Megaupload to Universal: You’ve Got Some Explaining To Do | Hacker News Reader

Megaupload to Universal: You’ve Got Some Explaining To Do

torrentfreak.com

118 pointsGarbage21 comments

Perhaps its just me, but when I read about the UMG/Megaupload thing I can't help but thing that UMG did this an intentional stab against a rival/competitor and alleged piracy service, hoping that no one would notice, but someone did notice.

Now instead of owning up to anything (let's face it, the music industry has never been one based on honesty), they are going to dig in their heels and try to deny everything, eventually pegging the blame as a 'clerical error' on some intern or lower management?

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I haven't seen anyone on the side of UMG make any salient points that would show otherwise.

Isn't "clerical error" essentially the same excuse that Kenneth Lay & friends made about the frauds perpetrated by Enron? In that case, they alleged that intentional bad acts were carried out by employees and that the executives had no knowledge of their activities. This prompted new law stipulating that company executives could no longer claim ignorance of illegal activities by employees as a defense.

Is "clerical error" the new refuge of this same mentality? "We can't claim they broke the law without our knowledge, but we can claim they made a mistake." Can we, and should we, make this similarly illegal? Or should we stike closer to the core issue, where executives may be lying about their knowledge of fraud/mistakes to deliberately take advantage of any benefits that may arise from them? Is this even practically enforceable?

Anybody can claim anything, that's the whole point of an adversarial judicial system. ideally the other side will poke holes in the defense's argument.

One, perhaps worthwhile, change would be to tie penalties to income. it's impossible for a corporation to do jail time. $100,000 would be a lot for most people, but for many corporations this is a tolerable sum. being held accountable for, say, up to 10% of revenue would get some attention.

In anti-trust cases the EU has fines tied to the earnings of a company. I believe they can go as high as 15% so for large corporations like Microsoft it can become quite the sum. I believe Microsoft were fined 1.5 billion euro before they gave in to the demands.

I worry in the US that fees like this would be accused as being 'job killers' by their friends in politics.

It's not impossible for corporations to face criminal charges, and I believe jail time shouldn't be ruled out.

Board Executives are going to think twice if a 6 month jail sentence is divvied up between them based on the percentage of shares they hold.

A corporation is not its board members. To put the board members in jail, you would have to try them. What you're proposing would be a major overhaul of the criminal justice system.

After yesterday's article about not making petty technical corrections of peoples' choices of words, I hesitate to say anything, but you should, at most, say "the major recording industry has never been one based on honesty". It is still probably an overstatement but at least it removes a whole slew of hard working people who you probably do not mean. We work with over 200 record labels, thousands of artists, dozens of venues, and partners across the industry, and nearly all of them are cool people of high integrity.

I read this and my heart sank:

Universal later added that it had a deal with YouTube to take down content even if it doesn’t infringe their rights.

Youtube already denied this.

Good to know. Thank you.

Link/citation/source? Very interested in this.

Here's the Ars Technica article on the matter: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/umg-we-have-...

YouTube's statement was added as an update at the end of the article.

> Update:YouTube provided Ars Technica with the following statement: "Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it."

So, certain companies have access to some sort of Youtube backend and they can shut videos and such without prior Youtube/Google permission (due to time limitation, I'd guess). Although Youtube/Google has the power to overwrite any changes made by these 'partners' (don't know which word to use).

Does that seem right?

That's pretty much my take on it. After all, YouTube said that it was the one to reinstate the video and I've not seen anyone claim otherwise.

Considering how Google has handled "customer support" in other areas of their business, the "override" option sounds like a cop-out.

What Youtube/Google should have done is require an arbitration system funded by "rights-holder", backed by monetary damages if they abused the system. Instead, we seem to have a system with no downside-risk for the media companies of over-reaching.

Youtube denied the ability for UMG to pull content that UMG does not own, but Youtube provided no evidence of why that ability doesn't exist. UMG cited portions of a particular contract, which makes me wonder if the contract has ambiguities in it or Youtube has been caught with its pants down.

YouTube also reinstated the video on its own.

While I'm sure that UMG is able to remove things they don't own, saying that they're allowed to is something else entirely and we should reserve judgement on that until such time as the contract, or at least rulings concerning it, are made public.

From what I understand, the peculiar deal with UMG is related to the VEVO channel on YouTube. The ability to 'pull' videos is really the ability to transfer them from the wilds into this marketing-friendly subdomain.

In essence, it allows content owners a third option when dealing with unauthorized posts. Instead of yanking them and breaking inbound links, or ignoring them and losing any value from the traffic, these arrangements allow them to keep the post intact, while transferring it to their control - no DMCA notices required.

The situation with Megaupload represented an abuse of this system. Because it's (apparently) possible to start the redirect process but not complete it (i.e. by having the Megaupload song appear on VEVO), UMG realized that they could 'disappear' the song from YouTube without having to file a formal DMCA notice asserting ownership.

Obviously, this is a hack, and not at all what YouTube imagined when setting up the transfer system in the first place. So I imagine lawyers are busy rehashing contracts right now.

It's very telling when UMG just thinks that it had carte blanche on removing anything it wants.

Which most likely means it's been banning stuff it doesn't like for years and just ran into someone with money to fight back against it.

everyone who was around in the amiga scene days knows that kimble is a very 'special' person, to put it politely.

i love him for going all the way regarding the 'mega song' issue though. and besides that, he is one of the few (?) people who came back rather strong after going down when the 'dot-com bubble' bursted.

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