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posted by on Monday February 20 2017, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-kim-dotcom-is-annoying dept.

Megaupload's business model isn't too far off from what cloud hosting providers such as Google Drive, Box, Spideroak, Dropbox, and the others still do today. Yet they are the only ones singled out for legal attacks over their business model.

Five years ago the US Government launched a criminal case against Megaupload and several of its former employees. One of the main allegations in the indictment is that the site only deleted links to copyright-infringing material, not the actual files. Interestingly, this isn't too far off from what cloud hosting providers such as Google Drive and Dropbox still do today.

[...] One of the main arguments in the indictment is that Megaupload would only disable a URL when it received a takedown notice, not the underlying file. As a result of the deduplication technology it employed, this meant that the file could still be accessed under different URLs.

[...] The apparent 'failure' to block infringing content from being uploaded by other users isn't illegal by definition. In fact, neither Google Drive nor Dropbox does this today. So how is the Megaupload situation different?

The main difference appears to be that Megaupload only removed the links that were reported as infringing, while Dropbox and Drive also prevent others from publicly sharing links to the same file. All three services keep or kept the original files on their servers though.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @09:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @09:46PM (#469455)

    The difference is the depth of their pockets... and who these pockets buy.

    Also remember Kim Dotcom threatened the music industry with building a distribution platform to legally distribute music that would've shortcircuited dead the current labels?

    Then the MAFIAA didn't even hesitate to DCMA his own song taking it down.