Didn't YouTube get popular on pirated content first? What was the main difference of the initial phase of YouTube and MegaUpload? They both went legal later.
Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate.
Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.
Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.
Back in 2012 you could upgrade the RAM yourself. Now there's no real alternative.
I read this and din't quite understand the argument, but realized (if I understood) this is saying that if you are a content host, then you need a lot of resources to deal with copyright violations, so it's hard to compete against these hosts.
Safe harbor in the DMCA isn't perfect, but a world without safe harbor would be a world with a lot less freemium products, that's for sure.
How does that prevent sharing, you can just setup email forwarding with someone else you want to share the account.
not impossible. Having to forward login emails creates more friction than sharing a password once.
You can set up automated email forwarding, its a one time process just like sharing passwords.
>Revealing e-mails and other internal communications unsealed Thursday as part of a $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom show that many top Googlers — all the way up to co-founder Sergey Brin — were concerned about YouTube’s copyright piracy problems and how they could reflect badly on Google’s ethics.
>[...]
>Google executives — who previously had referred to YouTube as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” — nevertheless agreed to pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube in 2006.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/03/18/google-executives-cal...
I mean it's actually a pretty good argument.
If Viacom can't figure out which of the videos it's own employees/contractors uploaded to YouTube how can Google be expected to police it?
> [1] in some cases employees of the entertainment firms had uploaded their companies' content to YouTube voluntarily ... Google argued that since Viacom and its lawyers were "unable to recognize that dozens of the clips alleged as infringements in this case were uploaded to YouTube" with Viacom's express authorization, "it was unreasonable to expect Google's employees to know which videos were uploaded without permission."
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Afaik, the big difference between Mega and YouTube was that YT would remove the video. Mega instead had a system where it de-dup'd files so when a file was uploaded say ~10 times, all of those links were stored as a single file. So Mega would remove the link when requested but the 9 other links would still let you download that file.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
Only if copyright holders voluntarily upload their content in a complete crazy manor. Otherwise the argument doesn't work since uh the copyright holder can easily identify which uploads were infringing.
> The only interesting thing here is that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it.
Lawsuit is public record, feel free to link to those emails.
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Also from reading the lawsuit, Google removed the content in question.
To quote the case.
> [1] This case concerns the alleged infringement of a closed universe of videos posted on YouTube at various times between 2005 and 2008. As this Court explained, “only the current clips-in-suit are at issue in this litigation.” SPA54. All those clips were removed from YouTube years ago. SPA45 n.7. Viacom originally claimed that hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos infringed its copyrights, but ultimately identified approximately 63,000 clips-in-suit. JAXIII:3135(¶¶6-7). It turned out, however, that Viacom’s own employees and agents had actually uploaded many of those clips. JAIX:2213-14(¶¶150-152); JAXIII:3135-36(¶¶8-11); JAXXII:5745-46(¶¶1.63); JAXXIII:5973-75. Even when it realized that fact (after years of litigation), Viacom and its lawyers still were unable to identify all the clips-in-suit that Viacom was responsible for posting. JAXXII:5717-20(¶127), 5544-46(¶11). Many clips-in-suit, moreover, are identical to or indistinguishable from promotional clips that Viacom now acknowledges uploading.
The non-court filings are way more accusatory but should really stick the court filings for matters of fact.
> [2] It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.
> [2] Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
[1]: pg 15 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4135344/143/viacom-inte...
[2]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/
Did it occur to you why they did that? Perhaps to make them appear legit on a service that was well known for piracy in the first place? The big difference here is that megaupload was not as popular as youtube among normies. So they didn't bother to leak there. Or maybe they did, and we just don't know yet. Dotcom could still come up with the same defense in the coming trials and it would be hilarious. Especially since there is research that show that piracy can boost media. So if Viacom didn't do it, someone else certainly did. The double standard is very real.
No need to for speculation. Viacom can explain their own behavior which they never do and just admit it happened and they also later informed YouTube about it the next day.
> The double standard is very real.
Maybe go read the lawsuits. Reading poorly summarized (or not even summarized) content of it is really not going to show the differences.
No one is speculating here. Read the discussion again. The argument was literally "if youtube execs had emails showing that they were actively encouraging and participating in the posting of copyrighted material on the site they would have been prosecuted as well"
That is blatantly false. No need to sugarcoat this.
You're conflating emails from Google Videos with YouTube ... Those are separate products and at one point even competitors. That would be like using emails sent amongst Trump staffers to prosecute Joe Biden for treason.
Keep in mind, that quote is in relation to why Viacom "roughed up" their videos. Which you literally asked for speculation on in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41266386 .
Interesting...hadn't heard of this before
I don't think Kim ever paid content creators. Youtube is pushing probably $5 - $10 billion a year to them in cash plus serves as a promo / branding / ad vehicle (all the sponsored content or product placement stuff in music videos).
Source? I missed that story, and that sounds hilarious.
Edit: found at least one source now when I went looking: https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...
> When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay.
> Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.
It was not just a nerd thing either, I remember someone I was dating in the mid 2000s bemoaning that YouTube had cracked down on TV content.
Nowadays even when paying for content, it really feels like extortion, it’s unfair anyway (prices constantly increasing, and you still get ads even if you’re paying… might as well go back to pirating stuff)
Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo
Kim dotcom didn't go to Stanford and have layers of contacts within the DoJ