Well if you read the article that doesn't matter in this case since it's a criminal case not civil (in which it could be argued that the system in place was inadequate). The article claims that what needs to be shown is intent on violating the DMCA requirements which I'm not sure the FBI has that strong of a case about. They had a system in place and responded to request showing that they were at the very least doing the bare minimum to comply and thus weren't (in my opinion, with what I know), blatantly trying to violate the DMCA.
Yes I understand the argument put forward in the article, but I was curious about the steps Megaupload took to try to conform with US law.
All of this is crazy, and the point in the article is very much valid in my opinion, on the other hand if the copyright holder allegedly affected were to sue Megaupload in a civil case in the country that Megaupload operates from then that would be perfectly fine in my opinion. I don't agree with the copyright laws that exist at the moment, but everyone should have the right to try to protect their rights in court, even if I don't personally agree with the law.
The reason I asked about what steps Megaupload made to comply with DMCA complaints, and what the law says about DMCA take downs, was out of curiosity about the legal landscape and the chances of Megaupload in this case, even though it shouldn't be a criminal case.
Apparently they responded to DMCA requests to take down individual links. But they did nothing to stop the same file from being uploaded again with a new link.
I am not sure if that is required by the DMCA. I know youtube has this "fingerprinting" system that stops copyrighted uploads, but is that the law?
The argument they will presumably make is that their system is a deduplicating file storage system. That one instance is infringing does NOT automatically mean another instance is infringing. For example, assuming the court agrees that personal backup copies can legally be kept, deleting the actual file instead of the links could delete legitimate backup copies. See the number of artists that were features as claiming to use Megaupload in their ads, for example...
Even other public links might be legitimate, and Megaupload would not have a way of determining that based merely on the presence of links.
Do I think they were aware that there were tons of illegal copies? Absolutely. But whether or not they could blanket delete content without in effect deleting content the people filing the DMCA takedown requests had no rights to request taken down is an entirely different matter.
Indeed, a fingerprinting system doesn't tell you what "legal color" the bits are (http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23). One copy of a file can be infringing while another, identical copy, is legit.