[tptacek]

Thanks for digging that up. It's instructive to read the evidence in the Viacom suit and compare it with the MegaUpload indictment. Again and again, the management of Youtube struggles with the copyright problem. Clear directives are given to remove full-length videos. The legality of clips from Comedy Central are constantly questioned. When Jawed Karim himself posts a copyrighted video, the rest of the team seems angry. And yes, repeatedly, the Youtube team is shown to be sensitive to the impact that copyright enforcement will have on their user stats.

There is no such conflict in the Mega emails. Kim Schmitz is show repeatedly to be concerned solely with maximizing the value of the content Mega stores to users. The operators of Megaupload are repeatedly shown to be aware of specific infringing content --- sometimes because they themselves used it, sometimes because their users pointed it out, and in some cases because they paid to have it put there.

Could there have been a criminal infringement charge leveled against Youtube? Based on this evidence, it looks like "maybe". But would DOJ have won the case? Almost certainly not. Read the judgements in the Viacom case. The founders are repeatedly found not to have had awareness of specific infringements. The DOJ doesn't bring cases it doesn't think it can win.

[eliasmacpherson]

> There is no such conflict in the Mega emails. Kim Schmitz is show repeatedly to be concerned solely with maximizing the value of the content Mega stores to users. The operators of Megaupload are repeatedly shown to be aware of specific infringing content --- sometimes because they themselves used it, sometimes because their users pointed it out, and in some cases because they paid to have it put there.

Agree with everything you wrote except the above. Basically the disagreement is on the source materials - one is a naive Viacom and the other is an indictment. So I think the indictment is cherrypicked "better" than Viacom managed.

If e.g. the FBI/DOJ were going after youtube I think they would have quoted more selectively than Viacom did.

Unless the full text of Mega's emails are out there - I can't be sure there's no conflict, I'm sure someone could dredge up him ordering something taken down.

Again with "repeatedly" and "specific" - the youtube emails, for all their conflict are repeated and specific, many times. There's also instances of youtube employee's grabbing stuff from other sites and putting it there themselves, which mega are accused of. I'm pretty sure with youtube's channel system, copyrighted content is paid to be put there in the same manner, though I'm not sure how youtube's early users were compensated.

I doubt the thought occured to them to bring a criminal case against youtube - that's one of the points I'm wildly speculating on - or if it was the case, lobbying stemmed it.

I'll have a read of the ruling: (PDF) http://www.legalbytes.com/uploads/file/Viacom-YouTube%20%28G...

[tptacek]

The full text of Mega emails are included in the indictment. If Viacom could have quoted anything of a similar magnitude, they absolutely would have. You should read the indictment. It's damning. And fun reading!

[eliasmacpherson]

I remember enjoying reading the indictment, but I don't recall all of Mega's emails being there, that's what I was getting at. Given a sufficiently large sample - I'm sure you could find exonerating material.

[tptacek]

How do you exonerate the guy who has one of his users complain that a pirated Dexter video has poor quality and then complains to his team about the low quality of the pirated Dexter videos on his site? He's been caught red handed.

The only argument I've ever heard that could exculpate Schmitz is that "perhaps the video uploads could have been authorized." But that beggars belief. No reasonable person on a jury would buy that Schmitz seriously entertained the idea that those videos were authorized uploads.

[eliasmacpherson]

Well I've set the bar low to mean exonerate the guy to the extent that he's only as bad as the youtube crowd:

"On September 23,2005, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley emailed YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, stating: "can we remove the flagging link for 'copyrighted' today? we are starting to see complaints for this and basically if we don't remove them we could be held lìable for being served a notice.

it's actually better if we don't have the lìnk there at all because then the copyright holder is responsible for serving us notice of the material and not the users. anyways, it would be good if we could remove this asap."

Their only mitigating behaviour is the moral dilemma they exhibit, I'm sure something similar could be pulled from Mega's email archives - again my point being the FBI/DOJ are better at making a case than Viacom.