| reply to the cerberus
Re: Megaupload crushed because they are/were pirates actually there are a lot of inaccuracy in the indictment. I have worked in the Anti-Piracy industry and have some knowledge of Megaupload and similar sharehosting sites.
Yes, Megaupload does pay under certain conditions Premium account holders for uploading files as part of the reward program. However, it's still a far stretch for the DoJ to claim that Megaupload pays pirates to upload copyright infringing files. The reason:
1) As has already been widely discussed, Megaupload is used for a number of legitimate purposes, to share open source contents, game mods, and among academics to share research related contents. You can't simply claim that Megaupload is only used to share copyright infringing contents. I don't have any exact statistics but I believe the majority of files on Megaupload are actually legitimate. Still, due to the large amount of contents stored on Megaupload, there is a large chunk of infringing contents.
2) Megaupload only pays if the file has been downloaded certain number of times, and I know the number is extremely high. Most pirated contents will never be able to hit that number because the distribution is very decentralized. One pirated movie is uploaded by hundreds of people/sources resulting in hundreds of copy. The number of downloads for each copy is thus diluted.
3) Megaupload exclude large files from the reward program. However, most copyright infringing contents such as movies are very large. Yes, uploaders often split files but you really got to split into very small files in order to meet the file size requirement to get paid. Nowadays, most people prefer to download contents in single file or 1GB splits so the smaller splits won't get much downloads. |
