News - File-sharing firms clamp down in fear

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

!Disclaimer!

I am not condoning file sharing by the following comment.

!End Disclaimer!

IIRC,both cassette and video cassettes were advertised by the media industry as being harmful to the livelihood of artists.

[roachcoach]

It was just a teeeeeny bit more hyperbolic than that:

"'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.'

[Biscuit]

Yet the VCR survived any court cases, the media industry survived and the fat cats still got rich.

i say to them, spend your money on producing better quality entertainment and more sensible and fair methods/channels of distribution instead of constantly cutting budgets and throwing money away with pointless court cases against pirates who have the flexibility to change their tactics at the snap of a finger.

[aidanjt]

███ ██ trust █ ██████ your ████ █ ██ ███ ████ ██████ ████ ███government███ ████ ██████ █████ ██████ ████ ██████████ █everything█████████ ███ ████ ███ ██████████ ████████ ██ is ██████████ ██████████ ███████ ███ █████ fine.

This comment has been found in violation of H.R. 3261, S.O.P.A and has been removed.

Copyright blasphemer!

[roachcoach]

Yet the VCR survived any court cases, the media industry survived and the fat cats still got rich.

i say to them, spend your money on producing better quality entertainment and more sensible and fair methods/channels of distribution instead of constantly cutting budgets and throwing money away with pointless court cases against pirates who have the flexibility to change their tactics at the snap of a finger.

Heretic

Give people media they want, the way they want. They'll EVEN give you cash money for the trouble.

[davidcrofter]

I think if the authorities really wanted to shut down these sites they could build a case against any of the site owners whether they had one or not ... big bad America now seems to govern the www - or so it thinks.

[cjs150]

Whether or not Megaupload are guilty of the charges brought they were foolish to use US servers. Almost by definition that brings the company within US jurisdiction because they were, at least in part, operating from US territory.

If all their servers were outside the US then it is questionable whether they should be subject to US law. Sadly US politicians and judges believe that US has jurisdiction world wide as long as (a) some US citizens used it, or (b) advertisers were from US or (c) payments were in US dollars. As a matter of international law principles that is almost certainly wrong but that never stopped them.

There is something about the Megaupload business model that really stinks and deserves to get beaten up by the authorities. Whether current laws are adequate is more questionable.

The problem is that the fall out will seriously hamper the development of cloud services, particularly where users pay a premium fee for access (or possibly even for extra storage) where some of the content turns out to be illegal.

There is a real issue with how media is developing in the digital age. DRM simply does not work. Blu-ray, DVD DRM has been broken, there are countless programmes that remove it and allow you to rip the discs. For personal use this should be unobjectionable. There is also the issue of DRM simply stops people using the media they way they did so before going digital. Take books and e-readers for example. If I buy a book, everyone in the house can read it when they like, friends can borrow it, when we are bored with it off it goes to the charity shop for recycling to someone else. Try doing that with an e-reader, heck we have yet to get a Kindle or similar to provide "family" accounts where any one in the family can have the book on their Kindle at any time on an unlimited basis

[mikerr]

heck we have yet to get a Kindle or similar to provide "family" accounts where any one in the family can have the book on their Kindle at any time on an unlimited basis

You can have up to 6 kindles on a single account, and books freely shared amongst them. (kindle app on ipad/iphone/pc counts as a kindle)

At book purchase time you can choose which one it gets delivered to, on all the others its available for download in the archive folder.

[geogan]

Good riddance is what i say. I have no time for services that make money on the backs of allowing a-holes to distribute and download pirate movies because they are too tight to pay for the dvds or blurays themselves. The ISPs have a big part to play in this too - they turn a blind eye and know well the only reason a lot of their customers pay them lots each month is for their 30mb download lines to the pirate movie mountains... if the pirate movies weren't available any more a lot of a-holes would cancel or downgrade (to slower) their broadband subscriptions...

[Biscuit]

Good riddance is what i say. I have no time for services that make money on the backs of allowing a-holes to distribute and download pirate movies because they are too tight to pay for the dvds or blurays themselves. The ISPs have a big part to play in this too - they turn a blind eye and know well the only reason a lot of their customers pay them lots each month is for their 30mb download lines to the pirate movie mountains... if the pirate movies weren't available any more a lot of a-holes would cancel or downgrade (to slower) their broadband subscriptions...

Because illegal downloading is THE ONLY purpose of high speed broadband?

I smell a troll.

[Pancake]

Lold hard, Anyway back on topic. This seems about right

Why was MegaUpload really shut down?

In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core. (http://goo.gl/A7wUZ)

I present to you... MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

"UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings," MegaUpload founder Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

"We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free," Dotcom outlined. "Yes that's right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works."

[Biscuit]

See now that would have been awesome

[mikerr]

Because illegal downloading is THE ONLY purpose of high speed broadband?

Not the only reason for being on a top tier download package, but a large proportion I'd wager.

[cjs150]

You can have up to 6 kindles on a single account, and books freely shared amongst them. (kindle app on ipad/iphone/pc counts as a kindle)

At book purchase time you can choose which one it gets delivered to, on all the others its available for download in the archive folder.

Oops forgot about that although that was mostly because last time I looked the restriction were simply insane for example all devices must be registered to the same account so all books in that account can be shared which is fine unless for example you have young children and you do not want them to be able to read some of the more "racy" books that you buy (or dad's victorian porn collection!) and as far as I can work out no device can be registered to two different accounts.

So Kindle is slowly getting the right idea but it is still a long way from where it needs to be

[riding moon]

Is anyone looking to go with something like MegaBox & MegaKey?

Can you just keep your servers out of the USA and this would avoid the G men being able to take you down. Megaupload had a lease and this is what allowed them to take the action they did.

[mikerr]

all books in that account can be shared which is fine unless for example you have young children and you do not want them to be able to read some of the more "racy" books that you buy

You can get around that by registering the kindle, downloading books, then deregistering it (the books remain in home, but no access to archived).