He was stupid, but a friend lost a load of legitimate, original work; he'd been using it as an external hard drive and sharing mechanism for his large project files.
The Mega prosecution was not spurious. The DoJ's discovery turned up a number of emails from Kim Schmitz and his team in which they openly admitted to compensating affiliates for uploading copyrighted material. Megaupload wasn't killed because of lax regulation over DMCA takedown regulations; it was killed because it was not, unlike Reddit or even Youtube, a bona fide clean-hands user-generated content exchange, but rather a piracy product wearing user-generated content clothing.
I would venture to say that the vast majority of piracy on megaupload was done without the knowledge of the people running the site. And it's obvious that some of the affiliate payments are going to go to people breaking the law on any site, unless you run background checks on your affiliates.
Megaupload may have been tuned toward being a 'piracy product' but that does not mean it was anything other than user-generated piracy.
Again: the Mega indictment is full of transcripts of emails in which Kim and his team arrange to pay people to put pirated material on the site, and in which they repeatedly acknowledge the existence of copyrighted material on the site. One guy complains to support about the quality of the video on a Dexter episode, and Kim writes concerned mail to his team about video quality!
Sorry, I somehow missed the emails about them actually arranging for pirated material. The worst I had known about was copying videos off youtube. But the Dexter email is valid. If illegal files find a bug you still need to fix the bug unrelated to removing the files.
A few minutes later: Okay I just skimmed through the indictment again and I can't find what you're talking about. There's points 54 and 55 about how they didn't cancel the affiliate accounts of people that had uploaded infringing files, but I can't find anything about them actually arranging pirated material, or specifically encouraging its upload. Also point 69d says out that copyright-violating uploads were disqualified for rewards, though Megaupload rarely terminated the accounts.
Ah, thanks. Well I see a lot of bad behavior, from them looking at user uploads, finding pirated files, and not removing them. But it's still unsolicited uploads. Page 33 mentions disqualification of 'very obvious' copyrighted files, but being 'rather flexible'. This is bad, but it's not going out and encouraging illegal-in-particular uploads. It's just poor policing on the affiliate program.
Page 32 is content from a discovered email in which a Megaupload employee calculates the affiliate bonus due to a user based on the value of the copyrighted files that user uploaded.
This isn't reading-between-the-lines stuff. It's there in black and white.
Right, it's black and white that they ignored copyright violations on a bunch of files. But that is not the same as encouraging infringing files over non-infringing files, or asking people to upload infringing files.
If you uploaded a popular infringing file, you might get $100, or you might get disqualified.
If you uploaded a popular non-infringing file, you would definitely get $100.
Megaupload knew about some of the piracy. That does not mean they arranged it. They treated it like any other file.
Also keep in mind that an indictment is designed to make the indicted party look as unsympathetic as possible. There may be additional context given which turns those e-mails from "smoking gun with Dotcom's demonic fingerprints" to just "Viacom vs. YouTube-esque questionable behavior" if that case ever goes to court.
One guy complains to support about the quality of the video on a Dexter episode, and Kim writes concerned mail to his team about video quality!
This is called "Doing it right."
If Showtime would sell me a license to view their content, I wouldn't even be tempted to download it for free. Since they refuse to, it's going to be tough to work up any righteous dudgeon towards Schmitz and crew, especially when they go out of their way to adopt a customer-oriented approach.
Copyright is a government entitlement that we spun from whole cloth. Capitalism, on the other hand, comes naturally. You can't fight Mother Nature.
Property rights, in the sense that's necessary for capitalism, requires authoritative enforcement to actually work, which in requires government. Both theoretically and empirically. It's not a novel idea at all.
My point is that some property rights can arguably be seen as natural rights, while others definitely cannot be interpreted that way. Copyright is unquestionably not a natural right. It's entirely an artifact of our legal system, and a very recent one at that.
As humans we've always had the concept of "property" to some extent, independent of government. That's not true of copyright law. That was something we invented in response to a specific need, but we invented it at a time when few/no other legal or intellectual tools were available. Copyright should never be treated as the sacred cow that property rights in general are, IMO.
> My point is that some property rights can arguably be seen as natural rights, while others definitely cannot be interpreted that way. Copyright is unquestionably not a natural right.
This "natural rights" talk sounds like theology to me. From an anthropological perspective, humans invented intellectual property around the time it became useful, just as humans invented land ownership around the time that became useful. You can say the same about owning shares of a business or owning currency. These are exactly the artificial property rights you need for capitalism, and you need government for those rights, and hence capitalism, to actually work.
A bone? Sure. Land? Stock in a corporation? These are the property rights capitalism is made of. Entire cultures have existed well into written history without either concept (one of the things that made it easier to forcibly remove them from the land they lived on, which likely means that your "natural law" arguments for land ownership are insufficient to protect the property rights of almost anyone in North America).
What you need for capitalism is centrally enforced rights to things like land and corporate equity. That is not a simple extrapolation for protecting one's personal possessions any more than copyright is. And like copyright, they require a government.
You can own a means of production without government backing, but without establishing laws and implementing a means of enforcing them, there's no guarantee that someone wouldn't come along and take it by force.
I just finished a Law 101 class so I'm by no means an expert, but I think the above explains the theory behind why we need laws. Whether you think the theory is legitimate or not is up to you. When I started the course, I was surprised to learn that our entire legal system was designed around the concept of property rights.
Your friend should be pretty pissed at Kim Schmitz for deceiving him into thinking that MegaUpload was a general-purpose file hosting site and not the criminal piracy conspiracy that it clearly, deliberately, lucratively was. You know, in addition to being pissed at the FBI.
I'm not denying that MegaUpload engaged in piracy, but that doesn't stop it from ALSO being a general-purpose file host.
This is very tangential to copyright law, but there was no good reason morally (and, as far as I'm aware, legally) not to return customers data.
Correct, and this is why Amazon S3 probably the biggest filesharing system in existence is not being sued and being taken offline. Megaupload, not so much.
(in reply to the much more nested comment) but this is the age of electronic data - it is easy to delete the content that was the subject of the DCMA and leave the rest of the site up read-only for a month while people archive (or something).
While I think the government could have been more forgiving of innocent third parties, remember that MegaUpload was a virtual company where all the computers were leased on the cloud. Those vendors were not being paid and meanwhile had capital costs on their equipment for as long as the prosecutors were copying off data. They deserved to have their equipment returned to them as soon as possible.
Sure, but he should still expect his seized "property" to be returned, just as if he had stored his archives at a storage facility whose owners were willfully ignorant of other customers running bootlegged DVDs on site.
He was stupid, but a friend lost a load of legitimate, original work; he'd been using it as an external hard drive and sharing mechanism for his large project files.