FBI charges Megaupload operators with piracy crimes

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Dropbox is a little different in that it's primarily a cloud archiving service, rather than a "sharing" service. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't offer public download facilities, does it?

You can share DropBox folders with a given list of email addresses.
There is also a 'Public' folder which anyone can access [the files within].

Edit: You can send out links to single files in the Public folder, but cannot expose the whole folder or subfolders.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

You can share DropBox folders with a given list of email addresses.
There is also a 'Public' folder which anyone can access.

Thank you for the correction - I knew that you could grant access to specific people, but I didn't know about the "Public" part of it.

[sabredog]

You can also email a link for a file via Dropbox to another person

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

My understanding is that it became an extraditable offence due to the fact that he'd allegedly earned $230,000 in advertising revenue from the site. That put it into the criminal category, rather than simply being a case of civil copyright infringement.

But linking to copyright content other people have made available isn't an offence in the UK (yet). That was why the Oink guy was prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud, and later acquited of that charge when it went to trial.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by JoeD

Which raises the question, why did a judge approve the extradition of the guy who ran a site that included links to copyright infringing content, which was deemed not against the law in the UK.

Either there's more to that case than was reported or it should be overturned on appeal.

It is only a magistrates court ruling, and will probably be appealed, so we should eventually get a more authoritative ruling.

[kiwipippa]

This was the top news story on New Zealand TV last night. 4 of these guys live in my city (Auckland). The first 3 pages of the NZ Herald are devoted to it this morning. There is a picture of a car trailer taking away $6 million worth of cars that have been seized ("including 15 Mercedes Benz, a 1959 pink Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce Phantom", with number plates like "KIMCOM, HACKER, STONED, GUILTY, MAFIA, GOD and POLICE").

Kim Dotcom lives in a mansion worth $30million and $100million of cash has been seized from various bank accounts. Apparently police arrived in 2 helicopters and Kim Dotcom had barricaded himself inside.

We are getting saturation coverage, I never realised how big this thing was. Obviously huge money in piracy.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kiwipippa

We are getting saturation coverage, I never realised how big this thing was. Obviously huge money in piracy.

Yes, that's the point that's often overlooked. The people running these pirate operations are serious criminals, making enormous profits from crime.

[kiwipippa]

In case anyone feels sorry for him, here's a photo of his house. http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webconte...11_460x230.JPG

He rents this place. He applied to buy it in 2010 but was it was declined because "Associate Finance Minister Simon Power and Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson decided he did not meet the "good character" test to buy land here.

(land over a certain value purchased by foreigners requires approval).

Bet the Ministers are pleased they made that decision now.

[Quexos]

A sad day for Internet freedom

[HarryT]

This would be "freedom to steal stuff", would it?

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by kiwipippa

This was the top news story on New Zealand TV last night. 4 of these guys live in my city (Auckland). The first 3 pages of the NZ Herald are devoted to it this morning. There is a picture of a car trailer taking away $6 million worth of cars that have been seized ("including 15 Mercedes Benz, a 1959 pink Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce Phantom", with number plates like "KIMCOM, HACKER, STONED, GUILTY, MAFIA, GOD and POLICE").

Kim Dotcom lives in a mansion worth $30million and $100million of cash has been seized from various bank accounts. Apparently police arrived in 2 helicopters and Kim Dotcom had barricaded himself inside.

We are getting saturation coverage, I never realised how big this thing was. Obviously huge money in piracy.

Originally Posted by kiwipippa

In case anyone feels sorry for him, here's a photo of his house. http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webconte...11_460x230.JPG

He rents this place. He applied to buy it in 2010 but was it was declined because "Associate Finance Minister Simon Power and Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson decided he did not meet the "good character" test to buy land here.

(land over a certain value purchased by foreigners requires approval).

Bet the Ministers are pleased they made that decision now.

The fact that they made a lot of money is not proof of wrongdoing. I don't know much about how they run their business, but the service they provided was legitimate, even if it was used illegitimately. According to the Wikipedia article on Megaupload, they have 81 million unique visitors (I presume that it is per month), and a "Reach" of 4%. I don't know what that means, but I presume that means the percentage of visitors that use their service. 4% would be about 3.2 million users. If each paid 5$ per month for the service, that would be 16 million dollars a month, 192 million per year. For the kind of service they provide, I can't imagine many people being willing to pay more than a few bucks a month for legitimate uses. If they were charging quite a bit for the service, such as 10 or more dollars a month, then that would indicate that the vast majority of users were buying memberships for illegitimate reasons.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Which is illegal, is it not?

Sure, but calling it terrorism is rather silly.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This would be "freedom to steal stuff", would it?

If you mean freedom to violate copyright, it won't make any difference to that. People who used it for that purpose will just move on to something else instead. As will people who used it for other purposes, of course.

What's more worrying is the knock on effect it will have. I certainly wouldn't want to be involved with any site that allows unmoderated user content, the risks are becoming far too great.

I'm assuming this site has someone check every ebook upload carefully before they are made available to the masses? But even then, the terms under which they are made available can change over time, so what is legal at the time of upload may not be legal months or years later.

Assuming you have all that sorted out, you still have no way of stopping people from dropping in links to pirate content. Removing them quickly when notified by a copyright holder is obviously not the defence it used to be.

[azazel1024]

Part of the point, at least in so far as the DMCA is concerned, is did they know the stuff was violating copyright that was being loaded? If they did and didn't do anything about it, then they are guilty of copyright violations/DMCA violations. In this case, they had to know that a lot of the material being loaded violated copyright...though the difference between knowing much of it must violate copyright, and knowing about specific instances and not doing anything is pretty big.

The little I've read so far about the inditments and evidence suggests they knew of specific instances and did nothing about it (though they appeared somewhat scrupulous on the outside about doing take downs once NOTIFIED, but safe harbor doesn't protect you if you know and don't do anything even if you don't receive a take down notice).

As for much of the use, it was for copyright infringement plain and simple. To my mind it will be interesting though if the US gov't can prove in a court of law that the people under inditement deserve to go to jail and were willful violators according to the letter of the law, of if there was a good faith effort to at least toe the line, even if they were obviously profiting off of copyright infringement.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by JoeD

Which raises the question, why did a judge approve the extradition of the guy who ran a site that included links to copyright infringing content, which was deemed not against the law in the UK.

Originally Posted by HarryT

My understanding is that it became an extraditable offence due to the fact that he'd allegedly earned $230,000 in advertising revenue from the site. That put it into the criminal category, rather than simply being a case of civil copyright infringement.

So he earned $230,000 in advertising by doing something that was deemed not against the law in the UK?

How does the monetary figure make it criminal if it wasn't against the law in the first place?