> On or about February 13, 2007, ORTMANN sent an e-mail to VAN DER
KOLK entitled “my concerns about the thumbnails table.” In the e-mail,
ORTMANN asked VAN DER KOLK to create “a dummy lifetime
premium user,” stating that “[t]his is very important to prevent the loss of
source files due to expiration or abuse reports.”
The company was literally reposting copyrighted material under puppet accounts.
It's about MegaUpload, not Mega. True, they both offer(ed) cloud-storage and public sharing, but MegaUpload was much more on the shady side. They were stalling and ignoring requests for removing illegal content. Furthermore, they were even actively supporting uploads of popular content. I vaguely remember they were even paying some people. Over all, it was a platform strongly focused on distribution of illegal content. And this is just about commercial content. I wouldn't be surprised if it also was popular for porn and abuse-content.
IIRC you had to pay for "premium" on MegaUpload, but if you uploaded a file that got downloaded many times, you'd be granted X months of premium (or lifetime premium, can't remember)
Not completely different, actually, they're pretty much the same.
The only difference is the "we encrypt everything so we don't know what users upload" trick, which seems to have worked so far (and branding and stuff).
Megaupload took steps to specifically support piracy. When a movie studio would report a pirated copy of one of their movies, Megaupload would tell the studio they removed it but in reality they would only make it so the specific link the studio new about would stop working. They would not delete the underlying file and any other links would continue to work.
This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation. When child porn was reported they were able to kill the reported link and the underlying file, thus breaking all links to it.
Is that alleged or proven? Because the law does no require you to take down a file and the make sure that file is not uploaded by someone else. In fact all it requires is you to take it down if you're hosting it, so if someone else uploads a file they would have to notify you of that file as well for the simple fact that it may actually now be the rightsholder uploading it.
>This failure to remove the underlying file was not a technical limitation.
This, and the rest of your comment makes sense in 2024, but not around 2010.
Back then:
* All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem at the time. You were even able to find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
* Most of these companies (including the "good ones"™ like YouTube) thrived under this (unlawful) sharing of copyrighted content. Measures against it were being actively developed and tested and there was a big backslash from the platform's users as they were being introduced, i.e. it wasn't an armchair software engineer's "easy problem". When these platforms incorrectly labeled and removed content due to copyright infringement, it was a bit of a scandal, with many of these events reaching the news and people boycotting platforms and threatening lawsuits.
* Piracy was huge compared to today, torrents were almost the norm. Not trying to justify it, just trying to put in context what internet users used the internet for. If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it. The "market" was there, with or without Megaupload. I would even go as far as to suggest a wild point of view where Megaupload was actually a victim of piracy as well.
* A lot of legislation around this was not in place and/or mature enough. Some landmark cases around Section 230 were just starting to take shape. It was not black or white clear whether a platform should be responsible for its content or not and what are the legal requirements for them to address this liability.
* The overall sentiment of tech people (even in communities like this one) was that internet services should behave like utilities, in spirit; I still believe this to be the right approach. It follows from that that whatever misuse of them made by end users should hold them liable and not the utility provider.
> All file sharing platforms had this exact problem. This was the problem back then. You could even find full length movies on YouTube quite easily. They were eventually removed, but it was a long, manual and tedious process. Even today, this is still not completely solved.
At Megaupload they were not eventually removed. At Megaupload the same physical file could be accessed by different URLs. When a rights holder reported the content Megaupload only made it so the specific URL no longer worked.
> If we are fair, Kim was not the one uploading the restricted content to Megaupload, neither encouraging it.
He was encouraging it. Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
They published list of the top downloads, but first checked them for pirated content and removed those items from the list. What purposed does that have other than trying to hide the infringement?
This is not true. All DMCIA requests were properly addressed and the content removed.
They even had a dedicated page to submit these requests, years before YouTube and others did so.
>Top management of Megaupload had discussions specifically about encouraging more piracy and making it harder for rights holders to get infringing material removed.
Dropbox scans shared files and checks hashes against known-pirated material. It's not just and "edgier tone", one actually makes an effort to take down infringing material and the other tacitly (and at time explicitly) condones it.
It feels like a decade ago, but I remember the issue being with how they dealt with abuse reports. To save storage space, they matched similar files. So if two people ripped a DVD and compressed it, they would just keep one source file, and generate 2 different metadata files, to avoid wasting space. So they'd have different filenames and creation dates, but only take up half the space. Then, when one got an abuse report, they would delete that metadata, but as long as one still existed, the source data never got deleted. Law enforcement called it a conspiracy to commit crime, megaupload called it smart database deduping. It was usually much more than 2 copies, so content owners were playing endless whack—a-mole while megaupload was barely shuffling a few kilobytes around.
