File Share Site Taken Down

[John Wagenseil]

Yesterday the entre file share site Megaupload was taken down for hosting copyrighted material.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/technology/megaupload-indictment-internet-piracy.html?src=me&ref=technology)

In that a large source of pirated material has been eliminated this could benefit designers and publishers of paper models.
However, it also means that the existence of one of the means paper modelers share legitimate material is threatened, since other file sharing sites are also at risk for being taken completely down for the same reasons that Megaupload was taken down.
In the long run sites that host or even refer material were the copy right is ambiguous, or vintage material where the copyright has been abandoned (such as advertisting material, or where the copy right holders no longer exist to get a release from will be of having their owners subjected to criminal prosecution. Site owners will be responsible for everything that is posted to their sites by third parties.
Access to vintage materials from the 1930's and '40s which no one still has a commercial interest in will be forbidden, since there are no explicit documents making the material copyright free. And it would not be worth the legal costs in most cases hunting down the owners, or for large corporate owners if they are located, to take the time to release that material to the public domain. It would be cheaper for them just to ignore it and in effect lock the materail away forever.
We have already seen that this can lead to the shut down of what had been one of the best paper model sites on the web. Herr Pleiner closed his karton model forum since he could not be sure of complying with all German laws governing internet media presentation.
Even releasing a free model to the internet may become an expensive process requiring recourse to attorneys in order to make the item free from copyright restrictions.
For example most of the donated models in the download section are probably not acompanied by extensive legal documentation about their free status, therefore their copy right status is ambiguous, putting just about every one associated with them, from the designer for not following proper proceedures, to the site host to the downloader, could be at risk of legal persecution under laws currently being considered but not yet enacted (SOPA)
This is something to think and decide how it will affect your hobby, the way you obtain entertainment and perhaps even the way you do your job.
If this is a concern to you go to Google or Wiki and see what they have posted on the subject, and consider signing one of the petitions or download a letter you can sent to your senator and congressman.

[Thomas Meek]

John;
At first, the idea of a law to stop Internet piracy sounds like a good thing, but as you have shown, things are not as simple as they seem. Thank you for explaining how this law could have a negative impact on our hobby. I have written to my Congressman and Senators asking them to vote against this bill if it should reach the Floor.

I am as much against piracy as anybody, but we must be careful that, in fighting piracy (which is theft) we do not destroy our freedom to communicate with each other.

[whulsey]

John, some great comments there...especially since with anything such as this you have to be really carefull about not 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. A lot like the whole airport-TSA thing. Are we any safer versus the level of privacy and freedom lost?

[cgutzmer]

I agree its a bit over the top to take it all down. But how many non copyrighted things do you find on those filesharing sites vs public domain files. The problem I personally have with those sites is there is no accountability to the person that shared the illegal files. NONE - NADA - ZIP - ZILCH. The most I could do to stop a file from being shared was to report it to the host, they would ALWAYS promptly delete them but then they would just get shared again within a few days (usually)

That dude (or dudette) that shares the file has nothing to lose and total anonymity.

A much better way to fight the problem IMHO is to take that away. For example make them have a REAL account verified with a $1 charge for a lifetime membership via credit card or something similar. If the person is sharing legitimate files then hey no problem, nothing to worry about. I would guess that people that share out hundreds of paper models or songs or movies or whatever else they desire, had their account verified to a real person (themselves) they would be a little more hesitant in what they would share. Well that or their parents would be pretty irate when they got a call....

once again purely my opinion...
Chris

[SJPONeill]

Agree totally with Chris - that is a good and practical method for overcoming a large proportion of the accountability issues - and for those that whine about not having a credit card, well, just tough...the world is changing...

[John Wagenseil]

Chris, I agree with you that piracy is a problem and it denies the author of new material the right to profit from his/her work.
The big file sharing sites generate huge profits for their operators through the outright theft of other people's intellectual property.
Taking down Megaupload is not a bad thing. However, what could happen beyond that is a major cause for concern.
Let us assume that SOPA passes and that there was such a thing as a rich and influential paper model publishing industry cartel. What if the paper model cartel decided this site was a threat to its control of the paper model market. Since nothing here is properly licensed, the paper model cartel could use its lobbying power to bring action against this site and have it taken down.

The problem is that SOPA as written and if strictly applied can make even sites like this one a 'Pirate site' because the public domain status of each of its offerings, each post and each link are not adequately documented. You'd have to contact each content author, each link target and have him/her/it sign off on some legal boiler plate, and attach it to each down load, each internal and external link, each post, and every single image in order to legitimize them. And what if there is a link to a site where copyright law is different from that of the US? Or to a site whose owner does not understand legal English and is unwilling to sign off on the document you must have if you are to legally link to his/her/its content. Bye, bye most Asian models. And bye bye vintage models if you cannot prove they are pre 1923 or that their creators or the heirs of the creators have abandoned copyright.
A lot of open source software and donation ware would also bite the dust if their developers do not have the financial resources to properly document their offerings. Eventually the Open Source Foundation or similar would get around to posting some standard forms to download and paste onto anything you wanted to offer on the internet, but even that might become a problem in recursiveness (certifying that the downloaded legal boilerplate is a legal download that was legitimately downloaded, ect ect) or making it broad enough to fit different media, prose, images, software ect.
You can bet your tuchas that MS for example would spend major dollars to use SOPA as a tool to try put an end to Linux, Open Office and Libre Office downloads and open source alternatives to its media player.
SOPA is a sledge hammer piece of legislation where something more subtle is needed. Megaupload was a major offender of intellectual property law, and was taken down. This shows that intellectual property rights can be protected without creating what essentially amounts to the nationalized internet SOPA would mandate.

(Various micropayment concepts have been floated as methods of seeing that content providers get reimbursed for their creative work. Actually the problem with almost all distribution schemes is that the attornies and distributors get the largest share of the cash flow, and only a tiny trickle gets to the actual content author.)

A heavy handed application of SOPA or similar law can become a vehicle for internet censorship.
The entertainment industry is not facing up to the reality that if a product can be digitized it will be pirated. The movie and music industries within living memory made their money, and a lot of it, with live or theater performances. They want to infinitely scale up their incomes by selling recordings while not being willing to tolerate the risk that the recordings can be copied and distributed outside their market network.
If they do not want their media product pirated with high quality copies, then they should only offer it in the form of live or theatrical performances and forego the home market, or create a technology that makes their product pirate proof while not imposing that technology on people who are willing to forego their product.
The entertainment industry should not be able to use its influence to impose draconian controls on internet access and linking in order to protect an obsolescent marketing model, at the cost of doing damage to the information exchange that keeps the rest of the US economy going.

[CharlieC]

Looking at the SOPA/PIPA affair from outside the US it seems that you have a legislature which is, at least partially, under the control of corporate copyright owners. The provisions in the proposed law to attack overseas hosted websites to my eyes is just a legalisation of organised standover scams - as in "pay me $xxx or I'll issue a SOPA order to take down your website and the only way to object is to (expensively) take the case to a US court". I run a couple of websites which rely on public domain and out of copyright images and text which could easily be attacked by this legislation.

The whole issue of copyright in the US seems to be approaching a level of idiocy that makes most people just shake their heads. The recent US Supreme Court decisions to allow Congress to arbitrarily extend copyright length and to bring material in the public domain under copyright makes one think that Thomas Jefferson (remember him - one of the signers of the US Constitution) was right in opposing copyright in any form because he believed it would restrict trade and hinder the spread of knowledge.

To imagine that taking down a few file sharing websites is going to materially affect the volume of pirated material around the Internet probably says more about declining education standards and a failure of critical thinking in the US rather than being grounded in any reality. As endless examples have shown - technology beats law every time.

One can forsee a possible end point to all of this with a new "great firewall" to keep the US out of the Internet and let the rest of the world get on with business.

Regards,

Charlie

[Texman]

...
One can forsee a possible end point to all of this with a new "great firewall" to keep the US out of the Internet and let the rest of the world get on with business.

Regards,

Charlie

Think China. Sadly, I too see this coming. Government is not of, by and for the people anymore. It is for big bucks and those with it.

[hancocp]

The reaction to the Megaupload take-down and arrests is spreading. Filesonic have stopped any form of file sharing so you can only access your own files now, and several other sites (Fileserve, Filejungle) have said they are considering it. Over the last 72 hours there has been a massive purge of uploaded content on all the major filehosting sites.

[Texman]

I do believe in the copyright issue. Your work is your work, and no one
should make a profit, or deny you your profit, from your work. Lest it be
misunderstood, I do not believe that the broad ranging, swat a fly with
Buick mentality is the best course of action. There are other, more
precise methods, rather than taking down entire sites/internet accessability
options.

[The-EDSEL]

MegaUpLoad was more of a Storage facility too.
If they want to Stop the sharing of Copy-write music & Video, they need to Block/Close P2P groups like emule, Torrent, Limeware, etc.

I used Mega as an off site storage/back up for CD's I only have poor copies of.
Now, I Definitely need at least one external Hard-Drive!!

Plus, I would love to see their reaction when I go to them to
Buy/Order CD's & DVD's Not sold in the US that I can not longer Get On-line!!

[Nemesis7485]

Personally, I think the taking down of MegaUpload is a good thing. That is an opinion based on my visceral hatred of internet pirates, rather than any deeply thought out analysis of the subject. IMO, the vast majority of files stored/shared on these sites are pirate/illegal content and well they know it. Again, this is opinion not based on any hard facts.

My only gripe about this is that it took whining from big guns like the movie industry to get it done when many, many of us "little people" have been screaming about it for years. Much the same attitude applies to hackers. Joe public and small time website owners can be hacked all day long and the culprits are never brought to book, UNTIL a Government agency or financial institution is hit and then the scumbags are traced, caught, extradited (if necessary), charged and slammed in the pokey in the blink of an eye.

If it takes the sacrificing of MegaUpload to make the rest of the numerous similar services tow the line, then I'm all for it.

[Zathros]

Personally, I think the taking down of MegaUpload is a good thing. That is an opinion based on my visceral hatred of internet pirates, rather than any deeply thought out analysis of the subject. IMO, the vast majority of files stored/shared on these sites are pirate/illegal content and well they know it. Again, this is opinion not based on any hard facts.

My only gripe about this is that it took whining from big guns like the movie industry to get it done when many, many of us "little people" have been screaming about it for years. Much the same attitude applies to hackers. Joe public and small time website owners can be hacked all day long and the culprits are never brought to book, UNTIL a Government agency or financial institution is hit and then the scumbags are traced, caught, extradited (if necessary), charged and slammed in the pokey in the blink of an eye.

If it takes the sacrificing of MegaUpload to make the rest of the numerous similar services tow the line, then I'm all for it.

Great post. Now that I know the consensus is building that only rich people are served by the governments, I do agree that it was not a good sign of things to come. Joe Public could never get his work protected unless it was a Mega money making movie. I don't believe in downloading movies off of the nett. It seems stupid anyways. With bandwith being charged by how many G's a month you download, I don't think it had much of a future in it anyways. These movies cost around $10 to $15 dollars when they first come out, $4 dollars to rent. I usually wait a week and the video store sells me a used copy for $8.00 dollars and guarantees it has no skips. :)

[Spaceguy5]

I agree with the gripes about piracy, but this was totally the wrong way of handling it. A great deal of legitimate people were hurt by this, and will be continued to be hurt by this. I've heard many stories of people losing backups of important files (some even work related) because they were hosted. Plus a number of people shared their work solely through these websites.

One thing to keep in mind though: When someone pirates a movie/song/piece of software/whatever (really, the term pirate is a misnomer since nothing is 'stolen'), the content owner doesn't really lose out. If someone walked up to my car and made an exact duplicate then drove off, I wouldn't care. In general most of the ones pirating are either doing it because they're poor and can't afford the original work (no lost sale), because they want to try before they buy (Who wants to shell out $60 for a game only to find out it's a buggy piece of rushed crap that doesn't work?), or in the case of video games, because their copy was damaged or they were locked out by overprotective DRM software. I know this because pirating is -veerrry- common, especially around college kids. The people that care about the product and enjoy it will pay for it as long as it's affordable; a lot of people I know will download music and if they don't like it delete it, but if they like it, go out and legibly buy it. In fact there's many free projects (including open source and public domain) that are very popular yet run solely by donation.

Perhaps if companies (particularly music, movie, software, and game companies) charged more reasonable prices for their works, piracy would be much less common. With digital distribution, they don't need to charge $60 for a digital download of a game when they aren't paying as much for marketing, packaging, distribution, etc. Yet they still choose to charge the same price for a digital download as they do for a store-bought copy. They need to learn to adjust to new changes in technology instead of clinging to outdated business models that are designed to suck as much money from consumers as they think they can get away with.

[OhioMike]

"If someone walked up to my car and made an exact duplicate then drove off, I wouldn't care.".......but Ford or Chevy might have a problem with that!

"Perhaps if companies (particularly music, movie, software, and game companies) charged more reasonable prices for their works, piracy would be much less common.".......its called supply and demand, part of the capitalist system that so many young folk hate cause they dont understand, or are just used to getting everything for free? If the price is to high there will be less sales and the price will go down or the company out of business!

[SJPONeill]

They are not being charged so much for hosting copyrighted material - the vetting of which would be impossible - but for allegedly offering incentives for the uploading of popular copyrighted material which then earning them more advertising revenue, i assume, through a "$ for clicks" system...

[Spaceguy5]

They are not being charged so much for hosting copyrighted material - the vetting of which would be impossible - but for allegedly offering incentives for the uploading of popular copyrighted material which then earning them more advertising revenue, i assume, through a "$ for clicks" system...

Yeah that seemed to be the biggest issue; they acknowledged that many of the most-clicked downloads were from copyrighted material. The fact that they acknowledged it yet didn't stop it is what's damning. There's no way that someone can justify making a profit at someone else's expense without consent.


"Perhaps if companies (particularly music, movie, software, and game companies) charged more reasonable prices for their works, piracy would be much less common.".......its called supply and demand, part of the capitalist system that so many young folk hate cause they dont understand, or are just used to getting everything for free? If the price is to high there will be less sales and the price will go down or the company out of business!

Explain to me why someone should pay the same price as a physical copy for a downloadable copy. You get less, it costs less to the company, yet you still pay the same price? It isn't fair to the consumers, and it's the reason why I only buy games through digital download when they're 50-75% off. You're right, supply and demand; The demand is lower because there's people that realize they're being ripped off and prefer to pirate instead, yet instead of decreasing prices, the big corporations prefer to bully people into paying it. For example in Australia, brand new games cost about $120 USD. Most Australians instead import games from other places. Instead of lowering the price in Australia, the corporations are lobbying to get laws passed that will stop legit importing.

[codex34]

What about all the stolen game content this site links to and distributes?
I recently reverse engineered some game formats that were produced for Games Workshop, after reading their policy for their content, it explicitly states that none of their content is to be used for paper modeling purposes.
Yet I see Games workshop content posted time and again on this site.

I also see more and more game content be churned out as 'paper models' without ANY thought as to it's legality.
I do know of some games that were released as, or later as, open content, but the vast majority isn't, most of the time the ACTUAL 3D game content is being released without permission. Sometimes no attempt is even made to turn it into 'fan-art', the model is just released unfolded, apparently this is acceptable.

I don't see that anyone has the right to complain about internet piracy, or pirated paper models, when this site is promoting the piracy of 3D game content.

It does hurt this community by allowing such content to go unchecked, i've seen many modelers give up, unable to compete with the deluge of pirated models, less and less people want to produce their own original content, let alone share it.

Well that's just my opinion, i'm off to reverse engineer the microsoft train sim format.
ARRRRRR JIM LAD.

[Spaceguy5]

Pretty much, the best way to solve any problem is to first identify the source, and fix it. As someone on another forum pointed out about piracy:

I'm not sure why all of a sudden there seems to be a surge on anti-piracy laws. Piracy has been rampant ever since writable media came into place, so why now? I keep seeing figures banded around about how piracy costs publishers £Xbillions every year, but I just don't buy it. When you look at it, there are 3 main types of pirate

1) The bored pirate. This is the most common pirate. These pirates will basically browse torrent sites like some of us browse TV channels. They're not looking for anything in particular, but if something catches their eye, they'll grab it. If they are a fan of something they will most probably buy it outright. The publisher doesn't really lose any money as the likelyhood is they were never going to purchase the product anyway. Likewise, by removing their ability to pirate it, the publisher still won't gain anything as they won't suddenly have an urge to go buy it, they'll just do something else rather than surf torrent websites.

2) The poor pirate. Less common, these pirates will pirate media because they can't afford the base product. If they really want a new game or film, they download it as they're too poor to afford to buy it at retail. Removing their ability to pirate the product won't gain the publishers any money as they couldn't buy it in the first place, and still won't be able to buy it when their ability to pirate it is removed.

3) The l33t h4xor pirate. Most rare of all, the person that can afford it, does want it, but refuses to pay for it. These pirates are in the minority. They pirate things mostly because they can, not through any financial need. Fair enough, publishers may make some money from a few of these pirates as they will most probably end up purchasing the product rather than miss out due to their ideals.

Looking at the above, the majority of people pirating software just won't bother. If piracy is 'costing £18billion a year' (or whatever the over-inflated sum happens to be), they won't get that back by shutting out the pirates. They might get a fraction of it, but not enough to be considered worth all this.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not condoning piracy, I think a creator has the right to be recognised and (if he so wishes) financially rewarded by those wishing to take advantage of his work. However, I just can't wrap my head around why all of a sudden online piracy is the new terrorism and must be regulated, policed and stopped at all costs (even if those costs are freedom of speech).


TL;DR Putting a crazy permaban on piracy won't have anywhere near the financial impact publishers claim it will, so why the big push all of a sudden?

If the main causes of piracy are people wanting to try-before-buying and people being unable to afford the products, then give them demos (adequate demos, not biased one) and lower prices.

[SJPONeill]

The third group above is actually the most common being largely the modern generation that is used to being spoonfed and which has yet to make a valid connection between labour and reward; it also includes all those who use faux morality to justify piracy e.g. 'Bill Gates is so rich it is OK to pirate MS products'.

The simple fact is that the internet has just made it so much easier to distribute pirated material without much fear of detection or retribution - if we only had the physical transfer of pirated material to deal with the problem would not be nearly so great...

[Spaceguy5]

I wouldn't say that's the group that downloads pirated material the most, but I do think it's the one that uploads the most (outside of YouTube, image, and social media sites at least--the people mostly uploading copyrighted content to those don't seem to realize it's wrong.)

[OhioMike]

Admitting piracy wont do well here!!! Complaing that this site supports PIRACY i guarantee wont get you rewarded here!!!! Neither justifies doing so!!!! Capitalism works......Sometimes it doesnt look like it, like in Austrasilia maybe but it does work! What i want to know is why the LAW didnt do anything about those terrible capitalist twisting everybodies arm literaly to pay those inflated game prices??? What also bothers me is the ease at which hotfile and a few others were able to remove pirated content without waiting to get shut down...why did the others not do as these and avoid the shut down?

[John Wagenseil]

While I am straying from my original post, I think one lesson from the Megapload take down is that one needs to approach cloud computing and online back up as one's only back up or only date storage site with extreme caution.
There probably were a few legitimate users backing up with, and sharing files through Megaupload who lost their files because Megaupload was also used by copyright violators, and the entire site was indiscriminately taken down.
The best offsite backup is probably sending your data on encrypted DVDs to several trusted friends and relatives around the county or around the country to store for you. In other words storage on physical media at multiple widely distributed trusted sites as well as on line storage for convenience.
About post #20, Bill Gates came out very early as an opponent of piracy and the open source model of software creation back in the days of the Home Brew Computer Club.