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Comment by Sumaso | Hacker News Reader

"It’s like mail, it’s private, we cannot just go in there and police what these users are uploading."

This has been mentioned before, but I'll say it again.

If I upload Batman to my personal storage locker, and never share it with anyone else, and then a pirate uploads Batman and shares it with everyone, why should I lose my digital copy of Batman due to the actions of someone else?

Maybe I don't have a thorough understanding of now Hashes work, but if we both rip the same movie with the same software, won't that file have the same hash?

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It depends on the hashing method, above all.

A cheap-and-nasty MD5 (for example) of the exact same film stored in different file formats will yield different hashes.

A more sophisticated hashing methodology (for example something akin to the audio-fingerprinting tech used by Shazam) might yield a match.

Might doesn't sound like I have the right to remove someone's potentially pirated movie.

Could have MegaUpload have done more to prevent pirated movies from being uploaded on their servers? Maybe, maybe not.

Should they still be protected by the DCMA? IMHO, I think so.

I agree - "might" does not cut it for me either, but these are political games being played, not technical.

Could MU have prevented "piracy" by blocking uploads of copyrighted material? Again, I'm inclined to agree with you and say "DMCA", there are too many privacy issues involved for sites to go jack-booting their way through everyones files (which again, Kim D-C mentioned in the video), especially when he's holding out an olive branch to the content companies by allowing them to delete millions of "illegal" files without any due-process.

Most people wouldn't ever upload anything illegal directly anyway. They compress it, split it up and then put a password on the whole thing. Theres no way to tell whats in the files then. MegaUpload was already going way beyond DMCA by letting them delete everything per their wishes.

Because it's not going to be the same file as Batman.Haxxors.Xvid

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