No. MegaUpload lost their safe harbor status by doing the following as spelled out in the DoJ press release:
As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.
Of course this is only a grand jury indictment and they have not been found guilty in a court. But the Feds don't bring a case if they aren't damn well sure they can win.
the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place
I might be reading too much into this, but to me this sounds like ten people uploaded the same movie (maybe with different filenames, maybe different encodings/file formats), the DMCA request only named one of these files, and MegaUpload removed only that one file.
(I know the quote says "link" not "copy" but it wouldn't be the first time people get confused over the distinction.)
If so, this sets a dangerous precedent for other (maybe more legitimate) file sharing sites: firstly, if you host millions of files, detecting which files are copies of another file, or deciding which filenames are similar to other filenames, is not a trivial task. Secondly, as far as I understand the DMCA, it doesn't even require you to go to these lengths.
Of course, I might be totally off base and they might really have kept the very same file in place and just removed a link to it on some pages while keeping the link on others.
Even if it is the same file if the provided links are private I think they should be safe under how DMCA is worded. Each link can be considered a key to locker and it would not be Megaupload's job to know who should have a key and who should not. DMCA would require them to reject keys but not necessarily the locker under many situations.
My previous post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3486903
Interesting that its okay for content owners to have false positives when flagging content, but it is not okay for site operators to have false negatives.
Multiple people upload the same file with the same name and the same content. The file is hashed as it comes in and only one copy is kept.
If the provided link is private, not index by megaupload or search engines, then it can be thought of a private locker with the key being the link. In this case it should not be Megaupload's job to know who is supposed to have the key and who does not and it seems reasonable that they would only remove the link complained about and not the content. Those other links after all could be for personal backup/use which is allowed.
Can anyone verify/deny that the links Megaupload provided were private?
As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.
Of course this is only a grand jury indictment and they have not been found guilty in a court. But the Feds don't bring a case if they aren't damn well sure they can win.