Megaupload closed down by the Feds.

[GamezRule]

Download them all for good measure.

 

[KMRblue1027]

Get them and put 'em on Dropbox or more/other upload sites

Until dropbox is shut down

 

[Angst]

It's quite a lot to deal with. A day is better spent on work or more music.

But shucks, I might actually need to get this down.

Note that this isn't even music I've bought. It's music I've made. It's that bad.

 

[bombshoo]

Im actually a little irked, so I will expand on my last thought. The taxpayer's money should not be spent protecting a greedy industry from its own incompetence. And let's be frank, piracy is simply the people voting with their wallets.

Movies have grown more and more bloated in cost both in the theater and on DVD. On top of that they want to double charge for digital and physical copies thanks to the ridiculous DRM on DVDs that does NOTHING to stop piracy but simply prevents the consumer from putting their purchased content on their digital devices. Video games are becoming a screw job as well. If you get a computer game they are slapping more and more brutal DRM on it or their favorite move of not releasing the whole game or releasing the whole game, but locking part of it on disc. Either way they charge you another 10-20 dollars for the "DLC" which is actually just the rest of your already purchased game. Microsoft and probably Sony eventually charge you to even play on line

And music? Get bent RIAA. For decades you sold millions upon millions of albums based upon 1-3 songs then the rest filler. Billions of dollars in profit and millions of consumers hosed because there was no way to get just the good stuff. Finally the internet rolls around, so the game changed. People dont have to put up with your garbage, with blindly buying albums without knowing if they were good, they rebelled or they just buy the songs you want. Either way your sale's went down, deal.

Finally, the movie, television, and music industries do their best to try and strangle any new legal method consumers have to consume their product. Anytime something like pandora, last fm, spotify, netflix, redbox, etc. comes along, gets people legally consuming and gets popular they get greedy and they try to strangle it, suck it dry of every last bit of blood and treasure. Look at netflix, as soon as it became popular the television and movie companies demanded more money, so netflix had to raise rates, and now its spiraling. Millions of legal consumers gone, quite potentially back to piracy.

But no, its not their fault. The government needs to come save them from the evil pirates who are costing them all their money because darn it they are trying their best and are being utterly victimized by anonymous banditos who steal for no reason from them!





tl;dr Im sick of our tax dollars being used to protect incompetence. The consumer is fed up and the government shouldnt make it so that the industry doesnt have to make changes.

This is basically how I feel, but piracy still isn't right. Based on the current laws, it's still stealing, even if it's stealing from jerks.

I pretty much have entirely stopped going to movies, buying movies and video games and music and I get by. If we really want to protest maybe we should neither buy nor download the content. Prove to them we don't need it and if they want us to want their products, they have to offer us something besides a bunch of overpriced crap and needless hassling.

 

[kramerfan86]

Sure it isnt right, but my point is the government shouldnt spend time and money protecting these industries from their own incompetence. Piracy is in many ways a monster of their own creation. They should be forced to change to a more consumer friendly model as opposed to having their current ineffective model protected by the government and the courts.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

So much for the celebrity endorsements, I kind of wish the RIAA/MPAA heads would die off suddenly or something and be replaced by people who actually understand the reality of the situation.

I'm with you 100%....

That's why SOPA Is so dangerous. It would allow the feds to shut down any site without due process.

This means that if you own a site and one of your users posts something that is copyrighted material, and the entertainment industry complains. Your site is gone.. No hearing, no trial, no nothing.

That's why it's so dangerous - there's no way a website operator could ever sort through all the links submitted every day - especially on large sites like youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. Maybe we should let Congress do that job, if they really want to.

...Not to mention the even more dangerous fact that if you posted something that DIDN'T infringe, but was critical of one of Congress' corporate paymasters, all they would have to do is accuse you of hosting pirated material to shut you down permanently! This isn't just hysterical conjecture either: Several dictators ousted by the Arab Spring abused the DMCA Takedown notice clause to get sites the dissidents were using shut down, at least until the US government wised up to their tactics.....

Im actually a little irked, so I will expand on my last thought. The taxpayer's money should not be spent protecting a greedy industry from its own incompetence. And let's be frank, piracy is simply the people voting with their wallets.

Movies have grown more and more bloated in cost both in the theater and on DVD. On top of that they want to double charge for digital and physical copies thanks to the ridiculous DRM on DVDs that does NOTHING to stop piracy but simply prevents the consumer from putting their purchased content on their digital devices. Video games are becoming a screw job as well. If you get a computer game they are slapping more and more brutal DRM on it or their favorite move of not releasing the whole game or releasing the whole game, but locking part of it on disc. Either way they charge you another 10-20 dollars for the "DLC" which is actually just the rest of your already purchased game. Microsoft and probably Sony eventually charge you to even play on line

And music? Get bent RIAA. For decades you sold millions upon millions of albums based upon 1-3 songs then the rest filler. Billions of dollars in profit and millions of consumers hosed because there was no way to get just the good stuff. Finally the internet rolls around, so the game changed. People dont have to put up with your garbage, with blindly buying albums without knowing if they were good, they rebelled or they just buy the songs you want. Either way your sale's went down, deal.

Finally, the movie, television, and music industries do their best to try and strangle any new legal method consumers have to consume their product. Anytime something like pandora, last fm, spotify, netflix, redbox, etc. comes along, gets people legally consuming and gets popular they get greedy and they try to strangle it, suck it dry of every last bit of blood and treasure. Look at netflix, as soon as it became popular the television and movie companies demanded more money, so netflix had to raise rates, and now its spiraling. Millions of legal consumers gone, quite potentially back to piracy.

But no, its not their fault. The government needs to come save them from the evil pirates who are costing them all their money because darn it they are trying their best and are being utterly victimized by anonymous banditos who steal for no reason from them!





tl;dr Im sick of our tax dollars being used to protect incompetence. The consumer is fed up and the government shouldnt make it so that the industry doesnt have to make changes.

Preach on, Brother! My dad, who will be 60 this year, and one of those types of people who mistrust all new technology, is even fed up with it: He said, "I don't think it's right how those greedy corporations want to sue anybody for doing ANYTHING even REMOTELY related to movies and songs they released!"

...And I agree! Why is it that patents expire after only 20 years (MAX!), yet copyrights are good for at least 125? That means that inventors, such as myself (although my inventions aren't really that spectacular) have to keep inventing stuff so that we can make the money and time we invested back before all the Chinese rip-off companies under-price us, yet all an artist has to do is write one hit song or make one good-selling movie and they, their kids, grandkids and GREAT-Grandkids are set for life!

Furthermore, it really isn't about the artists: The MPAA and RIAA take 90% of the profit from CD and DVD sales and use it to line their greedy fat pockets, with only a pittance going to the actual artists, thanks to the lousy, rip-off contracts the studios make performers and movie producers sign.

Enough is ENOUGH! I've just recently changed my avatar and signature on this site as well as every other site I'm a member of in protest, and they are staying this way until RIAA and the MPAA go down in flames (and I've had the opportunity to take a good, long piss on their ashes).

 

[GenMarshall]

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of files suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

 

[Narz]

As long as they don't mess with demonoid!

 

[Mise]

I propose a 2 minute silence for MegaUpload.

Upgrade to a Premium account to skip this silence.

 

[Maniacal]

As long as they don't mess with demonoid!

Demonoid is hosted in Montenegro, so while they cannot shut it down I am sure SOPA/PIPA will block it.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Get them and put 'em on Dropbox or more/other upload sites

Better yet, invest in some DVDRs and quit using these sites store important/irreplaceable files.

 

[Mise]

How is that in any way "better yet"? If I use Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, or some other cloud storage service to store files, it means I can retreive them from any computer. So if I go home to visit my parents, all my files will be there waiting for me, without me having to carry anything extra with me. What advantage do expensive DVRs and offline storage media have over cheap or free cloud storage?

 

[Winner]

Don't worry.

If they treat them the same way they treat Somali pirates, it will be back online in a couple of days

 

[Janusi]

It's sad to see how the FBI is used to silence people the entertainment industry wants silenced. I remember the lawsuit Megaupload had recently over Universal Music claiming copyright on a video they didn't actually own.

And while I don't know the percentages, I do know there were quite a lot of people using megaupload to distribute their own files. Those are gone now too.

In my view, the real criminals haven't been caught. They're laughing right now as the United States does their bidding.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Why not just hand over the government to the corporations. Remove the middleman.

Everybody needs to read Young Rissa (alternate title: Rissa Kerguelen). It's the first book in a science fiction series by F.M. Busby that shows what kind of society can result when democratic governments literally cannot afford to govern any longer and multinational corporations bid every four years to govern. Eventually one corporation decides to completely take over. They build Total Welfare Centers to warehouse and enslave the poor people and those others who lose their jobs, get into debt, or eventually, just dare to express a negative opinion about the government.

Busby wrote this book ~30 YEARS AGO! I met him at a convention in Calgary in the late '80s and told him, "It's scary that the scenario you create in these books could actually come to pass in the near future." He pooh-poohed my fears, saying it was only a story. Well, guess what - it's no longer only a story. I realize that to Busby this was just one book out of the many he wrote (he died several years ago), but some authors who extrapolate near-future stories from current events/trends can find themselves with frighteningly accurate predictions.

Just ask Margaret Atwood and the people who have read The Handmaid's Tale. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a "Republic of Gilead" kind of society is what the Tea Party would really like to see.

I didnt know it was a crime to put money in a washing machine and washing it.

US law dictates that all money must be washed by hand.

So that's why it all looks the same - faded and ugly from repeated washing in cheap laundry detergent!

To what extent should a file-hosting service be liable for ascertaining the content of the files they store, and enforcing an anti-piracy policy?

Most services, if not all, have a disclaimer that they are not responsible for the content of what people upload. However, they do have rules, and it's up to people to report offenders. After that... well, some services actually do something about enforcing their own rules, and others don't really care. Some of us have been looking into this because of some sick, twisted individuals who post "kitten snuff videos" on YouTube (videos showing kittens being killed in brutal, sickening ways).

All the insults thrown at Sarah Palin by you guys in CFC caused emotional pain to her friends and family.

Yeah, I'm sure Sarah Palin's friends and family read the CFC Off-Topic forum...

 

[Bugfatty300]

How is that in any way "better yet"? If I use Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, or some other cloud storage service to store files, it means I can retreive them from any computer. So if I go home to visit my parents, all my files will be there waiting for me, without me having to carry anything extra with me.

The point, which has apparently eluded you, is that relying on websites to store your important/irreplaceable files is not a good a idea.

DVRs and offline storage media have over cheap or free cloud storage?

For one thing the digital storage hardware devices sitting on my shelf can't be indefinitely shut down if the company that manufactured them is indicted for illegal activity.

That advantage comes to mind while reading this thread.

Back ups of back ups is a pretty reasonable precaution if your files are important to you. $15 for a stack of DVDRs isn't that much of a deal breaker.

 

[Mise]

They can just shut down for any number of other reasons instead. You're just relying on a physical thing that can break down, get stolen, get water spillt on it, fall off the cabinet, get corrupted by a kid with a magnet, or otherwise become inoperable, instead of relying on a cloud service that can become inoperable for reasons that come to mind while reading this thread. I don't see how relying on one is any better than relying another.

 

[Bugfatty300]

They can just shut down for any number of other reasons instead. You're just relying on a physical thing that can break down, get stolen, get water spillt on it, fall off the cabinet, get corrupted by a kid with a magnet, or otherwise become inoperable, instead of relying on a cloud service that can become inoperable for reasons that come to mind while reading this thread. I don't see how relying on one is any better than relying another.

Yep. They can break. If I can't live without the files on them then, in some cases, I can have the data professionally recovered. The same can't be said if I upload them to the wild blue yonder of cyberspace and *poof* one day they're gone.

That's exactly why relying on ONE mode of digital storage is a bad idea. Back ups of back ups of back up is the only thing that really works. Uploading your home movies to storestuff.net and then erasing them from your HDD to make space isn't a secure method of data storage. Granted, peither is putting them on a single DVDR. I just don't get what's so bad/inconvenient about backing up important files.

 

[kochman]

This really suck, megaupload is very huge here in Europe. ( is by far the upload of choice for medium-big files )

Mediafire is better anyhow... doesn't expire, no download limit (meaning, 2 million people can download your file without it needing to be re-uploaded)

How could federal authorities acquire search warrants for foreign countries? They seem to be going a bit out of their way to fight a crime which essentially isn't a major moral infraction if you are stealing something that doesn't tangibly exist from something that also doesn't tangibly exist. Just another example of how corporations are gradually usurping the government.

The gubbamint has a long history of working with foreign governments to stop piracy... ever see that FBI warning at the beginning of every frickin' movie on DVD? Read it.

Im getting tired of our broke government which faces real problems and major crimes is spending so much time and effort to protect a greedy and in many cases incompetent industry that shoots itself in the foot then wants to blame piracy completely for its problems and demands that daddy fed come save them.

Well, because we are broke we should stop upholding the law?
Don't get me wrong, I pirate music, the RIAA, but, I do it knowing it is illegal.
The people who enforce the laws don't write them, and don't have to support them, they just have to enforce them, as long as they are moral.

I hope they don't shut down Mediafire. I have backup of my musical files there - files that I no longer have available physically.

Download everything and burn them to data DVDs as a hard copy back up.

As long as they don't mess with demonoid!

They already did once... notice how it is now demonoid.me now? There was a transfer some time back, lots of torrents were lost...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The whole thing makes me think that I dont care if the U.S. goes bankrupt if they waste their resources on silly stuff like shutting down websites.