Hacker News Reader

Comment by gscott | Hacker News Reader

Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by hosting pirated tv episodes. But one was started by ex-Paypal founders and the other bootstrapped (MegaUpload).

Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but, in their case, now the law is something entirely different and unexpected.

View on HN

>>> Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by hosting pirated tv episodes.

+10x Twitch. I still remember JustinTV ..

>>>> Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated

Could you please elaborate ? The implication is that other similar sites were not removing child pornography or similar ?

Not 100% sure what your first line means so apologies if I'm telling you something you already know but just want to point out that Twitch is JustinTV. They just rebranded the gaming section of the original site.

No need to apologize. To clarify. I remember when JustinTV was basically 100% illegal (copyrighted) content.

That's how the service that we now know as Twitch built its resilient infra: battle tested with a bunch of teens broadcasting random stuff. No one batted an eye . So i was using JustinTV (Twitch) as an example of piracy that was overlooked, because because someone big had invested in it.

They (mega) may have started to do this, but for several years I used to come across saved text files with lists of of mega links on most pedophiles computers. A different unit in the police sometimes checked the links and anecdotally they still (months after seizure) were valid and contained Child Exploitation Material (CEM). Often the same material stored on the device that I was wading thru. (insert cannot unsee meme) I am not talking about fakes, I'm talking about photographic documentation of the worst abuse held by offenders either as memories or currency. So when Mega came under fire I didn't really care that if came from the "copyright" end. I understand that Mega faced a large task to address this. Not simple. But the fact that CEM was hard for them to sort from the large corpus of "pirated" material seemed like a feature, not a bug. A least from a site design perspective. Selfishly, my sympathy is low in this case. Motivated by my own secondary exposure to some horrible shit as a result of the legal process.

that's hardcore

Reply on news.ycombinator.com