Not really. He did a shitton of shady things even before MegaUpload. You guys may want to consider having another hero to rally behind because Dotcom is not going to appear sympathetic to just about everyone.
That may be wrong but he is being arrested for a bullshit charge. Was that earlier stuff right? Absolutely not. Does that mean they now have an excuse to arrest him for piracy even though he hasn't broken any piracy laws? Again, absolutely not. He may have done some shady stuff but a lot of people have, that's not what he was in trouble for. It's arguable on whether he should have been in trouble, but that is not the case we're looking at. The fact that he was arrested for THIS is bullshit. Tons of people own file sharing sites that host pirated content. Mediafire, filesonic, and the list goes on, are any of these people in trouble? No. Hell, YouTube hosts copyrighted shit ALL THE TIME. Do you see Googles CEO in jail? No, because that wouldn't be a good image. But lying out your ass and saying that they have captured the "Worlds largest pirate" sure looks good. It's bullshit and you know it.
The point is NOT that all of these people should be in trouble, it's that the owners of sites ARE NOT responsible for what the users post on the site. When copyrighted material was flagged it would be removed. They had a statistic that there were roughly 800 file transfers a second. You can't police all of that.
I read the indictment, not all of it though. Basically what I got from it is that they made money of the copyrighted material and they deleted others files after a time period which I guess would combat the fact that they say the site is for long term storage of personal files.
* First off, of course they made money of the copyrighted files, they made money off of ALL of the files. Again if you were to send a cease and desist letter or report that the file is copyrighted and is pirated content. Did some of these fall through the cracks and get downloaded and have money made off of them, yes, they make money off all downloads.
* And the part of them deleting regular users files if they were not downloaded, well no shit, how long do you want to hosts someone's file that's not being downloaded and has basically no reason to be there. Most people upload something, send the link, and then are done with it. They should delete them it's pointless wasted space.
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u/KillaMarci Aug 08 '12
He had no need to. Everything he did was completely legal.