No one posted about megaup getting raided...wtf
 

yes i did.

Heheh, I haven't even heard of megaupload til now.

Me either. But this sounds totally reactionary to public opinion on SOPA and PIPA. This is big brother telling us that they're right and we need them to fight the good fight against online piracy.

I used mega uplaod for 10 year to send clients data that were to dumb to use a FTP. There are 1000 like it but they are the biggest and endorsed by a bunch of musicians.

and then the other reaction was anonymous taking down a few sites...
department of justice and the riaa to name a couple

http://activepolitic.com:82/News/201...l_Lawsuit.html

Soo...interesting.

After reading all that, I have one question. Does anyone doubt that the site was mainly used for exchange of copyrighted material like movies? Why are we pretending that they are anything but thieves? How is stealing from the greedy, overcharging movie producers any better than them? Two wrongs do not make a right.

Are you trying to argue that illegal actions of one party justifies the illegal actions of another, rleete?

You trollin', bro?

You should probably go seize 6 million dollars worth of his automobiles and other personal assests, cut him out of a safe room to arrest him, and then one day take him to court and hopefully find him guilty of something.

Lets start with @gmail.com. I've totally used my email address to send questionable material to another person, so we should go sharpen our pitchforks.

I'm not saying what the gov't did was right. Certainly there methodology was too heavy handed. There are better ways of shutting them down than storm trooper style.

But at what point do you say enough, and do something about it? Anyone else here have intellectual property stolen?

errr day.

remember when lars went after napster?
and after napster became a pay-site...there were a million alternatives that popped up?
there are already a number of alternatives to megaupload.
where there's a will, there's a way.

ANY PIZZA
ANY TOPPINGS
ANY CRUST

If we didn't "get all Castro" on MegaUpload, who would the MPAA give all their money to? All that tax-free charity money to politicians will go to waste.

BTW, Filesonic went down today, I guess Rapidshare is next. Upload.to supposedly banned all US IPs. Suddenly we're starting to look like North Korea. With any luck, the MPAA can bring down the internet.

mediafire's still up
shhhhhhhhhh

This is an interesting read:
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/comedia...illion-12-days

They should have been taking down Mix96.3 and Sony, because they facilitated a TON of unauthorized song copying on my part during the early 90's.

I like how all these people in coastal Louisiana stole anywhere from $1-250,000 from FEMA and the LA Office of Community Development and we have a list of a few hundred of them, but that's not enough money to warrant investigation. However, shutting down Megaupload and others is a viable solution.

http://torrentfreak.com/australia-us...friend-120121/

Yeah, so...Ugh.

This just in:
If you get caught bootlegging copyrighted data or say you potentially bootleg some Michael Jackson, you will do more jail time than the man who killed him.

Piracy costs billions every year.

I'll be sure to lose sleep over that when we run a 15 trillion deficit.

Just a thought: Is society worse off because there is just not as much potential to become a mega-bucks rich person through being a musician? Because I have not noticed any real decline in the quality of stuff out there over the last 5 years. And I really couldn't care less if Hollywood goes bankrupt. Hell, the theaters already are.

Oh man, where's Scrappy Jack?! He doesn't like it when people people confuse debt and deficit, nor when they lament the size of the debt.

You rang? :)

The fiscal deficit for 2011 was about $1.3 trillion, or about 8.7% of GDP.

It's less about not liking people that lament the size of the debt and more about not liking how most people (including myself until not so terribly long ago) misunderstand the nature of the debt.


Also, piracy is bad. :inout:

no, and it doesnt stop the BAGILLIZOIAONS of potential legit dollars from entering the industry.

It's just like any business, take a restaurant, that fails. If you start buying cheap product and raising the prizes, people will stop going. When you have to pay $15 to see a movie, plus a $2 city tax...it's not worth it. and when food costs $5 for a small popcorn, you dont buy the food...then the theatre can't afford the $20000000000000000 movie reels, the paychecks, and the lease.

The music industry alone is worth 200 billion, the movie industry about 2 trillion. if they were missing out on a "few" billion, i'd say they aren't doing bad.

Proper terminology is important, thank you Scrappy.

And why do all the anti-piracy messages on my DVDs (that I bought legally....at a second hand store) come in French? Shouldn't they be in Chinese, Spanish, and Russian? Don't the French people get subsidized movies once per week anyway?

Total box-office gross in the US was $10.2 billion in 2011, down from $10.5 billion in 2010. (source)

DVD sales were down 2% from the prior year at $6.95 billion, with BluRay up 20% to 2 billion. Mail-order DVD rental and online streaming rental rose 4% to 2.37 billion, and kiosk rentals (eg: redbox) jumped 31% to $1.66 billion. Video On Demand (via cable companies) was up 7% to 1.87 billion, and iTunes sales of digital movie downloads rose 9$ to $554 million. (source)

In all, consumer spending for all home video fell a mere 2% to $18 billion, despite the implosion of the video rental store.


For 2011, physical sales of videogames in the US (in boxes from the store, not on-line) accounted for $9.3 billion, with the total videogame market (including hardware) at around $16.5 billion. (source) This was down 8% from 2010.


It is interesting that the ESA (the gaming equivalent of the MPAA), which arguably has much more at stake and suffered higher declines over the past year than home video, does not find it necessary to lobby the congress for such draconian measures.


Discuss.