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Comment by rasur | Hacker News Reader

I think some of the points Kim makes are interesting:

- He complies with the DMCA. - He provides direct 'delete' access to his servers for the content companies. - The content companies that claim to be losing billions, with direct access to his servers so far have failed to file any legal complaint with his lawyers.

I'm sure as much as we want to dislike him for his previous flamboyant behaviour, he has some legitimate points and a legitimate company providing a legitimate service (and one that is similarly provided by other companies, some of which are household names).

Call me cynical, but this smells of being such a monumental set-up that it makes the farm full of cows just down the road from me seem like a breath of fresh air.

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> He complies with the DMCA.

He claims he complies with the DMCA.

We won't know until the trial happens, but from what I've read, there appears to be plenty of emails showing the employees explicitly discussing how they actually don't take down content.

He claims to be innocent. The US government claims he is not. There should be and will be a trial.

None of that is what bothers anyone. What people are up in arms about is:

a) Presumption of guilt. A company which may very well be defensible has been destroyed. If the court agrees with him over the feds he's suffered massive revenue loss at a minimum and there may be no coming back as competitors will scramble to replace him in which case he's lost an entirely legitimate livelihood.

b) Extradition on a global scale by federal authorities for what's basically a civil matter.

c) Jail time threatened for everyone involved in the company right down to the web designer when much bigger and, in the eyes of the public, "just as obvious" misdoings from wall street bankers was rewarded with slightly smaller but still massive bonuses.

- He complies with the DMCA. - He provides direct 'delete' access to his servers for the content companies.

The way I heard it Megaupload was basically designed to perfunctorily comply with the DMCA while actually not deleting content and keeping it accessible.

The way any sane company would. Imagine you host a file locker service, and there are ten copies of a given music video on your service, which due to deduping (also what any sane enterprise would do), all point to the same physical data.

You recieve a DMCA for one link, and do your duty and take it down. You do not take down the other 9 links, because you are in no position to know if the other 9 are infringing are not.

which due to deduping (also what any sane enterprise would do)

Well, now. It seems possible to me that, in the current legal environment, copies are infringing or not, rather than links. If that's the case, then deduping is either destroying legal copies or conducting infringement, depending on exactly what operations were performed. This seems sane as long as you believe bits have color, I suppose.

>It seems possible to me that, in the current legal environment, copies are infringing or not, rather than links.

In which case what order the files were uploaded in makes all the difference...

This is why I hate the legal system sometimes. The fact that we have to "legally" define things like this which should be obvious to the most thick-headed individual concievable.

Fucking *AA groups..

Why exactly wouldn't you know? Couldn't you see who shared them, how they were shared and pretty much know? Or at least know enough to send an email or something to find out. A private backup that is only accessed by one customer could sanely be considered a backup, a link that has been downloaded 10,000 times by lot's of users of the exact same content, what should that sanely be considered?

What is the proper legal solution to this problem? Just "fuck 'em" and the lawyers search and write letters for each and every copy?

> Why exactly wouldn't you know?

It's only infringing if it lacks permission. The URLs could be kept privately and while 9 of the 10 were put up by pirates, the last one might have been the copyright holder's own copy which they were doing something with privately.

And then you delete it on them. Oops.

Well back to my premise, could you not sort of figure that out by the access patterns? Subsequently the people that give the permission have contacted you about it, what else are we needing? Perhaps you could have the notion of "private" shares.

Would it be reasonable to identify your users? Perhaps require and SMS or something to gain membership and then when there is this deduplication case why couldn't you contact them to find out if it's valid or not?

>Well back to my premise, could you not sort of figure that out by the access patterns?

You "could", but you could be wrong and cheese off your users. Who's to say that an indie label isn't using your service for cheap file hosting? Just because $file is getting a lot of hits (and "lot" needs to be defined here) doesn't mean that those uses are necessarily infringing.

And then we're back to the links + deduping problem anyways. Let's say you've determined that 3 of the 9 non-DMCA'd links are coming from CoolHotWarez.ru (first remembering that the law doesn't require you to do this research, and second remembering that any warez site worth a crap uses an anonymizer to strip referrer URLs ANYWAYS...) - You take them down.

The 6 left don't have much traffic, so your metric kind of falls apart. And all this would result in would result in warez kiddies uploading two copies of each file, keeping one secret and sharing the other.

So... you'd ask the pirates if they were valid or not? The copyright holder is literally the only person who knows who does and does not have permission, so they're the only one who can reliably inform others. Though some of the big copyright holders have trouble keeping track of what they have and have not approved, as was show in the Viacom case.

Big websites operate at scale. Think millions of users and thousands of new ones each day. Things like this are not compatible with manual processes. And if you look at something like YouTube, I think they get more than a week's worth of video uploaded every day.

Half of the problem is that there isn't a reasonable way to enforce this.

>Just "fuck 'em" and the lawyers search and write letters for each and every copy?

I would say yes, in precisely that many words, but then again, I tire of the content industry's abuses and I have a huge bias against them.

When it comes to "something potentially legal being taken down" and "something potentially infringing being left up", I'm going to fall on the side of 'leave the content up' 100% of the time. The "Better 100 guilty men...." school of law enforcement.

This might be a convincing argument if the links were accessible only to the uploader. Not so much when each is publically accessible and actually is accessed by many thousands of users (each of whom is limited in how much he can accessed only by how much he pays).

You still don't know whether or not the other 9 instances are infringing.

Actually, he provided 'delete link to content' access to the content and so if 10 different links with 10 different names were used to access the same content, then the content companies would have to click 'delete' 10 times (once for each link) before the content would be deleted.

Which makes sense. An infringing use in one case may be legitimate in an another. For instance, you upload a song you created to share with a friend. Someone else uploads it again - due to deduping, both links point to the same file. In the first case, not infringing in the second infringing.

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