Posts by Dylan Reeve
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Russell Brown,
Mega’s Bram van der Kolk has pointed out on Twitter that although Slater is now talking about protecting his “source” for the story, his original post claimed that he found the infringing file by dint of just “a bit of poking around on the internet”.
The two claims don’t exactly tally.
You have to poke pretty deep to find any pirate links to Mega as far as I can tell. It really doesn't seem to be a popular service for such activities.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to ScottY,
I don’t think one has to be a maximalist to point out that the statement is wrong. The law is evolving in this area, but at present (at least in NZ) a cloud provider can be liable for copyright infringement, unless it can rely on the safe harbour defences under section 92C of the NZ Copyright Act, or case law (e.g. the iiNet case, where the ISP argued it was not liable because it did not “authorise” the infringing act).
But storing files in the cloud is not infringing. Allowing others to download those files, on the other hand, is something entirely different.
I could upload my entire legal iTunes library to Mega and it's totally legal. Giving others links to those files however...
In this case all Whaleoil's screenshots proved were that the files were on the Mega server, not that anyone had ever shared them anywhere (aside from, arguably, with Whaleoil himself, assuming we believe his claims not to have uploaded them).
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to nzlemming,
Yeah, I hadn’t read that at the time. The encryption point is one I’d missed in passing, but that would also wreck de-duping, yes?
Yup - no de-duping on Mega. Lucky drives are cheap these days :)
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to nzlemming,
One way to do it would be to identify the file that Slater referred to (which we’re to understand they did) then use that as a fingerprint to identify any other matching files. All possible without breaking the encryption, but not foolproof. If one byte is different, the fingerprint is useless. They wouldn’t be searching by title, if that’s what you meant ;-)
Not possible for Mega. The same file encrypted (on client side) with different encryption keys yields entirely different data.
Vikram explained in another post that there was enough information visible in the non-obscured portion of the URLs on Whale's site to identify the files on Mega's servers.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Fergus Barrowman,
That would be a question for the Publishers Association.
CLNZ filed a takedown notice on our behalf, and we alerted the Luminaries’ international publishers, who have legal departments who deal with this sort of thing.
Thanks Fergus.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
Assuming Cameron Slater is to be believed, same IP address uploading and downloading doesn’t exactly equate to same individual performing those operations.
Vikram wasn't specific about whether it was same IP address or same user account. Either way...
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Fergus Barrowman,
In the interest of transparency, the press release was “Issued for Publishers Association of NZ by Pead PR”, and was different from the draft I approved. And no, we didn’t attempt to download the files or confirm the alleged infringement.
I'm genuinely curious, having working in PR in the past, what was the intended purpose of the release? I can't really see why it's worth trying to shame another company over barely substantiated piracy that they aren't really responsible for anyway?
I suppose there's a "kiwi battler" angle, and some aspect of the broad popularity thing, but I can't really see the purpose in issuing the release in the first place.
And did you file a takedown notice with Mega? That would seem a more efficient way to deal with the issue.
(Not trying to be a dick - I get why publishers need to protect their work, just not sure I understand the specific approach in this case)
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Vikram Kumar,
Yes, the two files were only ever downloaded by the same person who uploaded them and that too only once. This has been confirmed by our log files. Notably, the VUP press release was based on, and relied upon, Cameron Slater’s blog post, in that it appears they themselves did not download or independently confirm the alleged copyright infringement.
So you're saying that only the uploader downloaded them, and Whaleoil says he downloaded them... The obvious conclusion here is... interesting.
The allegation of copyright infringement is interesting too - Whaleoil's screenshots simply showed that the files were on the server, not that they'd been shared. If he'd wanted to prove illegal sharing he should have posted a screenshot of a post on some eBooks forum that included the link...
Storing files in the cloud is not infringing on copyright.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I don’t know if they can, around here that’s a question way above my pay grade as they say. But should they? I think that’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask. Just as I think it’s perfectly legit for small publishers like Sam Elworthy and Fergus Barrowman to ask why they should have to put time and resources into playing take down request cat-and-mouse
Craig, given the information that Mega could (potentially) have at their disposal, even if there were no encryption - a file name, the file itself, an email address of the user associated with the account - how would it be possible to determine if a file is infringing or not?
I can buy the ebook and store it on my Mega account, that's legal. I can download the ebook on multiple devices and computers from that account (logged in or not). How can Mega determine if my file should be deleted or not?
Scale that up to hundreds or thousands (or millions?) of files uploaded per day and then what?
The only workable solution is acting on notice. And even then that can be abused (as it regularly is on YouTube where companies issue takedowns against non-infringing content to silence criticism etc).
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to SteveH,
How did they identify those two instances? Mega are not able to access the file contents, right? If they identified the files by name, how did they verify those files were in fact the book itself and not (for example) someone’s review of the book?
One would assume they found a shared link somewhere to another copy. For a period of time Mega were being quite pro-active in locating publicly shared links to infringing material and taking them down. I'm not sure if that's still happening, but it was a pretty unpopular move among illegal sharers when it started happening.
In general I think Mega is only really used in small closed-access sharing groups now, otherwise there are many better options.