(Locked) Official: Megaupload shut down

Can someone please make one thing clear to me about SOPA ? If it’s turned into law, which types of websites will remain and which will be banned?

||+520739|DarkNurbs said-|| Can someone please make one thing clear to me about SOPA ? If it’s turned into law, which types of websites will remain and which will be banned?

It is not about a certain ‘type’ of site. To put it simply, an organization notifies the government it believes a site is heavily involved in piracy and the government will take action against that site. No need to prove it is, no notice to the site owners to give them a chance to defend themselves. Actions will be taken, and then the site owners will have to prove themselves innocent.

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Howdy folks – after some internal discussion we decided to reopen this thread as is such an important event at the moment for our industry.

That said – the mods will be watching the thread closely. We love constructive discussion and we certainly don’t want to censor anyone – we just want to make sure the inevitable political differences among a community of our size doesn’t get flamey.

So as an exception we will be reopening this thread. Stay nice errrrrybody!

Jords

My idea on this is that they closed megaupload (for now) because megaupload wanted to create a music online store where artist could have sold their song without the need of media companies that represent the artist now. Something like envato marketplaces but for international top artist (some of whom you may find singing in that “how awesome is megaupload” song that was created by megaupload last year in October and started all this fight). All the intermediaries between the artist and the fans would have disappeared (except of the marketplace itself). A big blow on those giant corporations that we all know who they are and who eat the big part of the cake in media industry.

It is not about piracy and it will never be. Sorry folks. And the closing of this website was and it is an abuse to internet freedom. They should have close it AFTER a fair trial not just by accusing someone of copyright infringement. Probably they are guilty of this BUT you need to have a court and a TRIAL before you punish someone.

Being a digital author, i’m not crying at all for this closing service, but i’m against all these laws that tries to control the net. Pretty stupid move, though, as 5 similar services will appear as each 1 will be closed down.

||+520874|doru said-|| And the closing of this website was and it is an abuse to internet freedom. They should have close it AFTER a fair trial not just by accusing someone of copyright infringement. Probably they are guilty of this BUT you need to have a court and a TRIAL before you punish someone.

The tricky part here is that a suspect of a ‘real-life’ crime is often placed in custody before trial as well (in order to prevent escape or further criminal activity), and it seems the FBI has applied the same protocol here. Of course in this case it’s far from necessary to step in and arrest the people responsible immediately. Shutting down the website while the case is in trial (with a sufficient amount of pre-trial evidence) could be open to discussion, but jailing the development team before trial is just ridiculous.

If you are pro freedom and liberty, you are pro freedom and liberty for the guy you don’t like too.

The real question is whether megaupload as a company was complicit in illegal file sharing or whether they made a good faith effort to remove files and comply with laws. There are hundreds of those services and many provide legitimate and good faith services. Megaupload is/was an extremely viable choice for transferring files to users, that can support heavy traffic spikes, and larger sizes all for free.

Deviantart has around a 60 or 90MB limit. What happens if someone needs to upload a file over their limit? Or how about an artist wants to give his album away and it becomes a viral hit? I’ve downloaded from megaupload for these very reasons and more! Things like dropbox and many web hosts will slap you sideways if you try and hammer their service. Megaupload is no different than amazon, google, and others who provide file hosting and bandwidth imo. It wouldn’t surprise me if illegal file sharing was the minority of their traffic at all.

It’s like bittorrent in a way. You know about the illegal sharing side of it because you hear about it more. But you rarely hear about all the large companies, universities, open source projects, and real people who use it because it actually works and solves a problem. Same with these types of sites.

An important point is also that this solves absolutely nothing and makes the problem they want to solve worse.

Now some VH contestants and Aj authors have problems downloading the VH authors created video loops. You may read about that more over here.

As MU was shut down, now we all have to reupload all those vids somewhere else. So in my opinion, NO, not all the content on MU was illegal. And YES if affected many of us right now.

Know a Good place to upload videos up to 800mb for free anyone ?

||+520890|Joost said-|| The tricky part here is that a suspect of a ‘real-life’ crime is often placed in custody before trial as well (in order to prevent escape or further criminal activity), and it seems the FBI has applied the same protocol here. Of course in this case it’s far from necessary to step in and arrest the people responsible immediately. Shutting down the website while the case is in trial (with a sufficient amount of pre-trial evidence) could be open to discussion, but jailing the development team before trial is just ridiculous.

I have nothing against arresting citizens if is done respecting the law. For example one gets arrested if there is a danger of escaping the justice by going out of the country in a place where he can’t be brought back for trial. One can argue that this was the case here.

Shutting down the website just because FBI thinks it did something wrong is another matter. I don’t think FBI did an abuse, probably under the US legal system they are authorized to do it, but if we want to speak impartially about it, the problem is FBI and the state in general acts like the judge when the judge should be separate from the state. FBI should prove that someone broke the law in front of a judge and in front of an eventual jury, and then let them decide if and how someone should get punished.

I’m not entirely happy with the US legal system but this is my personal issue and is not the point here. The danger is to let the state become the judge and executioner like in the middle ages in the times of the inquisition. The system is not perfect how it is but it could get worse in no time if these apparently bureaucratic legal steps are ignored.