Except that in this case Mega Conspiracy (the company behind MegaUpload) is being held liable for their own behavior. I'm used to Reddit being ill-informed but I was not expecting to see this attitude being so prevalent on HN!
Just in the comment thread for this post I've seen assertions that the U.S. avoided extradition treaties (untrue) and that MegaUpload was shut down just because of what their users were doing (also untrue).
Just as an example of things from the indictment (which you should really at least read a summary of):
* MegaConspiracy employees were discussing a way to avoid reposts of child porn by killing any video with a matching md5sum of movies which were deemed by MegaConspiracy to be child porn, but did not employ that same tactic for files uploaded that infringed copyright. Now you and I know that it's trivial to make the md5sum change without making the video look any different, but why does MegaConspiracy 'try harder' for some categories of illegal material and not others that just conveniently happen to make them more money?
* MegaConspiracy seeded their own website with videos copied straight from YouTube (thing wget --mirror) without so much as bothering to verify the license of those videos. This wouldn't be acceptable with open source software, why should this be acceptable for Mega Upload?
* MegaConspiracy distributed known infringing videos internally to staff (so it's not "just the users" doing it)
* MegaConspiracy rewarded uploaders monetarily for uploading popular videos despite the lack of authorization on the part of those users to redistribute the video (so it's not "just the users" asking for it)
So while I certainly appreciate that the movie/music industry are hopelessly out-of-tune with digital distribution, that doesn't make MegaConspiracy a bunch of good guys, and it doesn't make their behavior defensible.
For you 1st point: because in most jurisdiction CP is absolutely forbidden and typically you are not protected if you don't proactively act to eradicate CP on your service with reasonable dilligence, whereas an upload of a film might or might not be problematic, given that it can be for private use or public distribution.
For the third point who are you kidding. Technically this is problematic. In the real world even representatives and people in grand jury exchange ripped films, most probably most judges do it too. So this is both technically a reason but an highly hypocritical one.
> For you 1st point: because in most jurisdiction CP is absolutely forbidden and typically you are not protected if you don't proactively act to eradicate CP on your service with reasonable dilligence, whereas an upload of a film might or might not be problematic, given that it can be for private use or public distribution.
That's not at all the point though. It would be one thing if MegaConspiracy had a policy to only "full ban" videos that were targets of DMCA-complaints if it was clear to them that the content was actually infringing. Then they'd have a plethora of excuses (e.g. no time to sort through all the DMCA requests, "investigations" revealed it was unclear material was infringing, etc.)
Instead what the judge and jury will see is that MegaConspiracy had a "permaban video" tool which they didn't even attempt to use.
> For the third point [MegaConspiracy distributing infringing material internally] who are you kidding. Technically this is problematic.
Well, this is the best kind of "technically", given that it's exactly what they're being accused of! If the grand jury was as sympathetic to that as you think then why did they hand down the indictment?
Either way it's not very hypocritical given that some naïve users might be able to claim ignorance of the progeny of videos from the Internet, but MegaConspiracy went out of their way to establish DMCA protocol so they have no excuse for ignorance of the "safe harbor" provisions at all.
Just in the comment thread for this post I've seen assertions that the U.S. avoided extradition treaties (untrue) and that MegaUpload was shut down just because of what their users were doing (also untrue).
Just as an example of things from the indictment (which you should really at least read a summary of):
* MegaConspiracy employees were discussing a way to avoid reposts of child porn by killing any video with a matching md5sum of movies which were deemed by MegaConspiracy to be child porn, but did not employ that same tactic for files uploaded that infringed copyright. Now you and I know that it's trivial to make the md5sum change without making the video look any different, but why does MegaConspiracy 'try harder' for some categories of illegal material and not others that just conveniently happen to make them more money?
* MegaConspiracy seeded their own website with videos copied straight from YouTube (thing wget --mirror) without so much as bothering to verify the license of those videos. This wouldn't be acceptable with open source software, why should this be acceptable for Mega Upload?
* MegaConspiracy distributed known infringing videos internally to staff (so it's not "just the users" doing it)
* MegaConspiracy rewarded uploaders monetarily for uploading popular videos despite the lack of authorization on the part of those users to redistribute the video (so it's not "just the users" asking for it)
So while I certainly appreciate that the movie/music industry are hopelessly out-of-tune with digital distribution, that doesn't make MegaConspiracy a bunch of good guys, and it doesn't make their behavior defensible.