YouTube has now and has had far more infringing content than Megaupload ever did. But Megaupload isn't owned by a corporation with Al Gore and other rich politically connected Americans as senior advisors and/or on the board of directors.
You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not. YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it). YouTube is damn quick and transparent with their takedowns and has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly.
MegaUpload, at the very core of the idea behind it, really was a legit file locker service but that's not how it exactly worked in practice. MegaUpload has always been one of the go-to places for pirating media. They had ads on all the popular torrent sites that linked to the same files you'd download as a torrent. Everyone knew what MegaUpload was all about and anyone claiming they were just a poor innocent file locker service must be kidding themselves.
I have a hunting knife. I use it to hunt. No one will begrudge me my knife because I use it legitimately. If I kill a man walking down the street with it however someone is going to try to stop me and take my knife. I'll protest "but it's a hunting knife, it has a perfectly legitimate use!" but it won't matter because I crossed a line just like Mega did.
> You can't compare YouTube to MegaUpload. YouTube has Google levels of traffic which MegaUpload did not.
What on Earth do traffic numbers have to do with whether a site is infringing copyrights on not??
> has never encouraged piracy either directly or implicitly.
What the Viacom vs YT/Google tough us is that the YT owners were fully aware of the files uploaded being pirated. There have been long emails transcriptions where YT owners talk with each other how long should they keep the files online to "help traffic numbers grow" before putting files down. Lookup the court case, I am short on time to look right now.
> What on Earth do traffic numbers have to do with whether a site is infringing copyrights on not?
That was in response to "YouTube has now and has had far more infringing content than Megaupload ever did."
I believe billpatrianakos is arguing that what matters is the proportion of infringing files. YouTube could have more infringing content than MegaUpload with a much lower proportion of infringing content because they have "Google levels of traffic".
So I'm speaking of today's YouTube under Google. I know that the original YouTube had a lot of infringing content and while they were decent about taking it down I'll admit they had a relaxed attitude about it.
But I don't think the original YouTube is relevant to the discussion. The modern YouTube has been around for many years and has been very consistent with complying with the DMCA. YouTube doesn't encourage the uploading of infringing content directly or implicitly in a number of ways. Theyre very quick to take down infringing content considering the volume of uploads they deal with, they have disclaimers not only in their official terms but all over the place. You can't shake a stick around YouTube without seeing some kind of notice about not uploading copyrighted content you don't own and checking the little box that says you have permission to upload the content. MegaUpload on the other hand has what I call the 'plausible deniability factor'. They too have a notice in the TOS and mention that you can't upload infringing content but their actions tell a different story. They have ads on torrent sites that link to direct downloads of the very same torrents you've been searching for. The sharing feature of MegaUpload has always been, by and large, used for sharing copyrighted content publicly as opposed to with only a select group that the original user chooses.
What MegaUpload has always done is position themselves unofficially as a file sharing site for infringing content. Basically a direct download alternative to torrents. At the same time they hid behind the plausible deniability that comes from being an innocent file locker service. Everyone knows its next to impossible to police sites that let users upload content and they used that to hide behind.
It's very difficult to argue this from a strictly legal standpoint and that's precisely what MegaUpload has always counted on. That's obvious to anyone. But I'm not arguing the legalities of how they operated exactly. I'm sure any site with user uploaded content can be brought down like MegaUpload even if they really truly were doing their utmost to operate on the up and up.
What I really want to get at is the human perspective. I just want people to stop being in denial and admit that we all knew what MegaUpload was doing. MegaUpload has always had a reputation for being a place where you can download music, movies, and software for free. There's no shortage of infringing content on the site and just a quick search for anything will show you that. Their selection of pirated media rivals that of the Pirate Bay.
It's really disturbing to me to see so many people in denial about this. It's like we all root for these underdog pirate sites and want them to succeed so badly that we're blind to the obvious reality that they really do provide a popular service largely made successful by providing infringing content.
If only a few people would just admit that then I would shut my mouth and I'd probably agree with you on the legalities.
It reminds me of tobacco shops that sell "pipes". These glass pipes they sell certainly can be used for tobacco but they aren't being used that way. Stoners walk in, totally baked, buy a glass "tobacco pipe" and fill it with weed to smoke. Tobacco pipes are totally legal and when the shop gets shut down for selling drug periphenalia all the pot-heads throw a fit and make similar arguments like people are making for MegaUpload. I would love to get on board with those arguments but I feel it's disingenuous to make that kind of argument until the stoners can admit that those tobacco pipes were really bowls for smoking weed and were used for that purpose pretty much every time.
Was MegaUpload operating legally? Gray area but yeah.. for the most part. But it was being used for a different purpose, they knew it, turned a blind eye, and hid behind plausible deniability. Arguments about whether copyright should be abolished and debates about the validity of certain laws are irrelevant to this discussion as they already exist and have been enforced since before many of us were born. It's a good debate to have but is beside the point.
> YouTube lets you watch and listen but you can't take what you see and hear home with you (read: download it).
Yes you can, and most non-tech-savvy people I know actually prefer to do that, than to download their music from torrents or "download sites". Which I can imagine because they're much less likely to get a virus and they just need a firefox extension and everybody knows how to find their favourite tunes on YouTube.
MegaUpload reportedly accounted for a quarter of all corporate traffic.
And yes, YouTube did implicitly encourage piracy. I'm not sure if you remember the days before the Google acquisition, but you could find most anything you wanted on there. I remember watching whole TV series' on there. Their laissez faire attitude towards infringing clips had a large role in making YouTube the dominant player in the online video space.
You're reaching. You'd have a good argument if YouTube was still how it was in the beginning but today's YouTube under Google has been around for a while and has been very consistent about taking down copyrighted videos for years now.
Sure, you can still find infringing videos on YouTube but the main difference is that today's YouTube neither encourages that sort of thing nor does it have anywhere near the reputation of MegaUpload. When you want to pirate some music or video you think of MegaUpload long before (post-Google) YouTube. MegaUpload always had that plausible deniability factor going for it which was smart but why do we keep kidding ourselves into thinking this is just a poor file locker service that gets abused like any legitimate site but is being picked on?
I don't think I am reaching at all. According to In The Plex, the reason that Google bought YouTube was because that race had been won by YouTube at that point, and Google had come to that realization. There are also parts in there that quote the founders talking about their lax attitude towards copyright infringement being a good thing, and it also attributes part of Google Video's failure against YouTube to their over-worrying about making sure that copyright was appropriately respected, while YouTube was letting things run wild. The tough-on-copyright-infringement behavior of YT came later. I'm not equating them with MU, I'm saying that you're dead wrong about YouTube's past.
But YouTube's past isn't relevant to my argument. Since Google bought YouTube they've been very consistent about respecting copyright and taking down content very promptly considering how much content is uploaded every day.
You can't argue this based on how the service used to be. Let me give you a weird example. I used to be a heroin addict. I did a lot of unethical and illegal things with my friends who were addicts as well. Since then I cleaned up and have consistently sober and living well for three years while one friend hasn't. Now if that friend gets arrested and put in jail over his problem is it fair to argue that I should also be in jail because back when I used I did similar or worse things than my friend? No. Of course not.
What I'm hearing is "YouTube and similar sites should be taken down too because they used to have lots of infringing content". That no longer matters. I'm sure that if YouTube continued to operate as it once did that they could be in some hot water too but arguing their past is a flimsy argument. MegaUpload had every opportunity to at least try to look like they didn't encourage infringement but they didn't. I don't see how we can compare yesterday's YouTube with today's MegaUpload.
I knew this would come up. I've even done it. But it isn't something they promote. It isn't part of YouTube itself nor emdorsed by it so you really can't make that argument. The difference I'm pointing out isnt in one's ability to download media but if the site itself was actually set up for that purpose or not.
The next argument is probably going to be something like "well YouTube should stop third party services from being able to do that" but again this is beside the point and it would be damn near impossible to stop it from happening. There's always a workaround.
Rapidshare, Youtube, Hotfile. Which of these things is not like the others?
These kinds of razzle-dazzle arguments don't make you sound more convincing. "MegaUpload wasn't mostly infringing content". "Youtube is just like Rapidshare". This is Hacker News, not a court of law; who's mind do you think you're changing with statements like that?
>Rapidshare, Youtube, Hotfile. Which of these things is not like the others?
2 are general file repositories, one is specialized toward video? All 3 are very popular and heavily trafficked sites that host infringing content, but also a non-trivial portion of non infringing content?
>who's mind do you think you're changing with statements like that?
You're right. I shouldn't bother trying to change the mind of the MafiAA believer crowd. I still try anyways.
Google is a business partner of the content industry. Serious (high-fidelity, in-release-window, substitutable commercial product) infringing content on Youtube is a headache for Google. That same content is the reason Rapidshare and MegaUpload exist.
How is it name calling if you parrot the arguments of the recording industry? Just because a number of the hacker type finds them distasteful doesn't mean you're not making the same BS arguments they are. Stop parroting their arguments and I'll stop calling a spade a spade.
>That same content is the reason Rapidshare and MegaUpload exist.
> The site still appears to have been hosting mostly infringing content.
How??! It's 25 petabytes. How many movies did the MPAA (Disney+Sony+Viacom+NewsCorp+NBCUniversal+Warner) produce, that need to have been uploaded as how many duplicates in what sort of quality??
According to Wikipedia there have been about 3500 titles released on BluRay in the US (which are by no means all represented by the MPAA, but it's an upper limit). Generally these hi-res movies are uploaded in 10GB versions, but even if they all used the full dual layer disc (50GB), that's still 3500x50GB = 175 terabyte = 0.175 petabyte. And this is being extremely generous just to get a ballpark estimate to show just by how much they miss the order of magnitude. It's probably about a fifth of this number.
Movies before BluRay have not been released or uploaded in this resolution, they're generally not bigger than 1GB (the vast majority being 700-800MB).
How many movies did the Big Six produce? It's quite hard to find that number, actually. But I'll do you one better:
One number I could find, is that there were 9157 movies produced in 1995-2012 (summing these numbers: http://www.the-numbers.com/market/MPAARatings/ ) which amounts to about 538 movies per year. Times 70 years of copyright is max 37660 movie titles that might still be copyrighted, times 50GB a piece cause they're all magically uploaded as raw BluRay rips even if they don't exist in that format, is 1,883,000 gigabytes of data. That's 1.9 petabytes.
So, that means that every movie that's been made that is still under copyright, must have had 13 duplicates in the absolute highest 50GB/BluRay format to make up for 25 petabytes of data on MegaUpload.
Except that's not right because even on BluRay you can't just inflate the quality like that until you fill 50GB, you need to fill it with actual minutes of video material so even on BluRay these movies can't have been that big.
Also I'm fairly sure that the number of movies produced between 1995 and 2012 is a rather high estimate of movie production in the past 70 years.
And then there's the fact that 13 duplicate different format rips of a movie is quite a rare sight, and most different format encodings are going to be much, much smaller than the BluRay version.
So really, there's just no way anything more than a few percent of the data on MegaUpload could have been infringing on the MPAA's rights. But they took it all offline, just to make sure.
And the more I try to wrap my head around these calculations (petabytes are HUGE!!) I'm not even sure if they could have filled it up with porn either ... what IS in those 25 petabytes, I'm getting rather curious now :)
There are something like 20 different rips of _The Muppets_ on Torrentz.eu right now. It is not at all hard for me to believe that the majority of the content on MU was infringing --- not that that matters, because it's even easier to believe that substantially all of the monetary benefits of MU involved improving access to infringing content.
It's funny how I can be so confident about MegaUpload's intent to infringe copyright. It's almost as if I had some magic ability to quote actual internal emails in which their own employees stated that the majority of their video content was infringing.
Ok, you being tptacek I'll trust that's a fact :) Even though I really wonder why you'd have seen their internal emails (??). Still there's two things (and they both could be true):
First there's the possibility that MegaUpload has no duplicate checking at all, meaning that if anyone would upload the exact same data they would just store it twice. Or thrice. That way I suppose they could get to the 25 petabyte mark.
Second, you say "majority of their video content". I can believe that too. That is, the whole "it's 25 petabyte" argument goes nowhere if we're just discussing a part of the data.
Then all I'm saying is, even if they're storing all possible MPAA protected data, in several formats and encodings, it's still a tall order to claim that involves more than a couple percent of those 25 petabytes, and taking it all offline just because a small part of it is infringing (even if that small part is rather huge), isn't quite fair. It'd be like taking the Internet offline because people are doing illegal stuff on it, right?
If anyone has a tighter estimate for the number of MPAA represented movies produced in the past 70 years, that'd be great. The number should be out there somewhere, right? I'm fairly sure that ~38k MPAA movies since 1942 is guesstimating way too high.
As a rough calculation it sounds ballpark plausible.
IMDB lists 271,106 feature films. Even if massive numbers of those fall outside the MPAA or were pre-1942, it's still quite plausible that 38k fall within those boundaries.
The interesting thing is TV, which is certainly produced at a higher gb rate than feature films these days. I don't think you can discount those from a calculation of infringing material.
