Yep, it's happened, Mega Upload has been shut down. Whilst I'm not an advocate of using it or a regular user, the message it sends out is important and disgusting, the fact that FBI believe they can set up a sting in any country and just arrest people because their job was related to a company. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369 It appears though that this was done in revenge to the blackout date. http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...stice.gov/opa/pr/2012/January/12-crm-074.html
I don't really see a problem with this. If the allegations are true (and apparently there's enough evidence to support them being true to get an indictment), MegaUpload hasn't just been neglectful in taking down copyright infringing materials (in which case, this would be pretty unfair), they have been purposely avoiding and breaking copyright laws and encouraging illegal pirating of media to make money off of advertising revenue. According to the article you posted, they allegedly: "Paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world" "Manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users" "Failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement" "Selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers" "Deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, [...] the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file." Showing that they (if the charges are true) had the intention of breaking said copyright laws. Additionally, it wasn't just the FBI setting up a sting in other countries personally and intruding in those countries, it was them notifying other countries in which the MegaUpload staff had servers and/or residence in which MegaUpload's actions were illegal of those possible infractions, and gaining their willing cooperation, having them execute stings/investigations themselves. While the SOPA/PIPA supporters may be using it to further their own case, the investigations were conducted, and most likely planned, weeks before the blackout dates, and were, in my opinion, justified (although, they really should have allowed users time to recover any hosted files that they didn't have backups of). Edit: Woops, double post due to the [BB] website saying that it was "down". By the way, the website is acting sort of slow, any idea why?
I approve of this. Anybody who used megaupload was dumb anyway. Serves them right. This has nothing to do with sopa/pipa/anyotherdumbsoundingacronym
Lets move all forum posts to the Platinum section to keep all our secwets hidden! :< Also, how would one go about checking through tens of thousands of pages of data to find copyrighted material?
It's not the site (unless areas are actually loading slow for you), it's Cloudflare, their DNS system has been a bit iffy as of late. As for Mega Upload and illegal stuff - They were trying pretty hard to stamp out anything infringing and were actually hosting a large number of legitimate files. They were trying to become a form of Youtube but somewhat more premium.
Ah. Alright. My opinion is based off of the evidence that the investigations gathered, which opposes them trying hard to stamp out infringing files. However, I do think (as previously stated) that they need to allow for some method for users to download files for a certain time period so that people can recover files that will be lost in the shut down.
The only part of the mega network still up is their CDN / Static servers which for some reason weren't taken down.
I downloaded stuff from megaupload, but it was mostly free stuff like lawl4kids image folder, and other pic collabs So what else is gonna be taken down?
We will find out soon if New Zealand will release him on Bail or extradite him to the US. New Zealand has a different law system and I would see him getting Bail due to those laws.
Honestly, if MU went down, I can't figure out why they can't take out 4chan for all that child porn, copyrighted material, and blatant ways with which to produce illicit products (e.g. marijuana recipes). I mean, that guy, Christopher something, lives in New York if I'm not mistaken, and hosts his servers on U.S. soil.
Because Poole is not responsible for the content posted. It seems (after reading the report) that they were profiting from pirated materials purposely and were even trying to bulk up their own video service by ripping stuff from Youtube automatically.
4chins is just free speech with images. Nothing illegal about that. Your implying that copying and pasting from google images is illegal.
Except that a reasonable amount of illicit things (mentioned in my first post) can be easily found on the site, and are tolerated by the administrator, Poole (I think his first name is Christopher). Pretty sure the law applies if the owner is not actively removing the content, user-posted or not. That makes more sense. I haven't really had time to look into it too much, but that sounds more plausible.
Except, posting weed recipes is far from illegal. Child porn can be posted on any website, he has active moderators to clean up the boards if such things are posted, they are not tolerated at all by moot, you should stop assuming things.