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Your own post undermines your point.

"...easily on MegaUpload because that's basically what everyone was using it for"

You can never blame the creators of a tool for what their users do. Not to rehash an old argument, but you don't blame suitcase manufacturers for making suitcases that criminals use for convenient cash lockboxes. You can't blame a knife maker because a housewife stabbed her husband.

Unless you can empirically prove that MegaUpload courted people to break copyright I don't see what case you have. All of your "claims" seem to be anecdotal bluster, couched in a defensive posture to automatically discredit anyone who disagrees.

I find it so hard to comprehend that people refuse to believe that MegaUpload was never used for legitimate reasons. It's widely known that MegaUpload was well used in the corporate world[1], however it's unfortunate that no specific companies (to my knowledge) have come forward publicly. As a personal aside, I used it many times to send files that were too large for email to classmates and friends.

Beyond all of that, you are overlooking the problem. Attacking filesharing websites is simply slapping a band-aid over a symptom. The websites will continue to pop up, there is a demand and someone is going to supply it. Plus, it's incredibly easy to set up your own file-sharing website... I expect it won't be too soon before we start seeing people rolling their own just like blogs today (though admittedly not nearly as widespread).

We need to be addressing the real issue. Admittedly, I don't have a solution to "piracy" on a grand scale, however I can certainly say actions like targeting MegaUpload and then vilifying a business that has yet to even land a single customer over it's first press release definitely do not help the issue.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/01/before-shutdown-mega...

Edit: phrasing

As for blaming the tool for what the users do: I believe this has been tested in court with the Sony vs. Universal City Studios case (The Betamax case).

Since the recorder wasn't explicitly made for breaking the law, the makes of the recorder can't be held accountable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Univer....

Also, every gun and tobacco manufacturer.

You couldn't search for content on the old Megaupload. Third-party crawlers always took care of that.

In one of the articles discussing his arrest it was mentioned that they had an internal tool that could search for content, maybe that is what you're thinking about.

> This infuriates me. Sharing copyrighted files isn't what pisses me off. What does is the arrogance of Dotcom to try to pass this thing off like its for legit sharing of files.

You're attributing to arrogance that which can be adequately explained as a desire for plausible deniability. If Mega acts like a legitimate file depository site, and they don't do noticeably more to help with copyright infringement than things like Google Drive, and they say that they're legit, then this decreases their chances of getting in more legal trouble.

Box.net, Amazon, iCloud and other 'cloud drive' style sharing services can actually be quite a large pain to share large amount of files with random people, even when your paying. For example, I ran into this pain trying to share 4GB of photos I took, mediafire split archives ended up being the least painless way to go about it. These digital locker services tend to be the cheapest way to host/share large amounts of files too when your paying as a normal person.

> [...] everyone here knows what was going on at MegaUpload and anyone trying to deny is either twisting their minds into a preztel with the mental gymnastics they'd have to do to convince them otherwise or they're just outright lying. I said it.

I wasn't really aware of megaupload until the bust happened. Maybe I don't spend enough time looking for pirated copies of Lady Gaga albums.

So that's a third option for you.

I guess you never consumed user-generated content then. Plenty of CC music is shared through file lockers. Plenty of freeware games are done through file lockers.

Here's a discussion on rpgmaker developers site about megaupload going down: http://www.rpgmakervx.net/index.php?s=e2dfd62fff9638c7224860...

And there's hundreds of sites like that, people creating content on different platforms that need a way to share it. How do you think they share their creations?

>Because of the way the new Mega is set up you can't search for content.

Could you search on the old MegaUpload? For MegaVideo at least, I seem to remember that third party sites were all but required to find what you want.

> everyone here knows what was going on at MegaUpload and anyone trying to deny is either twisting their minds into a preztel with the mental gymnastics they'd have to do to convince them otherwise or they're just outright lying. I said it.

The question remains however, how big a part of "what was going on at MegaUpload" involved copyright infringing data. The article implies that the old MegaUpload was indeed using data deduplication. The Feds confiscated 25 petabytes of data. It just doesn't add up if you consider all Blu-Ray releases in the movie industry to date (which at 10GB a piece would make up the vast majority of infringing data). The only conclusion (that makes any sense to me) is that the vast majority of those confiscated 25 petabytes (about 95% if I remember my previous back-of-the-envelope calculations correctly) must have been legit user-generated or individually produced data, such as the 4GB photos that are mentioned elsewhere in this thread, or who knows what it could be, raw video data, the only reliable way to share huge amounts of sensor readings from whatever instruments for scientific research maybe. I have no idea, but given they used deduplication, Hollywood just didn't produce that many films. 25 petabytes are huge.

Don't get me wrong, it still means they were infringing on an enormous scale, just that it wasn't quite entirely fair to just take and hold the whole 25 petabytes, they don't do that when Google infringes either.

Doesn't this one seemingly trivial change (encryption) add enough annoyance for the average pirate that they'll likely use one of the bevy of competing filehosting sites?

Reasons I can think of using "Mega" instead of another service include (1) DL speed, (2) brand recognition, (3) less intrusive ads and less annoying capchas due to their superior financial position and scale stemming from their name recognition.

I wonder if the reasons above (or others) will be strong enough to transition Megaupload users to "Mega"

It sounds like their client is going to automatically perform the decryption. I would guess you'll be able to just pass in the key in the URL, so indexing sites will make Mega just as easy to use as BitTorrent is with magnet URLs. Remember that Mega only makes money if people use it.

Oh I see, that would resolve my concerns then! Thank you for the insight :)

A crypto key in the URL would ruin the deniability - their web server logs would contain the decryption keys. The whole point is to run AES in Javascript in the browser so the key never reaches them.

Linking the key as the fragment identifier component (after a #) would prevent the server from seeing it, but still allow Javascript to have access to the key.

That way you can link encrypted content with a key, and have the server not know about it.

This scheme has been deployed for at least one secure pastebin.

Interesting. I didn't know the browser keeps that part to itself.

This schema is actually more useful for secretive document "dead drops" (such as handing a tranche of files to Wikileaks) or for friend-to-friend swaps than it is for making warez available to the web at large. As soon as the files are publicly indexed, the excuse "we don't know what we're hosting" becomes a lie - they would have to delete it. The law's attitude would be "if we can find Lady Gaga on your servers with a Google search, so can you".

But then the copyright holder would have to proove that this thing named "Lady Gaga - all albums" is actually infringing material and not a bunch of, say, zipped lolcats. So they'd have to check it and file a complaint on per-file basis, at which point Mega just deletes that file. Isn't it just like YouTube, but without the ability to run copyrighted-material-detection algorithms on data?

BTW. in Poland there's a well-known sharing service that operates this way; promptly deleting infringing content, while everybody knows that the files will reappear shortly somewhere else, and it's all Google-indexed (I don't think that it's by coincidence), so with simple "site:" query you can even skip the paid search feature.

If your access to files consists of a public index (or something like a torrent tracker), they can just crawl the index, fetch all the keys, fetch all the files and check them. It would be a bandwidth hog compared to running recognition patterns on localhost, but it's not hard.

And more to the point, they could put the onus on Mega to go do that. It would be easy to argue in court "if we can find the key, so can they, if we can check the file, so can they" and cast their actions as wilful negligence.

It's not so much whack-a-mole, as "keep it quiet", then. Mega pretty much has to kill what they can find the keys to, but if you keep the key a secret and share it sparingly, that is no longer possible.

The feds didn't go after MegaUpload because it allowed people to share files that may or may not be copyrighted

It's very presumptuous to assume you know the reason why the Feds raided MU.

If the Feds had a case they should have presented it. Not all this "we have evidence, but we won't show it to anyone" crap.

With the fact that they had been spying on MU for over 5 years, you would think they could have built a solid case, and the fact that they couldn't makes one think the raid was rushed.

Perhaps this had more to do with the Universal lawsuit, the pending release of MegaBox, and pressure from lobbyists than actual wrongdoing.

Of course this is all conjecture, as is your assumption.