| > As a US citizen, this case makes me sick to my stomach. MU was the hub of piracy on the net. And from the figures posted, netted 400 million dollars from it. It's not something that was going to be ignored, even with a legitimate upload service being offered, because the primary monetary driver for that company was tricking and/or getting people to sign-up when visiting a page to d/l pirated content. All the US gov will have to show is a statistical sample of 10,000 random accounts, and correlate their signup to first entry ... a page hosting pirated content... More or less. And when that comes back to show that 99% of paid-users d/l pirated content, it's over. Anyone with access to the Apache or nginx access logs and the hosted files could do half of that in their sleep. What I'm sick of is there are people who choose to ignore the facts, and idolize this man who's entire history for the last two decades revolves around criminal activities and lawsuits. But hey, this is America and you're entitled to your opinion. Perhaps you know of a better country...
http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-... |
I'd like a source for that. I believe TPB is and was in that position. I also believe that rapidshare and all those other sites had a similar amount of pirated content. In general you'd have a mirror of a given file across 3 or so sites which would indicate MU wasn't that far different from those commonly used as mirrors.
>statistical sample of 10,000 random accounts, and correlate ... pirated content
Why? That shows that people downloaded pirated content (which makes the downloaders guilty, not MU). I don't see how that makes MU guilty.
>Anyone with access to the Apache or nginx access logs and the hosted files could do that in their sleep.
uhhhhhh no. Not at all. How the heck to you figure out if a file is actually legal or not? How do you tell if a downloader of a file legitimately owned that file or not? An artist once distributed his album to me via MU after I paid (I wanted it in a different format than was avaliable via automatic download). I was a legal downloader, but if I gave the link to my friend he/she would have downloaded it illegally. To do such a thing they would have to first catagorize all the content, determine the copyright holder, ask the holder if it was a legal download, wait on the copyright holder to look through his/her probably nonexistant logs, and so on. This is not easy.
> idolize this man who's entire history for the last two decades revolves around criminal activities and lawsuits.
His past doesn't matter in this regard. I don't actually see how any of what you posted matters. Sure, there's piracy on MU. That doesn't mean it was illegal since they apparently obeyed the DMCA.
>It's not something that was going to be ignored
Indeed, it looks like the US government isn't ignoring it even though it was likely legal and are using underhanded methods in order to destroy the business, probably due to the lobbying money from the entertainment industry. If the government not following the law to persecute someone who's not breaking the law, and isn't even a citizan of the united states, doesn't make you sick to your stomach then I'm not sure what our government could do to do such a thing.