Megaupload Staff Arrested for Copyright Infringement

[guardianangel42]

[citation][nom]freestalkers[/nom]The American propaganda has been teaching kids how communism is bad. I think I've just found a worse form of government: the US government.[/citation]

This is nothing compared to all existing forms of communism. We may be heading that direction, but we are nowhere near that level yet.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]pollom[/nom]what is next dropbox?[/citation]
or Senspace

 

[madooo12]

[citation][nom]bloodem[/nom]Too bad, it was the only reliable upload site in my opinion.[/citation]
mediafire was better

 

[guardianangel42]

Look, I hate SOPA and PIPA as much as the next guy. I've written (through and advocacy group) all my congressmen about it. I don't like it, I think it is a really, really bad idea.

But seriously people, how you could defend Megaupload is beyond me. I haven't been too exposed to their legitimate side of business but my sister has watched a LOT of anime online and the one thing almost every illegal anime hosting site has in common is megavideo. Not only that, but I've seen the videos link to porn sites before playing whatever it is it's supposed to play.

Megaupload and Megavideo may not necessarily have cost copyright holders 500 million dollars but they did consistently break the law by hosting and allowing others to distribute illegally obtained content.

Of course, from the article it should be obvious that copyright infringement is not the only charge brought against Megaupload/video. Racketeering and money laundering are much, much more serious crimes than copyright infringement and if these charges are true, they deserved to be taken down.

It's like many of you conveniently forgot that those other charges existed. Unlike patent trolls the FBI doesn't frivolously charge people with crimes they have no evidence they committed, at least to my knowledge.

 

[NuclearShadow]

Ortmann and another individual charged were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand,

This is bull**** what right do we have to charge and make people get arrest who aren't even in our own nation? Now he's no doubt going to be brought over here and charged. America's laws do not apply to the world. Also shame on New Zealand for showing they care so little about their own citizens.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]poxenium[/nom]In theory I have to agree with these actions. In practice however after SOPA is approved and most internet companies will be shut down for sharing 1 copyright infringing file, I doubt the end result will accomplish anything positive in the economy.[/citation]

this is total bs, megaupload isnt your parrent, they dont watch you 24/7, it was popular and it is also abused.

they comply with dmca take downs when issued, what right do they have to take it off the internet completely?

i hope they are counter sued, and counter sued hard.

[citation][nom]JOSHSKORN[/nom]I'm sure no one would care about MegaUpload or sites alike if movie ticket prices and concession stands weren't so damn ridiculously expensive. Now who is responsible for that one, eh?[/citation]

i used megaupload like a thumb drive for friends across the county, sending pictures and video was easier to password it and upload it there than a 20 part google email.

that said, i hate theaters, give me on demand same day as theater for 20-30$ and i would get that over theater. but i don't pirate movies because it it (the c&ds i got in the kazaa era when i was 9 made me rethink that)

[citation][nom]soccerdocks[/nom]This is not the way to approach things. What the government should be doing is arresting the people who submitted the uploads. Not those who merely hosted them.[/citation]

no, the government should tell the mpaa and riaa to eff off, and worry about real crime, with real people being hurt.

mpaa, riaa, and any videogame company lie through their teeth about piracy when there are a few common facts we should all know.

mpaa - boxoffice is everything, dvd release is candy topping,
riaa - radio/cd sales were the big tickets, now its single songs on itunes that are, and the people who download them wouldnt buy them
videogame - same thing, the vast majority would never buy it if it wasnt free,

because of supposed losses, (all numbers are complete bs they throw out, one movie bombed boxoffice, and said that if people didnt download it, they would have made a few 100 million if not 1 billion more) they up prices, slap on drm, and add crap that just annoys the legit user and devalues what they buy.

you cant resell a digital version if you dont like it, like you could with a physical copy.

piracy is just used as an easy finger to point to for stricter laws, most of which i don't think will ever be used as any more than a scare tactic to get insane amounts of money out of normal people out of fear, the riaa currently does this by offering a smaller settlement than the big what the law says payout.

*not endorsing piracy, stating a few facts*
i honestly dont even think piracy is a problem. look at photoshop and tell me if that wasn't pirated and used for free a long time ago, that it would be where it is today.
look at all the people who buy product because they pirated it first and would have never gotten it without that, you can not discount these people as a few

[citation][nom]mortsmi7[/nom]I wonder how they calculate the losses. Just because something was pirated doesn't mean it would have been paid for otherwise.[/citation]

1 person they catch pirating it, they times that by cost, than by 100-10000 because of how many people they could have shared it with. its not a 1 to 1 scale you are dealing with, its closer to 1 out of every 100-1000 they lose a sale, but its old people who generally don't get it.

[citation][nom]v3nom777[/nom]It all goes back to the Consumer, Dealer, and Supplier theory. It's easier for them to take out the dealer, and it's more cost effective, rather than spending vast amounts of time building individual cases against the masses.[/citation]

lol, riaa goes after consumer for 20k+ each, probably made them more money than they lost too.

[citation][nom]guardianangel42[/nom]Look, I hate SOPA and PIPA as much as the next guy. I've written (through and advocacy group) all my congressmen about it. I don't like it, I think it is a really, really bad idea.But seriously people, how you could defend Megaupload is beyond me. I haven't been too exposed to their legitimate side of business but my sister has watched a LOT of anime online and the one thing almost every illegal anime hosting site has in common is megavideo. Not only that, but I've seen the videos link to porn sites before playing whatever it is it's supposed to play.Megaupload and Megavideo may not necessarily have cost copyright holders 500 million dollars but they did consistently break the law by hosting and allowing others to distribute illegally obtained content.Of course, from the article it should be obvious that copyright infringement is not the only charge brought against Megaupload/video. Racketeering and money laundering are much, much more serious crimes than copyright infringement and if these charges are true, they deserved to be taken down.It's like many of you conveniently forgot that those other charges existed. Unlike patent trolls the FBI doesn't frivolously charge people with crimes they have no evidence they committed, at least to my knowledge.[/citation]

when its a copyight thing, they are in the corporate pocket and intreasts
when its out of country and widely distributed, its conspryacy
when people can claim they know nothing, its racketeering.

all these charges can be overblown bs because they cant trace everything in the company easily.

and as for anime, its an international issue, most anime barely makes enough to break even in japan, to the point that they sell it for insane prices (100$+ for 2 episodes isnt uncommon) and selling 8000 is a break even and 12000 is a second season for the anime (per disc)

going after every place to take it down is hard, and re uploading is fairly easy. they don't have the backdoor like corpert in america has, so they have to file take down 1 by 1. there is also the fact that anime is sold in japan to japanese, and they don't even consider over seas sales for anything at all realistically, and there is also the fact that anime only came to america because of the eairly can only pirate and anime circles who subbed tapes and mailed them in the eairly days. anime in general is very liberal with copyright even in japan, look at comiket as an example of blatant profiting off copyright material, or it can also be attributed to the fact that anime is fighting for its place in japan for the last few years where new laws are constantly threatening to kill off anime and manga in general.

 

[rottingsheep]

move your services to Iran. the US government can't touch you there.

 

[xtreme5]

ahhhhh! really bad really bad! it's mean megaupload site no more longer.

 

[freggo]

I will get a load of thumbs down for this but hey...

Yes, I am strongly opposed to SOPA/PIPA but on the other end of the extreme you have megaupload/videoupload.
Clearing $175 Mio, that's not kids sharing some tunes, that is organized crime cashing in big time.
Screw Hollywood, the RIAA etc; but if you can not see that sites like megaupload are simply criminal even without SOPA in force than go ahead and give me your sorry thumbs down now

 

[Guest]

Give me pucking brake! Is ok when people are dying due to lack of healthcare! Is ok when "Corporate American Socialism" not paying taxes.
welcome to Corporate Socialim!

 

[dillyflump]

So the movie & music industries lost $500m. So if we work on the RIAA & MPAA guidelines on previous court cases & losses, megauploads stolen 1 movie & maybe 3 mp3 files.

 

[kikireeki]

I think this is just the beginning. The other file hosting sites will face the same fate.

 

[nottheking]

I think it's pretty accurate to characterize this as "FBI pretends SOPA already passed."

Worse yet, I see just in the comments here alone why oppression is allowed to exist: because people are foolish, and believe fabrications easily. This is a VERY far-fetched case the DA has on his hands.
[citation][nom]IzzyCraft[/nom]you're an idiot,[/citation]
You're hardly civil.

[citation][nom]IzzyCraft[/nom]You act like SOPA and PIPA would make piracy illegal, it's always been illegal the problem of a DA is proving wrong doing in compliance usually with DCMA,[/citation]
Coincidentally, there's no presented proof of DMCA Title II (nice to know you can't spell) violation here. If you're familiar with the law at all, you'd know that it requires that copyright holders assume that content hosts are acting in good faith, and that if they do, the hosts are NOT liable for the illegal transfers.

The ENTIRE case here is going to require that it be PROVEN that MegaUpload did NOT act in good faith in responding to DMCA takedown notices. This gets a lot harder becaus the Justice Department & FBI admitted MegaUpload responded to said notices. So it's not as clear a case as a host that REFUSED to take down content on a notice: instead, it's being claimed that they didn't go far enough. So getting a conviction means that the court will have to both find that the actions were insufficient to satisfy the DMCA, AND that MegaUpload knew this.

I'd put odds of this point alone being proven in court at under 1%; the OCILLA (a.k.a. Act II of the DMCA, the part that deals with the "safe harbor" clause, etc.) isn't very harsh in terms of what qualifies as what the online service provider (OSP) knows, so MegaUpload has a LOT of plausible deniability here, whether or not they actually knew.

As for the racketeering case? That is just another "on top" for the laundering charge. And the laundering charge is perhaps even flimsier: for one, if the infringement charge falls through, it has absolutely zero base. Secondly, even if it does, I doubt it'd go through anyway: Ellison v. Robertson ruled in 2004 that simply hosting content for money does NOT qualify as a "direct financial benefit" from hosting infringing conent: MegaUpload would have to be SELLING it, or directly, openly advertising it to promote their business. In other words, the established legal precedent disagrees with the prosecution.

I'm pretty sure that the FBI was hoping that this'd be a well-timed act to "make an example" and make people afraid of "pirates" to get SOPA to pass. It has probably a better-than-50% chance of backfiring, making them, in fact, afraid of government censorship.

[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]go ahead and give me your sorry thumbs down now [/citation]
Done; you're a pretty gullible sheep for just taking their claim at face value. As I explaind above, unless the RIAA/MPAA decides to bribe the judge, (which is flagrantly illegal, even moreso than money laundering BTW) I don't see any real chance of the court finding ANY merit to this charge: it's basically just a fabrication on the FBI's part.

 

[julianbautista87]

I think pirates are thieves, I really do, but Megaupload itself isn't a piracy company. They sell the ability to share big files with a fast download rate, but that's it. They used to block protected content, and I really don't see how they are responsible for the illegal actions performed by their costumers or clients. It's like charging a knives manufacturing company for selling knives to thieves and killers. That's stupid. They should charge users who upload the protected content, not the company.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]julianbautista87[/nom]I think pirates are thieves, I really do, but Megaupload itself isn't a piracy company. They sell the ability to share big files with a fast download rate, but that's it. They used to block protected content, and I really don't see how they are responsible for the illegal actions performed by their costumers or clients. It's like charging a knives manufacturing company for selling knives to thieves and killers. That's stupid. They should charge users who upload the protected content, not the company.[/citation]

personally i dont think of pirates as thieves, because thieves get something physical, pirates dont. but to the law, pirates get harsher punishments than baby rapeing serial killers.

shoplift - 5000$ fine at most i believe with most likely comunity service,
pirate - get prosicuted under counterfiting laws get 5 years federal jail and up to 500000$ in a fine per act (i believe) so 1 cd could be charged for 8-15 times for a total of up to 5 years, and 7.5 million dollars.

see how life in prison or death penalty for baby rapeing serial killer would be better than a 5 year sentence and a 7.5 mill debt, or even if they charged a fraction, id rather be dead than even have a 100k debt.

 

[ctbaars]

pirates are thieves.

 

[Camikazi]

[citation][nom]mortsmi7[/nom]I wonder how they calculate the losses. Just because something was pirated doesn't mean it would have been paid for otherwise.[/citation]
That is how they calculate it, they find out how many times it was downloaded and multiply hat by the full price of the item. They do not take into account that most of those people wouldn't have bought it anyway, that would lower the number too much.

 

[southernshark]

GOOD!!!!

This is one time I support this kind of thing.

I hate Megaupload. They jack the feeds to most of the 3d world and try to force people to pay money for content which they do not have any right to distribute. This company needs to be broken down and its people need to be in prison.

 

[juanoxx]

hollywood needs more ideas, they need to play in a more intelligent way...sending cops to do his fights is just a way to probe his lack of innovation, play smart, do the same as megaupload but 100 times better and 100 times cheaper... most of us will prefer to see a blueray quality video than stupid sd res...play smart...play fair, but dont send the dogs to do your job.

 

[southernshark]

[citation][nom]nottheking[/nom]I Coincidentally, there's no presented proof of DMCA Title II (nice to know you can't spell) violation here. If you're familiar with the law at all, you'd know that it requires that copyright holders assume that content hosts are acting in good faith, and that if they do, the hosts are NOT liable for the illegal transfers..[/citation]


Well if you were familiar with Federal Criminal Court at all, and it sounds like you aren't (let's focus on the word CRIMINAL as opposed to CIVIL), you would know that very very few people survive a Federal Indictment in tact. The conviction rate in Federal Court is about 99 percent. The system is NOT designed to set people free. It is designed to convict people for the government.

Can they roll the dice and risk it? Sure.

Are they going to be convicted? There is about a 99 percent chance that the answer to that is yes.

The best thing they can do is to try and cut a deal at this point. If they don't then they are going to go to prison.