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Post by jackiek on Jan 20, 2012 8:50:10 GMT -5
I read the first 25 pages of the indictment and, while allegation does not equal guilt, some of those charges look pretty sticky - particularly that tricky business with the URLs in paragraphs 20-24 and that bit about paying users for the most popular content which would be great if what they were uploading was not directly copyrighted material but, well, if it is copyrighted material it is less defensible.
While it has been a very useful tool for showing vids and for distributing transformative work, I wonder if it might not be the best case to circle the wagons around. If those allegations stick, it will make the rest of us look rather disingenuous.
I strongly suspect that much of the content on megaupload was made up of movies and audio files that had not been transformed in any way.
I don't like the way it happened. I don't like that *all* content was taken down and probably destroyed with no chance for any users to argue fair use but, if the management was knowingly doing the stuff that they are accused of, I think it is fair that *something* happened to them.
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Post by obsessive24 on Jan 20, 2012 9:23:12 GMT -5
I've written up my reading notes/thoughts on the indictment here: obsessive24.livejournal.com/430212.htmlgiandujakiss - I'm sorry I made you feel old! I still don't know what it is, though. ;D lilly - I don't think it'll make you feel any better, but I guess it wouldn't matter if you deleted your MU account or not, they'd still have a record of it even after you delete it. Jackie - I think this case is sufficiently removed from the transformative nature of vidding that vidders shouldn't be afraid of the Mega indictment applying to us as-is, although I guess it's more about the general oppressive atmosphere of SOPA and PIPA and all this. Indeed. But again moving away from vidding, I think a lot of people, perhaps even some of us (purely in theory of course!), may have used MU or other services at some point in respect of non-transformed copyrighted works. I think it's worthwhile to gauge your own exposure in light of this. |
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Post by absolutedestiny on Jan 20, 2012 10:23:04 GMT -5
Usenet is an old technology but it still gets a lot of use for binaries (things that aren't just messages). Back in the day, usenet was a means of having a distributed bulletin board so rather than posting on a place like this, you would post to a newsgroup on usenet and your posts would be distributed and synced with many servers.
Nowadays there are fewer servers - in the past it was ISPs that ran them but nowadays that's left to big companies like Giganews.
So, on usenet you could post things, just like the post I'm writing now. You could also attach things, binaries, and newsgroups were set up for posting binaries such as, I dunno, alt.binaries.star-trek and people would post images and movies and all kinds of stuff.
As the usenet servers increased the amount of data they retain (it's now up to about 3 years of posts), usenet was seen as being better than torrents for low-popularity items because the binaries exist for as long as the host's data retention keeps them around. They can also be better than torrents for speed as a paid-for service will often have excellent bandwidth.
Usenet, however, was compliced for the average user. The old fashioned way of subscribing to a newsgroup, downloading all of the headers for the posts, finding something you want, downloading it, extracting it... it was complicated compared to a torrent. It was also hard to search for what you wanted. These days those technical limitations are bypassed with what are called .nzb files which are the usenet equivalent of a torrent file - it's a link to all the posts you'd need to get something. Sites that host .nzb files have been attacked much like torrent index sites have been but the underlying infrastructure of usenet has been largely untouched by litigation.
Anyway, that's all an aside. The takedown of megaupload was timed to coincide with the original schedule for voting on SOPA and PIPA. The long due process involved to mobilise the takedown is what SOPA and PIPA aim to circumvent - that they wont need to ask the feds or to coordinate a dubious international effort to arrest people and seize assets overseas, they'd have the powers to just stop you from visiting megaupload altogether and it would kill their business model. The objection to SOPA and PIPA was that these powers were wide-reaching, required little due process, had little recourse and would likely be massively open to abuse and chilling effects.
What we are resisting here is that there is a war for information control on the internet and while it's being presented as a war by big copyright over control of their IP really that's just the media aspect of it. It's a continual attempt to put the free information revolution genie back in the bottle so that control of information is back to being in the hands of governments, the media and the press instead of being in the hands of anyone with a twitter or youtube account. That the MPAA and RIAA are heading the charge is purely because they have the money, desire and self-righteousness to take it on. If they fail, expect to see SOPA and PIPA-like riders on all kinds of bills, particularly bills to do with child porn or other things which elected officials would find it very hard to vote against.
For everyone out there stung by the loss of Megaupload (there were plenty of legitimate reasons to use their service) there are other services out there but as usual we will just have to keep migrating.
@jackie if you want to know more about streaming video from your own site, gimme a holler as I do it on mine.
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Post by lillythekid on Jan 20, 2012 10:47:00 GMT -5
obsessive24 - Mmh, maybe this does make me feel a bit better, in a "there's nothing I could have done" way...
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Post by jackiek on Jan 20, 2012 11:48:28 GMT -5
@jackie if you want to know more about streaming video from your own site, gimme a holler as I do it on mine. You are clearly awesome. I will pass this info along to Carol and see if she would be willing to let me do some of the work involved. I am furiously working on my Peggy vid. I promise it will be done in time for Club Vivid submissions this year. |
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Post by franzeska on Jan 20, 2012 12:14:11 GMT -5
I've always done all of my online stuff under my own, highly distinctive, legal name, so I always feel pretty exposed. (No, really, you can find hideously embarrassing posts from 13 year-old me on alt.tv.x-files back during the first season. That's also, incidentally, where I was introduced to the concept of fanfic and this type of fandom. I've had the same e-mail address since then too.) Megaupload sounds like pirate central, even compared to other similar sites, but this latest wave of hysteria mainly inspires me to upload the rest of my vids to Youtube so clueless tweens can find and reshare and repost them all into eternity though. I am more than happy to have people steal my stuff if it means giving the finger to the US government and big media. If I ever win the lottery, my first donation will be to OTW. what's usenet*dies* (sorry, i just feel ... really really old right now) To be fair - does Usenet even really exist anymore? Me too. ME TOO. Usenet still exists and parts of it have even remained consistently active and un-spammy. Some people are saying that the Eternal September finally ended a few years ago. |
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Post by icepixie on Jan 20, 2012 14:47:12 GMT -5
what's usenet*dies* (sorry, i just feel ... really really old right now) Me three. (I remember posting my first fanfic to alt.startrek.creative back in the mid-nineties. I think I was twelve.) I personally feel more exposed for having a website that's being hosted, rather than just having my vids on YT or MU or wherever. I agree that it feels more exposed to have stuff on my own website. When I started vidding, I thought briefly about putting my vids up there, but quickly decided to go with Vimeo/Viddler for streaming and Mediafire for downloading because my real name is plastered all over my site (it's mostly for my photography), my hosting company has all my details, and I figured whatever the potential case for transformative or fair-use, better to stick them up somewhere where I can be at least vaguely anonymous. |
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Post by franzeska on Jan 20, 2012 15:09:35 GMT -5
Oh, hey, question about Usenet, actually: I know people shared plenty of other types of files through it back in the day, but was anyone sharing video? When I got into fandom, it was years before vids were on my radar at all. I just had no clue; I don't remember anyone mentioning them, not even talking about seeing them at cons or something.
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Post by legoline on Jan 20, 2012 15:45:42 GMT -5
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Post by franzeska on Jan 20, 2012 15:53:22 GMT -5
I particularly like the bit where he says that American intellectual property needs to be protected from "foreign thieves". OKAY!  Ah, that mysterious form of accounting where 'dollars we thought we ought to earn this year based on decades-old predictions' = 'dollars 100% definitely lost due to piracy' and not, you know, a sign of poor abilities with financial projections. I like that Black March idea, except I wasn't likely to buy anything anyway then, so there's no point in me making a big fuss about it. |
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Post by icepixie on Jan 20, 2012 16:05:59 GMT -5
Oh, hey, question about Usenet, actually: I know people shared plenty of other types of files through it back in the day, but was anyone sharing video? When I got into fandom, it was years before vids were on my radar at all. I just had no clue; I don't remember anyone mentioning them, not even talking about seeing them at cons or something. My experience lines up with yours. I think the closest I ever saw on Usenet was people who missed the most recent episode of something begging to have copies mailed to them on VHS. The first I ever heard of vids was on a mailing list around 2000, when someone offered copies of hers on VHS. |
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Post by legoline on Jan 20, 2012 16:25:57 GMT -5
I like that Black March idea, except I wasn't likely to buy anything anyway then, so there's no point in me making a big fuss about it. I like the idea, too, I just wonder if the idea reaches beyond fandom and other frequent users and would thus have that much of an impact on the economy... |
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Post by jackiek on Jan 20, 2012 17:26:28 GMT -5
Well, foreign theives perhaps not the greatest phrasing but, I can forgive him for that if he is taking the bill away. The comb-over, though is really uncalled for. Does this mean I can buy stuff in March now? |
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Post by littleheaven on Jan 20, 2012 20:44:25 GMT -5
I use Usenet all the time! There are companies that offer annual subscriptions (about 80 euros from memory) and you get a certain download limit per month. It's direct download rather than torrenting, so it's (currently) immune from NZ's file sharing crackdown laws, were you to download something that was copyrighted. It has a user interface application which enables you to search, download and extract the files you want. The database of stuff that's available is massive.
I assume that you could use it to share vids, just as others do for video, music, software, text, etc.
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Post by barkley on Jan 21, 2012 11:18:44 GMT -5
Oh, hey, question about Usenet, actually: I know people shared plenty of other types of files through it back in the day, but was anyone sharing video? Yes! I used to go to alt.binaries.x-files to get .wavs so I could put them in all my windows sound prompts. And then one day I found some vids (I believe they were set to Sarah MacLachlan) and I loved them. But most of the video files were short and fuzzy in nature, not full episodes, due probably in part to bandwidth issues. As it was, 10 MB took forever and ever to download over a dial-up modem and codecs were not what they are today. So they were mostly posting the previews for the next week or outtakes. (The good part is you could queue them all up in your newsreader and download all the different parts as you slept though.) Cable modems coming on the scene probably brought about the full episode posting. |
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