[Zigurd]

Be careful what you wish for. A big slice of the tech industry builds surveillance technology and sells it to anyone globally. Would you trust such a lobby not to lobby for protectionism if US companies were losing business to overseas providers of verifiable secure services?

[jlgreco]

There are already people lobbying heavily for all the shitty things I could see a tech lobby lobbying for. MPAA/RIAA, protectionist labor unions, 'military-industrial complex', etc.

Tech lacks representation though, particularly compared with how much lobbying much less affluent industries manage to do.

[eliasmacpherson]

I think specific parts of tech, lobby specifically, for their specific interests - and those specifics aren't aligned with other players.

Far be it from me to understand the finer points - but to my mind, youtube isn't a whole lot different from megaupload - but you can bet Google has top class lobbyists and lawyers, whereas megaupload did not.

[nly]

Everything on Youtube is publicly indexed. It's therefore accessible to copyright holders and authorities. Megaupload (and all file lockers) were set-up as if your uploads are personal and private, but to still allow files to be shared by passing around direct URLs. This is why Rapidshare (who were once one of the biggest of them all) ditched their sharing capability and are now left alone. It's the cliques that are the problem to vested interests, not the frivolous sharing.

[jlgreco]

> Everything on Youtube is publicly indexed.

That is not actually the case. Youtube has a concept of both private and unlisted videos. Unlisted videos work similarly to how you describe Megaupload:

"Unlisted videos

Making a video unlisted means that only people who have the link to the video can view it. To share an unlisted video, just share the link with the people who you’d like to have access to it, and they’ll then be able to see it. Unlike private videos, the people you share the video with do not need to have a Google account to see the video, and they can share with more people simply by forwarding the link to them.

Unlisted videos won’t appear in any of YouTube's public spaces, like your channel page or search results."

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/157177?hl=en

[nly]

Ok, put another way... all videos on Youtube are videos and relatively transparent, easy to view and inspect. On a file locker your files are opaque mysterious entities that the site can't hope to inspect.

[jlgreco]

So like Google Drive?

Not to incriminate myself or anything, but I have been given copyrighted documents with Google Drive. (Though I've ingested many orders of magnitude more copyrighted documents through youtube...)

[eliasmacpherson]

Can you embed private videos on youtube in a webpage?

[jlgreco]

I have no idea, I've never actually uploaded anything to youtube.

[eliasmacpherson]

I don't follow. In what way was megaupload inaccessible? Rapidshare have had to ditch their sharing capability - and yet youtube continues unimpeded. Can you explain what I am misunderstanding?

[rayiner]

The difference is that Youtube takes advantage of the DMCA safe harbor provision by responding to DMCA takedown requests. Indeed, the Youtube/Viacom litigation was instrumental in the current understanding between media companies and internet companies that sharing sites could operate freely as long as they complied with DMCA requirements. Megaupload in comparison made it a point to bill itself as a facilitator of copyright infringement.

[eliasmacpherson]

I'm not sure I remember it billing itself as a facilitator of copyright infringment and I do seem to recall megaupload responding to DMCA requests. I remember in response to their indictment megaupload said that the DMCA requests they didn't respond to were on machines that had some other legal instrument demanding they not interfere with the evidence.

I wasn't sure how youtube's private videos worked but jlgreco has explained above - further blurring the lines in my view between megaupload et al and youtube.

I think the litigation you mention is evidence of Google's lawyering and lobbying prowess.