File Share Site Taken Down

[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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by 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...

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.

Originally Posted by OhioMike

"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...