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I don't get this. I can use Mega in exactly the same way as Dropbox. Why does Mega exist to supposedly facilitate copyright infringement? The content lobby pap

by whyever 12y ago

I don't get this. I can use Mega in exactly the same way as Dropbox. Why does Mega exist to supposedly facilitate copyright infringement? The content lobby paper you are referencing claims that the differences between a legitimate service and an illegitimate "cyberlocker" are the following: * Bandwith for sharing is limited. * User accounts are terminated for copyright infringement. * Infringing material cannot be searched and found. * Users are not paid for sharing material. As far as I know most of those apply to Mega as well as to Dropbox. (Mega pays users that recruit new premium users, this can be seen as encouraging infringement, if you think that this gives incentive to host content in hope of users downloading the content and becoming premium users.) That it is about infringing copyright is what the content lobby would want us to believe. I don't see how the material you are referencing is less biased than Mega's blog post. You just replaced one biased opinion with another.

markdown 12y ago
> Mega pays users that recruit new premium users, this can be seen as encouraging infringement Dropbox pays you (in lifetime free storage) for referring new users.
pdabbadabba 12y ago
I don't think you read my post carefully. I was very careful to say that I don't think the report is very reliable, much less that it is adequate justification for cutting MEGA.nz off from CC payments. You also didn't read very far into the report; they allege finding much more direct evidence of infringement than what you say: >For direct download cyberlockers, 78.6 percent of files were found to infringe copyright. For streaming cyberlockers, 83.7 percent of files were found to infringe copyright. Again, I don't think these claims should be taken at face value. But the chain of events here is pretty clear: 1) report is published, 2) Senator['s staffer] reads report, gets agitated about copyright infringement (probably at the suggestion of industry groups), 3) Senator writes letter to Visa/Mastercard, accusing them of facilitating copyright infringement, 4) Visa/Mastercard freeze out MEGA.nz. Given all the pressure that we know the content lobby brings to bear on legislators, and how eager democratic legislators like Leahy have historically been to do this lobby's bidding, I find nothing farfetched about this chain of events whatsoever. And there is certainly no evidence that Visa and MasterCard cut off MEGA.nz because it uses end-to-end encryption. As others in this thread have pointed out, there are many "legitimate" services that use end-to-end encryption, that have not been targeted in this way. As for the difference between Dropbox and MEGA.nz, I suspect it's that, allegedly MEGA.nz's content is overwhelmingly infringing. Dropbox's probably is not.
- whyever 12y ago
  I'm well aware of what you wrote, and I'm well aware of the section you are citing. Their method of measuring copyright infringement is very sketchy. They can only measure public links, so they miss the majority of the data stored. I don't trust their algorithm either, given the ridiculous amount of false positives in automated DMCA requests. They don't give their results for non-"copylockers" like Dropbox. Mega claims in their blog post that 99.7% of the files they are hosting are smaller than 20 MB. That almost all of those are copyright infringing is not plausible.

by whyever 12y ago

markdown 12y ago

> Mega pays users that recruit new premium users, this can be seen as encouraging infringement Dropbox pays you (in lifetime free storage) for referring new users.

pdabbadabba 12y ago

I don't think you read my post carefully. I was very careful to say that I don't think the report is very reliable, much less that it is adequate justification for cutting MEGA.nz off from CC payments. You also didn't read very far into the report; they allege finding much more direct evidence of infringement than what you say: >For direct download cyberlockers, 78.6 percent of files were found to infringe copyright. For streaming cyberlockers, 83.7 percent of files were found to infringe copyright. Again, I don't think these claims should be taken at face value. But the chain of events here is pretty clear: 1) report is published, 2) Senator['s staffer] reads report, gets agitated about copyright infringement (probably at the suggestion of industry groups), 3) Senator writes letter to Visa/Mastercard, accusing them of facilitating copyright infringement, 4) Visa/Mastercard freeze out MEGA.nz. Given all the pressure that we know the content lobby brings to bear on legislators, and how eager democratic legislators like Leahy have historically been to do this lobby's bidding, I find nothing farfetched about this chain of events whatsoever. And there is certainly no evidence that Visa and MasterCard cut off MEGA.nz because it uses end-to-end encryption. As others in this thread have pointed out, there are many "legitimate" services that use end-to-end encryption, that have not been targeted in this way. As for the difference between Dropbox and MEGA.nz, I suspect it's that, allegedly MEGA.nz's content is overwhelmingly infringing. Dropbox's probably is not.

whyever 12y ago
I'm well aware of what you wrote, and I'm well aware of the section you are citing. Their method of measuring copyright infringement is very sketchy. They can only measure public links, so they miss the majority of the data stored. I don't trust their algorithm either, given the ridiculous amount of false positives in automated DMCA requests. They don't give their results for non-"copylockers" like Dropbox. Mega claims in their blog post that 99.7% of the files they are hosting are smaller than 20 MB. That almost all of those are copyright infringing is not plausible.