't be playing such a dangerous game.

blandpiper 2y ago
he was swedish and thats enough sometimes. the government thinks ahead instead of acting like mobsters after the fact
- slater 2y ago
  Finnish?
  - LtdJorge 2y ago
    German
    - shmeeed 2y ago
      Both

doctorpangloss 2y ago

It did. YouTube has paid the piper here and continues to do so. It pays a lot of money to record labels right now. TV networks choose to run their own streaming, and YouTube enforces what networks ask for. Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate. Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.

brian-armstrong 2y ago
Isn't Apple losing money on their streaming service though?
- 8338550bff96 2y ago
  isn't costco losing money on hotdogs?
miffy900 2y ago
> It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so. Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.
- BobAliceInATree 2y ago
  I don't think anyone, even the diehardest fans of Apple, thinks that Apple's RAM upgrade prices are reasonable. But we pay it for the same reason that people pay Porsche an extra $10k for a trim package — because you accept the high-margin upgrade as the cost of the item itself.

quitit 2y ago

It was definitely used that way, early YouTube had a download button

DaoVeles 2y ago

My original youtube channel was basically just funneling split up episodes of Daily show & Colbert Report directly onto it. Would get about 100,000 views a day until they started cutting down.

rldjbpin 2y ago

apparently so did crunchyroll (https://restofworld.org/2024/crunchyroll-india-subscription-price/ https://restofworld.org/2024/crunchyroll-india-subscription-...). difference being they went the legal route what seems like even earlier in the lifecycle than youtube.