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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

The way monetization of MU content worked, is they would send the average internet user to a page that mostly hid the download link and tricked that person into clicking on the 'sign-up to download it fast' area, selling them access.

This was not a business model that proved something noble about pirates, it was a criminal enterprise that for the most part, took someone else work, and sold it pennies on the dollar.

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I'm not arguing that they weren't a criminal enterprise or that movie pirates are all closet consumerists waiting to be parted with their money. However, the article says that the vast majority of mega's money came from "premium subscriptions". The subscription part is interesting to me because it implies that a not insignificant number of people were paying regularly for this "service". They can't all have been dupes who never checked their credit card statements.

As to your statement about them reselling this stuff for "pennies on the dollar", I do have a major problem with creators not being compensated for their work. However, I'm also not really sure what movies and TV shows are actually worth anymore. The pricing seems totally crazy between Netflix, physical media, and iTunes. It's anyone's guess what an episode of "Breaking Bad" actually is worth. The answer is increasingly, "it depends".

The download-link trickery was probably relatively ineffective, since most people only needed one download to figure out how it worked. There were a lot of people who paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download stuff faster and without limits. It was like the Amazon Prime of bootlegged content in some circles.

There are billions of impressions being sold daily for advertising from hijacked users. Big $$$.

Advertising revenue was secondary to premium memberships, but now paypal, visa/mc are shutting down file lockers payment processing and they are more reliant on ad revenue.

The biggest problem with this straw man argument is that copying software is not zero sum. The movie studios do not lose exactly X dollars because there were Y downloads from Megaupload, or from any other copyright infringing site for that matter. Copying data is not the same as theft because there is no transaction cost and you haven't "deprived" anyone of any good. There is no way to prove that an infringer would have consumed that data if it hadn't been free.

Sure, having users pay full price for a movie (or CD or video game, etc.) is always the most desirable outcome. What's far worse than having someone infringe upon your copyright is for your media property to be completely unwatched or unused. When you're in the entertainment business, there's absolutely nothing worse than no one caring about what you're producing. A lot of people in the are starting to figure this out; look at how successful bands like Iron Maiden (on HN today) have been.

With that said, yeah, MU is pretty sleazy, but I'm not sure I would go so far as call them "criminal". They really were fulfilling a need which wasn't being delivered by the various media companies. I have no idea why movie studios can't figure out how to properly segment their market and charge different prices for different types of content delivery. The hyperbole about calling copyright infringers "pirates" and calling what they do "theft" has to stop, along with the lobbying government for draconian laws which stop reverse engineering. Provide better ways for your customers to not be copyright infringers and you'll have happier customers and more revenue.

> straw man argument

In what way is it a straw man argument?

> copying software is not zero sum.

This doesn't seem to contradict the parent post, nor affect its argument.

This is the problem right here.

It's a business model that works..if you don't have to spend $100 million dollars creating it.

Legit sites try to trick visitors like that too.

Sounds almost like GoDaddy … although GoDaddy is of course not considered a criminal enterprise. In the old days, shareware sites had similar business models as far as I remember.

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