Quote Originally Posted by DirtyB View Post
Quote Originally Posted by BeerAndPoker View Post
They host a file sharing site because they can make money and it's not illegal to do so.

I'm not saying you can avoid copyright material from being hosted on your servers but he personally wasn't uploading the stuff. With any file hosting site it's their responsibility to remove the material when reported. The problem is as soon as they delete a link someone else in the scene/warez industry just reuploads it. I know I've went to links to get a tv show and saw the file was taken down due to violating copyrights and TOS.
Read the emails in the indictment. They're pretty damning. The entire management team sends around links for Sopranos episodes and albums.

They had a power user affiliate program where you could earn money if files you uploaded got a lot of downloads. It was clear that the only way to earn real money was to upload popular movies, TV shows, and albums. In the emails they discuss giving out extra bounties for screener copies of specific top movies.

The basis of the indictment is a bunch of emails where the management team congratulates themselves on finding a "loophole" in the DMCA. The law says that when a copyright holder notifies the host of a violating file, the host has to delete the file, or make it unavailable to users. In order to save disk space, if multiple users uploaded the exact same file, they would only store it once, but give the users different links to it. Copyright holders would report infringing content by proving the URLs they found on forums or wherever. Megaupload would then disable the one link specified in the takedown request. They thought this complied with "making the file unavailable", when it clearly didn't. They had been informed that the file was illegal content, but still knowingly had other working URLs that provided access to the file.
Well if they management is doing that then clearly that is a problem. I'm not sure but I remember having a few different megaupload links for a file and when one went down the others did too. The software checked files by the actual byte size and time stamp of their creation so if someone renamed files on their server unless they used something different to compress the file to alter the size if the file was named 5 different times it would only store the first file yet when someone went to download it their service was sophisticated enough to name the file whatever the second guy uploaded it and the third,etc...

My biggest issue is the DOJ stepping in because the service got too big only to take out a few heavy hitters and put scare into smaller hosting sites yet many new services to host files have come out since. If they were smart the DOJ could find way better ways to combat internet piracy instead of cherry picking on the big sites.

Now I guess while it's a different case once the DOJ took out the big three poker sites they never came after Merge, Everleaf, Bovada,etc... While I'm a bit happy about that it still just proves how inconsistent they are and that isn't fair to others who were indicted. Of course it's all about the dollar amount to them but all these sites including the small ones were moving around money in what could be considered illegal or violating UIEGA prior to Black Friday.