U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.

  • @Noonecanknowitsme@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    31 year ago

    It looks like they were charged in the US. I didn’t see with what specifically but the US sentenced them to prison for about a year and they elected to do their prison sentence in NZ (which is allowing one of them to wait until the birth of their child before beginning their sentence). It looks like NZ’s role in this isn’t harmful (besides allowing foreign search of their home)

    • kwj
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 year ago

      undefined> (besides allowing foreign search of their home)

      So it is harmful.

    • Deref
      link
      fedilink
      31 year ago

      Even in the US there’s no law against hosting encrypted files. They could be liable if they knew a specific file was illegal/pirated and didn’t take it down but a recent SCOTUS case (think it was Twitter v Taamneh) set the precedent that general knowledge of illegal activity is not enough.

      • Thank you for that reference! I did think it was a poor reasoning for US to say “you’re distributing pirated material” versus their response of “it’s the users who are distributing it”. I’ll look more into the SCOTUS case

      • Kaldo
        link
        fedilink
        11 year ago

        I was always wondering why this isn’t an obvious “gotchya” for pirated content. Wouldn’t even a very simple encryption make it impossible to prove that the content being shared is copyrighted/illegal? After all, there could be anything in these bytes?

      • @AntennaRover
        link
        11 year ago

        I don’t think the original MegaUpload site hosted encrypted files, at least not in a zero-knowledge way. They also encouraged users to do things like upload their entire music libraries and had a searchable database of them called Megabox. They weren’t just a file hosting provider, they were in many instances encouraging their users to upload pirated content and had all of the tools to see what was being uploaded and what was infringing.