I don’t like this article much. It reads like someone’s been fed Gov’s toilet rolls PR sheet.
To play Devil’s Advocate:
The US government dropped a nuclear bomb on “cyberlocker” site Megaupload today…the site earned more than $175 million since its founding in 2005, most of it based on copyright infringement.
While I don’t doubt the claims it served to traffic in copyrighted materials between offenders, I highly doubt this was its stream of revenue.
People pay for accounts. That’s about it. What they use their accounts for does not affect whether or not there’s revenue or increases revenue directly.
As for the site’s employees, they were paid lavishly and they spent lavishly.
All the fluff that followed here seems to me an obvious attempt to colour them, against the backdrop of “Occupy” movements and general poverty as some sort of Wallstreet 1% bad guys.
It has registered a DMCA agent with the US government.
Funny how THAT guy wasn’t arrested for massive malpractice, failure to notify the authorities and slapped with extreme negligence to enact his duty to maintain compliance with DMCA standards.
So either all this time he reported “All’s good” or all this time he just cried and no one listened until…the SOPA/PIPA comes under massive flack fire?
Yeah, right…
the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other.
Where are these emails? Show me! I want to know.
Don’t tell me “we’ll reveal in court”, you obviously have no problem quoting tidbits of some emails that you WANT to show because they come off badly without proper context.
Gov press leakers…
The “Top 100” download list does not “actually portray the most popular downloads,” say prosecutors
My grandma has wheels to go 100mph and can rocket to the moon, say Foxstab.
Proof? What? Who needs. Hey, I can sue bloggers for saying bad things about gov officials. But who sues gov officials for saying bad things about anyone they wanna martyr and smear?
they claim that Megaupload purposely offers no site-wide search engine as a way of concealing what people are storing and sharing through the site.
And I claim that to avoid becoming the next PirateBay and to avoid having to bother with implementing sophisticated search engine censoring techniques and keeping the site true with its spirit as a filesharing service, not having a public search engine is a good idea!
When making payments through its “uploader rewards” program, employees sometimes looked through the material in those accounts first. “10+ Full popular DVD rips (split files), a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez),” said one of these notes. (The DMCA does not provide a “safe harbor” to sites who have actual knowledge of infringing material and do nothing about it.)
I find it quite suspicious these notes don’t go onto further detail as to what this uploader has gotten in return. Was he rewarded? Was he warned? Content deleted? Allowed on site? Was the account closed and user banned?
Funny nothing further is said except exact bits to make megaupload look bad.
n a 2008 chat, one employee noted that “we have a funny business… modern days [sic] pirates :),” to which the reply was, “we’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping servies [sic] to pirates :).”
And I contend that if Anonymous breached the FBI wikileaks will have a MOUNTAIN of SPECIFIC agents being highly vulgar about the public they’re defending and what not rather than an anecdotal questionable emails that aren’t being named to their sources or those concerned positions within the company.
Employees send each other e-mails saying things like, “can u pls get me some links to the series called ‘Seinfeld’ from MU [Megaupload]," since some employees did have access to a private internal search engine.
“Hey, Paul, I heard there Sienfield series is making the rounds on our service, can you please fetch me the links…
…so that I could treat it proper and close them as per our protocols?”
Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase,[skipping to the actual relevant bit, past the bad PR fluff purposely injected] im Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.
GASP! No way. Megaupload actually COMPLIED with Media Corps requests? HERESY!
One report showed that a specific linking site had “produce[d] 164,214 visits to Megaupload for a download of the copyrighted CD/DVD burning software package Nero Suite 10. The software package had the suggested retail price of $99.” The government’s conclusion: Megaupload knew what was happening and did little to stop it.
My conclusion: People downloaded Nero Suite. They also probably downloaded some sort of key generator somewhere, because to get the full $99 Suite you need to register with the developer with a key you buy from them. Or maybe they just went and bought the key from the company. I haven’t an idea.
I don’t have access to facts as much as the Government does.