Does the United States government have the jurisdiction over Pirate Bay? Wouldn't that be something to look up?

 

 

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish based site. MegaUpload is a Hong Kong based site. What's the point?

 

Actually, nothing, I guess.

 

But I'm still not sure what you're upset about here. If MegaUpload.com was engaging in illegal activities, then what Pirate Bay was also doing is irrelevant, right?

Does the United States government have the jurisdiction over Pirate Bay? Wouldn't that be something to look up?

 

 

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish based site. MegaUpload is a Hong Kong based site. What's the point?

 

Actually, nothing, I guess.

 

But I'm still not sure what you're upset about here. If MegaUpload.com was engaging in illegal activities, then what Pirate Bay was also doing is irrelevant, right?

 

No, it's not. MegaUpload's 'illegal activities' mere minuscule in comparison, and largely un-monitor-able. Yeah, they had their lil shindig with the premium accounts and pocketing cash off of the situation when clearly what they were doing was wrong, but in reality we're dealing with the exact same situation on Pirate Bay.

 

What's the difference between the two though? MegaUpload is not a pirate site and the majority of its usage is legal and is used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people as an internet tool, legally. It's a general file uploading website. Then you've got the Pirate Bay, which is devoted solely to the purpose of stealing pirated material.

 

 

The only argument here is that the law can legally act on MegaUpload and it cannot legally act on Pirate Bay. That's why I'm mad. MegaUpload is not a site devoted to stealing copyrighted material.

 

This is like someone committing murder in cold blood and you're letting them off simply because the law doesn't allow you to do anything about it, meanwhile the next fellow commits vehicular manslaughter due to 'negligence' and gets sent to prison for a decade. Now you've got a sick sadistic murderer in the public, meanwhile you've locked up someone who never had intentions to murder somebody for a decade. Yeah, such an example might be slightly biased but the point is still that justice isn't being served at all. Justice is being cheated.

Yeah, I still don't see what you're upset about.

 

Pirate Bay has already undergone a trial in Sweden and I believe was shut down for some period of time.

 

But one thing being more illegal doesn't make another thing less illegal. That's not how it works.

You can't file every case at once. I'm sure there are reasons why The Pirate Bay hasn't been shut down by the US gov't -- maybe they're not "good" reasons in your view, but it's not necessarily the case that the US gov't foolishly put The Pirate Bay below Megaupload on a Most Wanted list, which is what you're implying.

Who gives a sh*t about Sweden? I don't live in Sweden. The fact is that it operates now and it has always operated just fine in the US.

 

I also never said 'one thing being more illegal makes another thing less illegal'. I don't see how you don't see my point...

 

MegaUpload was beneficial to society from a legal standpoint. What MegaUpload did was 'wrong', but they hardly did anything at all. It is arguable that one who commits vehicular manslaughter on the counts of 'negligence' while driving didn't deserve to be sent to prison. You're labeling such a person as a murderer when in reality it's just an unfortunate event and someone has to be held responsible in the name of pseudo-justice. Meanwhile, true justice is not being served for the maniac murders out there because of failures in the law.

 

Can't you see? MegaUpload was merely a casualty of this SOPA bulls***. The two events didn't just simultaneously occur for no reason. The point is that they're after the wrong people. MegaUpload wasn't a site of pirates thirsty for copyrighted material. There are hundreds of those, and this isn't one of them.

 

By these grounds you could also shut down stuff like Photobucket, tinypic, etc. The only difference is that they're not charging for premium downloading rates, but they're the same type of business. And their purpose is much easier to monitor as file sizes are much smaller. Needless to say though, plenty of copyrighted material passes through there without outcry. Hell, what about YouTube? Not all of my music videos get picked up through their systems. I have several songs from artists that weren't detected as UMG Publishing or whatnot. I can collect add-based revenue from that. Shut down YouTube!

You can't file every case at once. I'm sure there are reasons why The Pirate Bay hasn't been shut down by the US gov't -- maybe they're not "good" reasons in your view, but it's not necessarily the case that the US gov't foolishly put The Pirate Bay below Megaupload on a Most Wanted list, which is what you're implying.

 

 

I'm mad that they're on the same list at all! MegaUpload can be/is legally beneficial to society, why is that so hard to understand?

I also never said 'one thing being more illegal makes another thing less illegal'. I don't see how you don't see my point...

 

This kind of seems like exactly what you are doing. You are saying MegaUpload shouldn't be targeted because Pirate Bay is 'worse.' But if they're still doing something illegal then they should be targeted, regardless of what happens to anyone else.

You can't file every case at once. I'm sure there are reasons why The Pirate Bay hasn't been shut down by the US gov't -- maybe they're not "good" reasons in your view, but it's not necessarily the case that the US gov't foolishly put The Pirate Bay below Megaupload on a Most Wanted list, which is what you're implying.

 

 

I'm mad that they're on the same list at all! MegaUpload can be/is legally beneficial to society, why is that so hard to understand?

 

What do you mean by 'legally beneficial to society?'

I also never said 'one thing being more illegal makes another thing less illegal'. I don't see how you don't see my point...

 

This kind of seems like exactly what you are doing. You are saying MegaUpload shouldn't be targeted because Pirate Bay is 'worse.' But if they're still doing something illegal then they should be targeted, regardless of what happens to anyone else.

 

That is not what I'm saying! I'm saying it's a debatable case against MegaUpload where illegal matters are happening, however it's not really at the hands of the creators. Perhaps some negligence is at hand, which should be reprimanded, but otherwise it is not a pirating site!

I think you're massively understating how much illegal material is posted and hosted on their websites.

What do you mean by 'legally beneficial to society?'

 

 

Do you know what MegaUpload is? It's a file sharing website where basically MegaUpload gives you a big ass empty locker and you put whatever you want into it. It's a cloud, and for a very long time it was the cloud that allowed the most amount of space in terms of file size. Things such as videos, PPTs, etc. could be hosted and recovered on another computer without having to physically transfer data through some form of transportation. This is very common. Facebook does it, Photobucket does it, tinypic does it, imageshack does it, etc. (all of those through photos).

 

It's not easy to find a website that will allow you to store your 500mb video clip (that is before YouTube made it possible to download your own videos). It's not easy to find a website to store a PPT on, or to share such a thing... say I wanted to post a PPT here at MarlinsBaseball.com.

 

It's a personal library of files on the internet. It is a cloud. The fact that illegal material went through there is because it's incredibly hard to monitor large sized files. Yeah, of course it should still be the responsibility of MegaUpload to do all they can to prevent that which is why liability should be questioned... but to simply shut down the site and call it one of piracy is not fair.

 

My points about Pirate Bay are simply standing that the law itself is ass backwards because it allows for a questionably liable MegaUpload to be shut down yet an irrefutably guilty Pirate Bay to remain fully functional and the world's leader in piracy.

I think you're massively understating how much illegal material is posted and hosted on their websites.

 

 

I think you're overstating it. No doubt it was widespread, but you're not accounting for the absolute monster of a website that MegaUpload was. MegaUpload is (or at least has been in the past) used by businesses and schools/universities legally. I wouldn't be surprised if this site getting shut down is damaging (even if small) to said businesses and schools/universities.

Yeah, oversimplification, though. It's not just the website "megaupload.com." It's the whole family:

 

The company's services included a one-click hosting service known as MegaUpload, image hosting and video hostingservices known as Megavideo, Megalive, Megapix and Megabox as well as CUM.com (formerly Megaporn, Megarotic, and Sexuploader) which specialized in hosting pornographic contents. (Megaupload itself also allows such content). Other services included Megaclick, Megafund, Megakey and Megapay, all of which were advertisement and financial services. Two additional web sevices, Megabackup and Megamovie, were in development before its closure.[6]

 

So it wasn't just a place to store files.

 

Did you ever use Megavideo to watch movies or TV shows? Because millions of other people did. There were copyrighted television shows and movies being hosted on their servers.

Absolutely. But they weren't very good about it. At all. You could find pretty much every TV show ever on there, and most movies as long as they were more than a year or so old.

Negligence =/= Omission

At what point does that become completely moot?

 

Don't call it an oversimplification. Check your own quote there dude. "Image hosting", "video hosting". I drew perfect parallels to that with YouTube and Photobucket, etc. of which copyrighted material makes it through all the time. YouTube is just the biggest player in the game at the moment, and is fully protected.

 

You're still ignoring part of my point which is 'why is this wrong but that is not"? It's a technicality. MegaUpload gets in trouble for a community-based free will site where the user uploads content. How does that differ from Pirate Bay? The user isn't using a cloud, but instead torrenting software.

 

So in effect, the Pirate Bay serves as a site where every single person who uses it is a criminal but the site owners have done nothing wrong (although I'm sure they're pretty targeted). With MegaUpload, the person has done nothing wrong and liability is on the hands of the site.

 

Why? WHY? What the hell is the difference?

 

Now, reassess my original point. MegaUpload is not a website devoted to torrenting, piracy, or otherwise stealing copyrighted material. They're a site that simply gave the users too much freedom. They should be forced to alter their operations and pay fines (much ala Napster), but they're not criminals in the sense that Pirate Bay is.

PIRATE BAY HAS ALREADY BEEN THROUGH A LAWSUIT!

 

Also, if a private citizen downloads music or movies illegally through megaupload and get caught, I'm fairly certain you're in just as much trouble as if you do it through a torrenting site. So I don't see how the liability is solely in the hands of the site.

 

The big difference is that megaupload hosts illegal content on their servers.

PIRATE BAY HAS ALREADY BEEN THROUGH A LAWSUIT!

 

 

WHATS YOUR POINT THEY STILL LEGALLY OPERATE HERE IN THE UNITED STATES.

So no site should get shut down until every single one is. Got it.

When are you two getting married?

Completely ignore the argument at hand and revert back to the "you're saying what I say you're saying" response.

 

Gotcha.

OK.

 

Nobody is saying "What Pirate Bay is doing is right but what Megaupload is doing is wrong."

 

The actions of the DOJ are saying that "what Megaupload is doing is wrong." It has nothing to do with Pirate Bay. You're bringing them up and harping on them when it's irrelevant to this.

 

So it seems that your argument is that Megaupload should not be taken down while Pirate Bay is still up. But they aren't related. At all. They are mutually exclusive to one another.

Knowingly hosting illegal content is a problem. As an analogy, it's a problem to buy a warehouse and then rent it out to mafia bosses or drug dealers. You aren't allowed to just stink your fingers in your ears at that point.

 

I don't know much about Megaupload, to be honest, but the conduct described here is not negligence; and, just because it's an omission of a sort does not at all remove the stain of liability and possibly criminality.

No, my argument is that it is debatable as to whether or not MegaUpload is doing something wrong, meanwhile sites [such as!] Pirate Bay are clearly doing something wrong and the law as a whole is f***ed up because MegaUpload, who is questionably wrong, just took a total asswhooping meanwhile Pirate Bay remains clean as a whistle.

 

It's a point that the law is f***ed up. That's where Pirate Bay comes into the conversation. I never said 'because Pirate Bay is still up, MegaUpload should also still be up'. I merely used them as an example of who the FBI should be targeting because what they are doing is legitimately wrong. It is Pirate Bay's sole intention to distribute pirated/stolen material.

 

Instead, the FBI are making an example out of MegaUpload on this 'SOPA week' if you will.

Knowingly hosting illegal content is a problem. As an analogy, it's a problem to buy a warehouse and then rent it out to mafia bosses or drug dealers. You aren't allowed to just stink your fingers in your ears at that point.

 

I don't know much about Megaupload, to be honest, but the conduct described here is not negligence; and, just because it's an omission of a sort does not at all remove the stain of liability and possibly criminality.

 

 

It's not as simple as 'turning a blind eye'. MegaUpload isn't something small like a warehouse. MegaUpload is a world. If you're leasing out your world to a world of people, can you keep up with every interaction that the world is doing?