Great read over on Wired.com that exposes the grey areas of the internet. Megaupload.com was a website for storing files and it stored a lot of files. Fortune 100 companies used it, governments used it, private citizens used it ... and pirates used it to, to distribute ludicrous amounts of pirated media such as music, movies, and more. The owner, "Kim Dotcom" is still waiting his fate in New Zealand but the case raises questions of privacy concerns, and all sorts of others.
Here is a snippet from the piece:
The DOJ claims Megaupload was anything but ignorant of the pirated material on its site. In fact, the indictment claims, Megaupload’s generals engaged in illegal file-sharing themselves, encouraged it with an incentive program that paid cash for popular content, and were slow and selective in complying with takedown notices, only pulling infringing content and dropping the incentive program when the company was at the peak of its power. Megaupload counters that policing the billions of files on its service would be both impossible and a violation of their customers’ privacy, that they did their best to comply with takedown notices as the law required, and that they had reasonable expectations of the same DMCA safe harbor afforded to YouTube.
But unlike the Viacom versus YouTube case, the charges against Megaupload are not civil but criminal; the key players aren’t being sued, they’re facing jail. Not for the first time, Kim finds himself embroiled in a criminal case based on uncertain tech precedent.
But unlike the Viacom versus YouTube case, the charges against Megaupload are not civil but criminal; the key players aren’t being sued, they’re facing jail. Not for the first time, Kim finds himself embroiled in a criminal case based on uncertain tech precedent.
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