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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: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:20AM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:20AM (#469546) Journal

    That was pretty much what I was going to say — I've used Dropbox, Spider Oak, Google Drive, etc. and as far as I'm aware, none of them have ever offered incentive schemes based on how many people accessed the files. Even beyond that, all of those services have advertised themselves as a place to back up personal files and added on limited sharing later, while MegaUpload advertised itself as a file distribution/sharing service from the get-go (which is why the front page featured popular artists, IIRC).

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