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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is what I think is the speculation. Let us speculate you wanted to build a "legitimate" Pirate Bay type system, what would you have to do in order to pass the 'sniff test' for litigators while providing an otherwise easy to use service?

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.

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Stopping your digital locker online service from being used for mass copyright infringing material is easy. Go ahead and host a movie on dropbox and share a public link on a popular site. See how long it stays valid.

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.

Dropbox doesnt have copyright checking last I checked. The way that they deal with the problem is by bandwidth limiting public urls. You would have the same effect with a video that you legally publish as with an infringing video.

Popularity is not proof of illegal activity. It seems implied that only restricted copyrighted information may bring high traffic, but that's not true. One of the highest traffic torrents I ever had, and which got the computer club network cut off from the university because it was "suspiciously uploading high amount of data" was in fact a linux live cd... It was also a highly effective way to test out the new server's hardware :).

Of course it's implied because > 99% of high traffic volume files on Mega are going to be copyrighted material. To suggest otherwise would be insane. Is high traffic proof of anything? Of course not. Is it reason to investigate? Absolutely, unless your stated mission is to cover your eyes singing "lalalalalala".

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.

Investigation takes time, effort and money. Its why the police is a group of people being paid to do that work. No one expect the police force to be made out of voluntaries. Why do then suddenly people expect system administrators to do police work for free?

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.

>99% of high traffic volume files on Mega are going to be copyrighted material.

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.

So you're one of the people that buys into the whole "It's easy to tell what files are legally shared" and it's just not true. Which is proven time and time again when publishing companies send DMCA takedown requests for the content another department in their company published intentionally.

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.

I took for granted that most ingringement policy is done locating the links in forums, checking if they really point to copyrighted content, then requesting the file locker to remove the file.

Actually I can't see how encryption could change this procedure. It seems a technical solution applied to a social problem.

You can't take for granted that anyone actually checks the file contents. I'm pretty sure the laser printers that got sent takedown notices weren't actually sharing any content.

I didn't mean that every denounce comes from content inspection, just that this is the most common case and that encryption couldn't stop it: if it's public, someone can inspect it.

Are the cloud providers (dropbox in this case) even allowed to look at the contents of your files?

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.

> Are the cloud providers (dropbox in this case) even allowed to look at the contents of your files?

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.

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