![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I could have almost gone with the 'don't buy anything' post everyone put up about SOPA and PIPA yesterday. Almost. Except the part that white-knighted MegaUpload. I don't think media companies should have the right to shut down other people's businesses due to illegal content on their sites. But if you want to understand why they are frustrated...read further.
Most file-sharing is done on a relatively small scale and I view it as a cost of making content available to the public. If I buy a book and loan it to a friend - the author and distributor don't get paid. But maybe my friend likes the author and buys more books by them, or tells another friend about it. IMHO - this type of sharing shouldn't be a legal issue.
What isn't OK, is stealing a book and making it available to millions of users without compensation to the artist or distributor. Or even worse, stealing the book and then charging others to read it. This is what the MegaUpload case is about.
Most file-sharing is done on a relatively small scale and I view it as a cost of making content available to the public. If I buy a book and loan it to a friend - the author and distributor don't get paid. But maybe my friend likes the author and buys more books by them, or tells another friend about it. IMHO - this type of sharing shouldn't be a legal issue.
What isn't OK, is stealing a book and making it available to millions of users without compensation to the artist or distributor. Or even worse, stealing the book and then charging others to read it. This is what the MegaUpload case is about.
If you read the indictment (I have, all 72 pages of it) the issue wasn't file sharing. It was MU themselves uploading copyrighted content. And paying others to do the same. They allegedly had an elaborate system in place to incentivize people to upload the 'best' content and then reward those people by the number of subsequent downloads that were made of the same item. Of course they never said "Go and find me a copy of the latest Harry Potter movie that just opened in theaters last week," but they knew exactly what was being uploaded and how much they were paying for it and how much they were making on it through subsequent downloads..
Even better, they are alleged to have used anything their free or paid users uploaded for private use. You upload a movie. Maybe you paid for it, and you just want a backup for yourself (a stretch but go with me on this). No harm no foul, right? Nope MU stored that movie in their library and resold it to others. That also means that any private stuff you stored there wasn't even remotely private.
If you tried to search MU directly you'd never find the content. The content catalog was accessed through other sites. The indictment doesn't explain how this happened, but basically they used other people's sites to get users to come to their site when they were looking for content.
Now even honest upload sites that aren't soliciting copyrighted material can find themselves with a lot of unauthorized stuff on their site. Youtube is a good example. They can't possibly police every upload onto their site. So the burden is on the media companies to identify content that is under their copyright and request that it be taken down. Current law states that if the hosting company complies, they can't be held liable. That seems reasonable to me.
But when MU was asked to take stuff down, they didn't. Once in a while they would take down a few things from a US based request to make it look like they were in compliance. There are emails in the indictment discussing whether to comply. My favorite - an email where they discuss ignoring a request because the company is Mexican and they are no threat. How many files did the Mexican company ask request removal for? 18,000.
Finally, when it looked like MU wasn't going to be able to get away with ignoring requests anymore, they supplied a tool to these companies so that they could use it to take down the illegal content themselves. Except it was a fake! It made it look like the content was removed but only a copy was. The content would reappear a few hours or days later and MU would say that it was a new download. But it wasn't. It was the original stored away in their library. (Bonus fact - they had limits on the number of files the magic tool could be used for - in the tens of thousands of files a day - this was not some mom and pop operation).
So how did MU make money? You could download stuff from them for free but it was excruciatingly slooooow, and there was a time limit. But for a small fee you could have unlimited downloads. And they got lots of advertising revenues from companies that thought they were dealing with a Youtube type company - coping as best it could with pirated stuff on their site.
Even better, they are alleged to have used anything their free or paid users uploaded for private use. You upload a movie. Maybe you paid for it, and you just want a backup for yourself (a stretch but go with me on this). No harm no foul, right? Nope MU stored that movie in their library and resold it to others. That also means that any private stuff you stored there wasn't even remotely private.
If you tried to search MU directly you'd never find the content. The content catalog was accessed through other sites. The indictment doesn't explain how this happened, but basically they used other people's sites to get users to come to their site when they were looking for content.
Now even honest upload sites that aren't soliciting copyrighted material can find themselves with a lot of unauthorized stuff on their site. Youtube is a good example. They can't possibly police every upload onto their site. So the burden is on the media companies to identify content that is under their copyright and request that it be taken down. Current law states that if the hosting company complies, they can't be held liable. That seems reasonable to me.
But when MU was asked to take stuff down, they didn't. Once in a while they would take down a few things from a US based request to make it look like they were in compliance. There are emails in the indictment discussing whether to comply. My favorite - an email where they discuss ignoring a request because the company is Mexican and they are no threat. How many files did the Mexican company ask request removal for? 18,000.
Finally, when it looked like MU wasn't going to be able to get away with ignoring requests anymore, they supplied a tool to these companies so that they could use it to take down the illegal content themselves. Except it was a fake! It made it look like the content was removed but only a copy was. The content would reappear a few hours or days later and MU would say that it was a new download. But it wasn't. It was the original stored away in their library. (Bonus fact - they had limits on the number of files the magic tool could be used for - in the tens of thousands of files a day - this was not some mom and pop operation).
So how did MU make money? You could download stuff from them for free but it was excruciatingly slooooow, and there was a time limit. But for a small fee you could have unlimited downloads. And they got lots of advertising revenues from companies that thought they were dealing with a Youtube type company - coping as best it could with pirated stuff on their site.
'Its just a little downloading' we all say (myself included). MU made in excess $110 million dollars US from this business model. The Justice Department spent four years, and had to get an indictment from a Grand Jury to shut them down. That's fine with me. MU wasn't some innocent file storage/sharing site. It was nothing more than an organized criminal enterprise designed to make money on other people's content. The charges include money laundering and racketeering separate from the copyright theft charges. So I can understand the frustration of media companies and artists about this type of enterprise.
But there's something I don't understand. Think of the money the media companies spend chasing their copyrighted works around the Internet. And the cost of four years of surveillance, and the lawyers putting together the indictment (paid for by taxpayers). if were a media honcho I'd be looking at that $110 million figure and be thinking about how to recapture some of that money. It doesn't take a genius to see if you make stuff cheap and readily available, people will buy.
So I'm all for increasing the awareness of media companies that they can probably end up making the same amount of $ with a lot less theft by changing their business model. I'm all for saying to media companies, you know if you charged me a 1$ to download (fill in your favorite TV show from a country you don't reside in) I wouldn't be tempted to download it illegally. We live in a world of instant communication and people don't want to wait six months to get content. Not when everyone is online talking about a show today. Capitalize on the buzz. Set up an itunes type store so I can legally get my Japanese soap opera fix or whatever.
Everyone would win. The media companies would save money not having to chase illegal downloads, people would get the content they'd like to see legally, and who knows, the media companies might, in the end, make more money than they are now. They'd have happy customers (except for those unwilling to pay anything for content - but those people are, frankly, asshats - because no one has a right to someone else's creation for free), they'd have less headaches and we could all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
What I can't approve of is making mega-thieving Megaupload into a martyr. Or Anonymous' DDoS attacks. Bottom line, content distributors are idiots, but they still own the content. So yes by all means, boycott or do something legal to get the message across, but defending MU is not the way to do it
.
.
The best thing to come out of the MU indictment is it shows that we don't need more legislation - the current laws work just fine. But they work slowly and expensively. If the media companies want to end this problem it's in their power to do so.
But let's not kid ourselves. Anyone who downloaded stuff off of MU knew it was illegal. That includes me and you and your cousin Sheila in Miami. So to act all outraged and cheer on Anonymous doesn't earn you any cookies. The only people who have any right to be angry are those who stored only their own content on MegaUpload. They are the innocent victims in the case. Not you, not me, not MU.
And Anonymous needs to pick better companies to white-knight. Attacking the women who charged Julian Assange with rape as a way of supporting Wikileaks and the DDoS attacks on the Department of Justice, media companies, the US Patent Office and others in defense of MegaUpload, doesn't make them look heroic. It makes them look like butt-hurt twelve year olds who haven't learned that everyone who is the enemy of your enemy isn't your friend. And that they don't have a right to what they want, when they want it, for free, even if they threaten to throw a temper tantrum every time they don't get their way.
But let's not kid ourselves. Anyone who downloaded stuff off of MU knew it was illegal. That includes me and you and your cousin Sheila in Miami. So to act all outraged and cheer on Anonymous doesn't earn you any cookies. The only people who have any right to be angry are those who stored only their own content on MegaUpload. They are the innocent victims in the case. Not you, not me, not MU.
And Anonymous needs to pick better companies to white-knight. Attacking the women who charged Julian Assange with rape as a way of supporting Wikileaks and the DDoS attacks on the Department of Justice, media companies, the US Patent Office and others in defense of MegaUpload, doesn't make them look heroic. It makes them look like butt-hurt twelve year olds who haven't learned that everyone who is the enemy of your enemy isn't your friend. And that they don't have a right to what they want, when they want it, for free, even if they threaten to throw a temper tantrum every time they don't get their way.
( Here's the indictment )
Where did I get it? From a file storage site. LOL!
tl,dr: SOPA, PIPA, media companies, MegaUpload, Anonymous, are all bad actors. You and me - we own a piece of this as well.
tl,dr: SOPA, PIPA, media companies, MegaUpload, Anonymous, are all bad actors. You and me - we own a piece of this as well.
