Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Had his "startup" been in Sillicon Valley, he had been in jail a long time ago. I don't see how there would have been less emphasis on copyrighted material, as that is and has always been the focus of megaupload and mega.

What US competitors are safe? You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.

View on HN

> Had his "startup" been in Sillicon Valley, he had been in jail a long time ago.

I'm hoping the founders of Napster get early release from jail. They've done their time, surely.

"Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future licensing royalties of $10 million"

Have you ever seen Kim engage in talks for a settlement? Would it even make sense for the industry to settle at this point? You think Sean Parker would still be a free man if he would just continued running Napster as it was?

(The Dread Pirate Roberts was also running an innovative business where users could exchange government restricted goods through a P2P system with a centralized registry, look where that got him)

> You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.

Actually, this is very common. It works in exactly the same way as MegaUpload did - Señora Pirata uploads her ripped movies to Dropbox, and distributes the public link to strangers.

The difference is that Dropbox takes reasonable steps[0] to try to ferret out and block copyrighted material. Mega did not.

[0]http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-your...

Yeah, BUT, Mega did everything required under DMCA. When informed, he took down the offending data.

A closer example is to compare it to youtube

You've probably never tried to watch YouTube videos from Germany. The most random incidental music in the background of a cat video can cause an upload that plays fine in the US to display something like, "This video is not available in your country because it contains music that the rights holder has not cleared through GEMA". Youtube goes to great lengths to follow all of the DMCA (not just notice and takedown), as well as the laws of other countries. Evidence indicates that MU did the opposite in many cases.

A closer example is to compare it to youtube

Youtube, who spent millions developing a state-of-the-art image and sound recognition system (ContentID) so that copyrighted content could be detected and blocked by its holders?

I think the case relied more on the fact that people in Megaupload were uploading things, and Kim was encouraging people to upload copyrighted things.

DMCA Safe Harbor doesn't apply if you're complicit, IIRC.

Youtube's copyrighted content recognition systems do not work that well - but now that these systems are a legal requirement they stop Youtube competitors from getting off the ground.

IIRC, Mega took down the offending URLs, of which there could be thousands pointing at the same data.

That's perfectly valid. Copyrighted data isn't illegal to distribute per se, only distributing it without a valid license. The same file can be illegally distributed by one Mega user and legally by another - it depends on who they are and what license they might have.

Oh, you can.

There is a whole group of people sharing copyrighted movies via Google Drive, it happens all the time.

Some of the movies were accessed hundredthousands of times, and are still online after over a year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com