[pp.int.general] Other (no sot good) reaction to MU joint complaint campaign

[Stephane Bakhos]

>> Well, that's the natural reaction if you defend a company like
>> MegaUpload. You can close your eyes as hard as you want, their business
>> modell is based upon earning money by selling other people's work
>> without permission.

When thing that you seem to have missed is the MP3tunes verdict from about 
5 months ago
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/record-labels-get-hollow-victory-in-mp3tunes-infringement-case.ars

And the denian of the appeal about 2 weeks ago
http://onthecoversongs.blogspot.com/2012/01/labels-denied-interlocutory-appeal-in.html

The few juicy bits:

The labels argued that MP3tunes was disqualified because it should have 
known that many of the songs users sideloaded from websites such as 
rapidshare were infringing. But Judge William Pauley disagreed, arguing 
that the DMCA imposes no obligation to investigate potentially infringing 
activity absent a specific complaint from copyright holders. The only 
exception is links to sites with URLs containing "red flag" words like 
"pirate" or "bootleg."

EMI also argued that MP3tunes couldn't claim the DMCA safe harbor because 
it benefitted from its users' infringement and had the ability to control 
that infringement. But Judge Pauley disagreed. He held that there was no 
evidence MP3tunes directly profited from users' infringing sideloads. And 
he held that users, not MP3tunes, controlled which files users placed in 
their lockers.

"Judge Pauley soundly rejected that line of reasoning, writing that 
"MP3tunes does not use a 'master copy' to store or play back songs stored 
in its lockers. Instead, MP3tunes uses a standard data compression 
algorithm that eliminates redundant digital data."

This is probably going to be jurisprudence in favour of MU, and most of 
the cyberlockers out there.

At the end of the day, the FBI raid did achieve a few things in favour of 
the *AA:

1. Give them a picture of the foreign rich guy they were talking about 
when pushing SOPA/PIPA

2. Excerted tremendous pressure on the cyberlocker system, with many 
deciding to close down (filesonic, fileserve, etc)

3. Divided the pirate movement.