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Originally Posted by Ankh
Our legal system is not designed to cope with massive violations of the rules (we declare martial law when it hits the fan), and that is the biggest problem at this time.
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The problem that's hitting, is that copyright was designed for industrial business applications, and it's being extended to individual uses and is falling apart.
Rather like tax law isn't designed to go after everyone who says "let's get pizza; everyone pitch in five dollars" and the end result is the host pocketing $3.74 after the pizza's bought. We don't expect people to declare that "income"--nor do we expect them to get a restaurant or food resale license to have the pizza party.
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The issue is not individual damage done by one person downloading ebook, song or movie, the issue is cumulative effect.
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In the case of, oh, smog pollution, you can't identify how much damage one particular car causes, but you *can* show measurable damage from many of them. The entertainment industry is failing to show *that* kind of statistics, in addition to not showing individual damages.
They are happy to show individual filesharing numbers--X files are shared Y times; those files are commercially available for Z dollars. But then they usually say, therefore the damage is Z times X times Y, rather than indication that that those *would have been purchased* if they weren't shared.
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From that standpoint, takedown of Megaupload has its own logic, it is attacking the infrastructure that makes it easy to abuse copyright.
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Not saying it doesn't make sense, just that I'm intrigued by the fact that it's apparently the *only* takedown being planned. The FBI hasn't said they intend to go after individual users who were using Megaupload.
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For individual persecution of violators to work as a defence of the system, the "noise" level has to come down first.
Which is easier said than done.
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Indeed. I can't see that megaupload's removal has had *any* effect on the state of copyright infringement and/or filesharing on the net--although it has damaged several legitimate groups that were using MegaVideo to host their files.