Originally Posted by
DirtyB
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.
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