Megaupload finished: Feds shut down file-sharing giant without SOPA

Megaupload shutdown links to copyrighted material as fast as they can and for their hard work they are shutdown. Well done FBI! Sony drops rootkits on users' computers without informing owners of those systems and it's business as usual. This incident highlights how little understanding the current authorities have of the workings of online services. Why the FBI has any jurisdiction over a service like Megaupload when it obviously doesn't understand the technical challenges they face, I can not understand. By simply renaming a file, packaging it and linking it from another site you can defeat any existing detection techniques, though I'm sure some cunning lawyer can totally distort those facts to a technically illiterate person. Even though I suspect this was more a political favour to appease a very rich and powerful industry that can't get everything it wants at present.

Depending on how large and powerful you are, and of course if you keep up with your regular financial contributions to the right people, well it seems you can flout the law.

The political and judiciary systems seem to have little technical understanding of IT systems and the MPAA/RIAA take full advantage of this. User contributed services and search engines do not have a single person creating and overseeing every link. Many online services have billions of links and uploads in operation on any given day, expecting administration staff to keep up with the demands of massive multi-billion dollar entertainment moguls is an impossible task.

MPAA/RIAA want to police the internet by their own rules, at no doubt significant financial and tactical gain. All proposals by ISP's and technical experts have been flatly turned down over recent years, even proposals that would benefit these associations members from downloads they would not otherwise make any financial gains from. The problem it seems is that these proposals did not also award tactical gains over increased control of information distribution, nor were these ideas their own.

The whole idea of a free and open internet is a terrible concept for such parties to bare. A brave and frightening new world in which some artists are no longer shackled by the chains of old institutions and can not be unfairly profited from while relinquishing control of their very own creations. If increasingly artists and venues were to become independent, these old outdated business models would start to feel a growing fear, a very fast and growing fear leading to panic and increasingly irrational behaviour.

Imagine a growing failure to sell us "musac" and dressed up tripe categorised as "entertainment"!

apparently DOJ and fbi.gov didn't expect us

I don't know how they expect to make a case against them.

It's not as if Megaupload deliberately uploads pirated content while snickering and rubbing their hands together.

Like Youtube or any other user-driven site, people upload shit and, a lot of the time, they don't pay attention to it.

It might be true that they didn't police it. But it sets kind of an odious standard to be responsible for anything your users do on such a massive site.

Fuck it.. pull the plug and kill the internet.

An interesting byproduct of this sort of thing is that we'll see an increase in the number of TLDs outside of US jurisdiction such as .me, .bz, .nu, .is and .tv.

The five I mentioned look like catchy ways to cap off the names of websites, but they actually stand for Montenegro, Belize, Niue, Iceland and Tuvalu. These five countries benefit financially whenever somebody registers a website with their national domains, and none of them plan on passing draconian laws like SOPA/PIPA. Iceland, I believe, has even enshrined Internet freedom in its new constitution!

So, if you plan on launching a website, forget the pedestrian .com and go with something catchy like .is instead!

Mr. Obama, the Feds are your peep at the moment, which makes this action, YOUR ACTION! This represents more than "double speak", this represents the epitome of duplicity. This smacks of you genuflecting to Hollywood, et. al, while still making a play for tech money and putting on a citizen's rights false face. You, Mr. Obama, are so OUTED, once again. At this rate, you are likely to appear more like a Mexican jumping bean when debating the Republican candidate on stage, rather than the flip flopper that you prove yourself to be.

Damn.

Just to clear the air here and to suggest that folks consider these issues beyond the basic Ten Commandments view....

"On December 9, 2011, Megaupload published a music video titled: "The Mega Song", showing artists including Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys and will_i_am endorsing the company. The music video was also uploaded to YouTube, but was removed following a takedown request by the record company Universal Music Group (UMG). Megaupload said that the video contained no infringing content, commenting: "we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign". Megaupload requested an apology from UMG, and filed a lawsuit against the company in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on December 12, 2011. UMG denied that the takedown was ordered under the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and said that the takedown was "pursuant to the UMG-YouTube agreement," which gives UMG "the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube's CMS (Content Management System) based on a number of contractually specified criteria." The video was subsequently returned to YouTube, with the reasons for the UMG takedown remaining unclear. YouTube stated: "Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YT unless they own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it.""

Nutshell: Megaupload (MU) legally published a video on YT. Universal had YT take it down. The onus then falls on MU to get it back up. They do so. One month later the DOJ takes down MU. Figure it out.

Point is: DOJ can take down sites now. What are SOPA & PIPA for? Under SOPA/PIPA, Universal, except for maybe a wink, would not have even needed DOJ. They could essentially require ISPs handling MU to disconnect. MU has only a long and arduous process to get back but the ISPs themselves (innocent parties) are also liable.

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and others are not wrong.

I don't think artists will be able to stop people from stealing their work.
Most people have no problem with stealing copyrighted material as long as it's over the Internet.

It sux for them, but there is no recourse.

Megaupload is now back up and rebuilding.

Interestingly enough, this has done nothing to stop any of the real Internet pirates out there. Nothing.

(Hint: they don't go about swapping files on ad-supported dot-com websites with physically stationary server space)

Welcome to 1984. We are officially a police state. The will of the people no longer matters.

Speechless. Can't...continue...typing.

http://Antiwar.com

They've been shutting sites down, as well as harassing and intimidating administrators at sites, harassing bloggers...

They stay messing with Antiwar.com, Citizensforalegitgov., they've shut down and or harassed quite a few others, Activistpost....

SEVERAL, they've been doing it for a long time and aren't about to stop.

This is just the beginning.