First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
They should be scared. What they're doing is illegal in 168 countries. They're not complying with the letter or the spirit of laws like the DMCA that would limit their liability.
I don't think your quote really applies in this case. Megaupload is being prosecuted for plain old copyright infringement, under the Copyright Act of 1976, nothing new. If you want it to be legal for a site's owners to upload DVD rips and pay other users to share them, then that's the law you need to attack.
We can debate the merits of file sharing and, IMHO, there are real arguments on both sides, but I'll make the claim that there clearly ought to be a line drawn at people charging money/basing business models on the access to copyrighted files that they don't own the copyright to.
To argue against that, you have to go after the larger notions of copyright and IP laws as a whole, just as dangrossman said.
edit: I'm not sure why this is being voted down – but I'd ask for you to respond rather than just voting down comments you disagree with – discussion seems much more valuable than moderation.
Insane laws like SOPA and worse are the only possible answer if you want to enforce copyright. Nothing less than full blown constant network surveillance would work.
Supporting copyright as it's defined by law and not supporting laws like SOPA is an oxymoron.
I'm thinking it's at least partially an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" attitude. Megaupload was about to launch a music distribution service for indie musicians, MegaBox, that, due to Mega's popularity among non-technical users, would have been a significant threat to the major labels, iTunes, and Amazon MP3. They were also fighting Universal to defend their Mega Song. Copyright is out of control, the public domain is stagnant, so maybe some people think that anyone fighting the copyright establishment is worth supporting.
Another part may be that some people here survived their teenage years on downloaded music and developed their skills using pirated software, and would never have become programmers/designers/hackers without it. Maybe they feel like the excessive force shown to combat piracy is like an indirect way of the government and major copyright owners saying, "Your career is illegitimate." It's an attack on their identity.
Which is pathetic. They need a better identity, because they one they've got is hollow.
P.S. A number of your comments on this thread have been inflammatory. You've been here long enough to know there are better ways of getting your point across.
I just checked and I've sent 15 DMCA requests to Filesonic and had them all removed within 24 hours.
To be protected by the safe harbor laws in most nations you need to not have actual knowledge of infringement. If files in someone's account are being flagged on a regular basis, you have a hard time arguing you don't know what they're doing anymore. The indictment against Megaupload says that there's physical evidence of exactly this occurring -- the site owners know that much of their traffic is from users uploading pirated content, even looking into their file lists, yet they reward these users instead of blocking them.
> Under the knowledge standard, a service provider is eligible for the limitation on liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gaining such knowledge or awareness, responds expeditiously to take the material down or block access to it.
http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
And as the Megaupload indictment showed, these sites are not taking efforts to stay unaware of what their users are doing -- they're looking into their accounts, seeing that the top shared files are DVD rips and commercial software, then rewarding these users instead of removing the content. That's illegal.
1) Identify potentially infringing files of sufficient value to constitute criminal copyright infringement
2) Identify accounts that uploaded those files
3) Verify that the account holder is a US citizen (jurisdiction)
4) Track down where that user distributed the links in order to collect evidence proving:
a) The infringement was willful
b) The infringement was of commercial advantage or private financial gain
5) Obtain a court order for each account to subpoena the identity of the account associated with the ISP of the uploader's IP address
6) Track down the current copyright holder of each potentially infringing work, and verify that the person identified was not licensed to reproduce or distribute the work (i.e. don't sue the label marketing agent for uploading a demo copy of their artist's song)
Now, you can prepare and file one case.
2. dont see a problem with this one.
3. lets skip this one; a UK student is almost on its way for breaking US law and be deported to US, so juristiction doesnt matter anymore -- especially if you can narrow your search down to people who hold hundreds of files.
4. I think once you prove the file was downloaded from a different IP than your (owner) then its enough of an evidence. you uploaded from California, bunch of guys downloaded in Europe. Unless you can prove you went to Europe and lived in all the cities download took place from, you are cooked. a/b) your infringement does not have to be willfull AND you dont need to make money off of it to be charged with owning illegally obtained files.
5. dont see problem here either. the justice system has all the time and money to persecute.
6. with a 5 or 6 biggest hollywood studios it shouldnt be a problem, should it?
At this point it's clear that you haven't actually read the copyright law of your country. Merely having illegally obtained files is never criminal in the US. Not under USC Title 17 (our copyright act) or the amendments (NET Act of 1997) that weakened the requirements of the financial gain clause. Without these elements, "owning illegally obtained files" is a civil matter only. A federal prosecutor has nothing to charge you with.
Why waste peoples' time debating law when you don't know what the law is?
There are HUGE problems with copyright and IP law, and those also need to be fixed. The damage caused through the corrupting of those laws has been far worse than copyright infringement.
I mentioned in another thread that this is the most sensible way to handle this, because there's no way of knowing whether some of the links to identical/deduplicated files were legitimate. My previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489054
So while it would be sensible to only remove the one link that you were notified of, if there are others, then by not taking them all down the service provider does not gain the safe harbor protection of the DMCA and remains liable for copyright infringement. Right now, as a non-lawyer reading the DMCA, it looks to me like any storage service that dedupes files is required to remove the file (from everyone's account) when any link to that file is reported, even if the other accounts have permission to store that file.
I feel like this should probably be a grey area to be sorted out in court, if not a reasonable codification into law.
But as I understand it the wording of the DMCA can be interpreted to mean that you must remove all links to the file, regardless of whether or not some of those users had the legal right to distribute while others didn't.
It seems a little banal to compare all this to, you know, genocide.
... since when is this a crime? There are tons of "clones" of YouTube out there.
Probably almost every video on Youtube is owned by the video creator. When you upload a video to Youtube, you still own the video and you're granting Youtube a revocable license to use it (see section 6 of the Youtube EULA, https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms). In addition, Youtube enters commercial licensing agreements for much free and paid content.
Youtube videos aren't public domain just because they're on the Internet! No, you can't copy and host data you don't have the license to. And recall that these videos belong to little guys as well as big ones.
> Really?
There hasn't been a trial yet. I doubt you have any inside information on the activities of megaupload. In the US, justice demands a presumption innocence in criminal cases.
I was distrustful of Megaupload and its ilk long before the government made these arrests and filed charges, but I will wait until they've actually won their case in a court of law before I'm going to accept those charges as fact. I hope more people will do the same.
These guys have some serious legal firepower. I sincerely hope they are able to defeat the extradition request.
Yeah, not having access to free entertaiment == holocaust.
Get over yourself. People need to do some introspection and figure out how they became so pathetically dependent on being entertained.