Brad A. Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “A sound recording is either copyrighted or it’s not.”Hip-hop is more closely associated with grey-area music than most genres. At least the Beastie Boys won their sampling lawsuit, but that's a snippet vs. whole tracks and albums (and even discographies).
[...] when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.posted by fight or flight at 12:54 PM on January 19, 2012 [1 favorite]
@hyperizer: I hear what you are saying, but those obscure-o music blogs would be better off posting a short sample (much more defensible as fair use). It's much more enjoyable tracking down obscure vinyl at indie music shops that need the business.Well, yes. But that's a little like telling everybody to stop this all broadband-enabled internet nonsense and go back to 1997. Which seems a little Cnut-ish to me.
Is MegaUpload a Dropbox-alike or a Piratebay-alike? If it's the former I can see some fireworks ahead.It's definitely the former. It's just a website that you post files on. The piratebay is an index of stuff that's available on bittorent. Interesting, Piratebay doesn't directly violate copyright, since they're only pointing out where the files are. They don't even host the trackers anymore (IIRC). But I think there may be other laws they violate, or something.
[...] when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.Imagine if that rule applied to DropBox. That would mean if the MPAA demanded someone take down an MP3 file hosted on a single person's DropBox account, DropBox would have to remove every single copy from every single person's storage area. Remember DropBox saves money by comparing files to see if they match, so if two people have the same file, DropBox does know.
Dropbox might be the most legitimately useful utility I have for work-home productivity, short of an actual laptop. Let's not lump in Dropbox with these other services.The only difference is the marketing and the quality of the product. They do the same thing.
I don't share anything with Dropbox. It's just a folder on my work computer, and a folder on my home computer, and I can drag files there and they end up in both places.Yeah, but you could use megaupload or any of these other sites the same way. It would just be annoying.
Is anyone else chilled by the fact that the FBI is able to arrest people in new Zealand, and shut down server, farms in hong kong, as well as seize domain names, not all of which presumably reside with US registrars?The Obama administration has decided that it 'owns' the .com/net/org/etc top level domains. They were originally created by the U.S government, and ICANN manages them under a contract with the U.S department of commerce.
Pleh, all the cool kids use WebDAV servers these days.Why WebDAV and not just plain old SCP? If I have a file I want to put online now I'll dump it to a server using SCP or put it on Amazon S3 directly, using Amazon's proprietary apis (for which there are plenty of nice GUIs for)
Copyright infringement is normally a tort too; here we have the FBI acting as enforcers for the content companies because they claim the numbers are big enough.More like campaign contributions. Plus, the fact that yesterday Hollywood elite said they'd stop donating to Obama, maybe this will keep the cash flowing and signal to his donors that his administration still takes this stuff seriously. Remember, the claim numbers were just as high during the bush administration, but he never did anything about it, because Hollywood was a democratic constituency.
China and North Korea would seem to be reasonable places for these sites to set up soon. They are far enough out of reach and I can't see them bowing to any external law let alone those of the US.Megaupload was based in HK.
They should've probably not gone after the White House and DOJ since the White House has come out against SOPA/PIPA if I'm not mistaken.Uh, the DOJ are the ones doing the takedowns, even if they're not mandating filtering, they're still declaring that they control .com/net/org TLDs and taking down everyone one they don't agree with. Since most 'global' internet sites use .com they are effectively implementing part of SOPA already (which, by the way, is in the bill. The only reason that people are saying SOPA doesn't 'effect' 'domestic' sites (i.e. .com/net/org) is because they think they already have the power to censor those tlds, and are doing so.
"The Mega Conspiracy leases approximately 25 petabytes of data storage from Carpathia to store content associated with the Mega Site" From the IndictmentThe Mega Conspiracy? I suppose they can take solace in the fact that they got the most awesome criminal syndicate moniker ever.
The indictment goes after six individuals, who between them owned 14 Mercedes-Benz automobiles with license plates such as "POLICE," "MAFIA," "V," "STONED," "CEO," "HACKER," GOOD," "EVIL," and—perhaps presciently—"GUILTY." The group also had a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls-Royce, and a 1989 Lamborghini. They had not one but three Samsung 83" TVs, and two Sharp 108" TVs. Someone owned a "Predator statue." Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the "Mega Conspiracy."posted by Rhaomi at 3:38 PM on January 19, 2012 [6 favorites]
Others indicted include:Ouch. Sven's an old friend of mine from "back in the day". Wondered what became of him. Now I know.
*Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, chief marketing officer.
*Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, graphic designer.
*Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, head of business development.
*Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, chief technical officer co-founder and director.
*Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, software programmer.
*Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, programmer.
They're also run by verizon, a us company. While I may not like laws like coica that authorize seizure of such supposedly international top level domains, they do arguably fall under us jurisdiction. Megaclicks.co though is a columbian domain and has also been seized and has a US FBI warning on it now.Nothing prevents a country from handing over a domain if the US government asks for it. I would imagine it would be harder to get an .ru domain or a .cn or .ir site. .ru in particular is notoriously friendly to people who want to get out of US jurisdiction. It's ironic that Putin's Russia is actually a bastion of internet freedom.
One of the innovations that Mega had was that they didn't bother to upload a file if there was already an identical one on the servers. That saved time and was a benefit to consumers. There is nothing illegal about it unless you *don't* have the rights to it, which is determined on a case by case basis.That's exactly how dropbox works, by the way.
The Justice Department and FBI said Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested on Thursday in Auckland, New Zealand, by local authorities on the basis of arrest warrants requested by the United States.So my old friend sevenup (Sven), being in Germany, should be safe. They've had no extradition since WW2, for obvious reasons.
Bencko, Echternach and Nomm remain at large.
While the federal government does have a role in protecting intellectual property rights, it should do so in a way that does not weaken internet security, disrupt growth or restrict free speech rights. To date, SOPA and PIPA fail to meet that standard.posted by mullingitover at 6:36 PM on January 19, 2012 [1 favorite]
Heritage Action opposes SOPA and PIPA and if they come to a vote will include them as a key vote on our scorecard.
There might be internal emails amongst MegaVideo staff that indicate they appreciated how their site profited from copyright violations, but BoA, Citi, etc. all have internal emails appreciating how they rob pension funds, Universal Music has internal emails about how they cheat artists, etc. You must seize the servers before you get the evidence.I always wonder -- why do people always take notes on a criminal conspiracy. The Galleon group insider trading ring, those pot-smoking arms dealers from Florida. It just blows my mind that these people are just emailing each other all the time about what they're doing.
I mean, I'm sure both MS and Apple would love to replace DropBox with their services, but it's pretty ridiculous to pretend that MegaUpload was some sort of business model competitor to iCloud and SkyDrive that was targeted by technical competitors.Maybe from a marketing/revenue look but from a technical perspective there's really no difference. They both hosted de-duped files for people, and let you share them.
All four viable Republican candidates just said they oppose SOPA. That was unthinkable a week ago. It wouldn't have even come up in a debate.Why are the dems sticking with SOPA while republicans abandon it? Same reason James Inhofe was defending oil drillers from expanded liability during the BP oil spill. Hollywood donates mostly to the dems, the oil industry mostly to republicans.
@hyperizer: I hear what you are saying, but those obscure-o music blogs would be better off posting a short sample (much more defensible as fair use). It's much more enjoyable tracking down obscure vinyl at indie music shops that need the business.Well, yes. But that's a little like telling everybody to stop this all broadband-enabled internet nonsense and go back to 1997. Which seems a little Cnut-ish to me."
You can't combat piracy. Externalities are a cost of doing business. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding him/herself.posted by frmrpreztaft at 12:29 PM on January 20, 2012 [1 favorite]
There's exactly one way to maximize profit, and that is to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for at a price that they are willing to pay. The pirates were never your customers and never will be, and the sooner the companies accept that and focus on the real problems (massively overpricing everything when first released, delivering products that can't easily be moved between devices because of the restrictive/broken DRM, and the declining quality of entertainment products in general), they'll have better profits. That's not what SOPA/PIPA and similar legislation are about, however. They're about eliminating legitimate lower-cost competition.
What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films. Moderately high-end HD cams cost a couple of grand or three—well within the price range of most people if they are willing to save up for a bit. You can buy halogen lights at Home Depot for fifty bucks, then rebuild the reflectors yourself and build your own barn doors for just about nothing. And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent.
In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand. But instead of finding ways to take advantage of new technologies to cut their production and distribution costs, they are instead focusing on destroying new means of distribution to prevent competition. You see, YouTube is in a great position to deliver paid content from independent producers to consumers. The studios know this, and they know that if the Internet turns into anything approaching a free market, they're basically out of business. For this reason, they do everything within their power to kill such sites—not because they can be used to pirate Hollywood movies, but because they can be used to sell non-Hollywood movies without having to spend millions of dollars in infrastructure. That ability of the general public to do what the major studios do is the greatest threat to their power.
Game studios are similar. There's no reason why people who want to write games should go work for one of those sweatshops, working unholy hours for terrible pay. You can go off on your own and work with a handful of people and write a great game, sell it, and make a fair amount of money. If everyone did this, the sweatshop game studios of the world would collapse, and the Internet makes that not only possible, but downright easy. They know this, and it terrifies them. So they do what they can to create liability for any ISP that might dare to distribute software, thus discouraging the practice.
And so on. It's not about piracy. It's about control. They want to control the entire content production industry, and our Congresspeople are almost all too fucking stupid to realize that these laws only serve to turn the big studios into a state-protected oligopoly and thwart small businesses' attempts to compete. And this is why we don't have jobs in this country.
Toohey said Echternach had travelled to Germany from the Philippines, but cannot be extradited because German law does not permit extradition of its own citizens.So I'm vindicated on that. Wonder what it means for Sven?
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So how about that copyright reform, guys?
posted by Phire at 12:42 PM on January 19, 2012 [18 favorites]