I don't think anyone at Mega gives a damn though, or the people who are going to use it to upload movies. The only reason there's an encryption key at all is to cover their asses on future lawsuits, not to make Mega amazingly secure.
I am not in any way at all suggesting that Mega is doing this, or that they are even trying to do this. I am simply observing that there is an interesting case to be made where you can swear under oath you did you best to make the site secure, and yet people more sophisticated than you broke into it and had their way with you. How much liability does that protect you from? Any? All? I haven't got a clue here but I find the question an interesting one. Perhaps Eric Goldman will chime in.
A normal system admin might decide a single 4gb file accounting for tens of terabytes of traffic is unusual and investigate the cause. Odds are pretty decent you'll be able to find a source driving all the traffic.
Kim Dotcom is going for the blind eye approach. Just close your eyes and cover your ears so it's not your fault. He did this with MegaUpload to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars of profit. I wonder if the new site will reward users who have highly downloaded files like his last?
Can you prove, or disprove, that the cryptography was intentional broken? Doubtful. Can you prove a website didn't try to prevent the mass sharing of copyrighted material? Yes. Is that illegal? Maybe. Should it be? That's whole 'nother can of worms.
Kim Dotcom has already made hundreds of millions of dollars off copyrighted material and he's trying to do it again. I'd say the fact that anyone supports his antics is bewildering but the power of selfishness knows no bounds.
How common is it that people go to the local police station in an afternoon and offered to do some work with no expectation of some kind of salary?
System administrators are not people that work for free. They expect to get paid like everyone else. They also expect to be able to decide what work they accept, and which ones they do not (ie, they are not slaves). Some do investigations for the police without getting any payment because they feel they want to perform some civil duty to do so, but the above comment imply that they must do so. That is wrong. System administrators should not be forced labor for the police.
If there is investigation to do, call the police, pay your taxes (so the police get paid), and let the system work as intended without putting forced labor onto the system administrators of the world. If you dislike a service because its used by criminals (like say, gmail which is abused by spammers), it still the police you should call and not the system administrators.
This is a completely baseless assertion with no facts to back it up. (Difficulty: Pointing to a dodgy DoJ case does not count as "facts")
Attemping to shift the burden of proof by saying "to suggest otherwise would be insane" is not appreciated or necessary.
Futhermore, it's a useless assertion too, since pretty much everything is copyrighted. Whether it's authorized is another matter and not near as easy to figure out from a service provider standpoint. Neither is it their job.
Almost everything is covered by copyright, it's indeed not too hard to figure out if something is covered by copyright. It's much harder to figure out who owns the copyright on something, and it's almost impossible to figure out if a certain file is authorized by the copyright owner.
Just because a file is popular doesn't mean it's infringing. Can you guarantee this popular file wasn't posted on twitter by the artist for a marketing campaign? Can you guarantee the artist didn't upload it to a torrent site to get attention? No, you can't. You'll just take a flamethrower approach and many legitimate files will be removed in the process.
Actually I can't see how encryption could change this procedure. It seems a technical solution applied to a social problem.
I guess this would be up to the TOS for each site but the few sites i've actually read at least pretend that they value your privacy.
Also remember the shitstorm after 37signals announced that the millionth file ever uploaded to basecamp was an image of a cat? The official story after all complaints was that they never opened the file but they still "knew" because the filename in the logs showed up as cat.jpg.
DMCA safe harbor means the hosting provider should not have editorial control. If you have editorial control, you're open to liability for not exercising that control. Better to go the legally proven route of getting a credit card and an adult signature, to keep all the liability on the user.
It's good work by fail0verflow, but as long as Mega addresses it soon, I don't think it's a big deal. In fact, it's a good test case for how seriously they take this kind of problem.