Who would be dumb enough to use it, given Kim Dotcom's criminal record? The man has been convicted of receiving stolen goods, insider trading, and embezzlement. If he's not convicted in the Magaupload case, it will be ENTIRELY due to procedural errors on the part of the prosecution.
The only times he appears to have not been engaged in criminal activity is when he was on parole waiting for a sentence to run out.
Why would you trust him with your data? Or if you are an investor, with your money?
Who is a bigger criminal, Lloyd Blankfein or Kim Dotcom?
That's a rhetorical question of course, but considering the status quo and Kim's agenda actually siding with that of the general public, he seems to stand in good favor.
Then you have to take into account the new services being offered, which in addition to the old services seem to offer legitimate music marketing opportunities for bands around the world. Ways to promote your band without selling your soul. Ways to earn more from your album sales, and even ways to earn money when people listen to your music for free.
They're going after the music industry, and they're doing a very good job of it.
Investors are perfectly capable of determining risk vs. monetary reward in any venture.. and if not, then they won't be an investor very long.
Absolutely not. Unless I was a non-technical user looking for an easy way to share my pirated software/audio/video etc, in which case it's almost a plus that the guy in charge is going to try his hardest to avoid being shut-down again.
> Or if you are an investor, with your money?
For me the answer is a firm "no" but other people will weigh risk/reward differently.
This isn't and was never Megaupload's purpose. I'd imagine most of the people awaiting Megaupload's ressurection are those who make affiliate commissions from uploading high traffic files (38 part movies, books, applications, etc).
Doubt it. Megaupload's business model was based around refusing to pay out people who uploaded anything they obviously don't have the right to distribute. The e-mails released by the FBI were carefully selected and spun to make it appear as though Megaupload deliberately paid commissions to copyright infringers, but even they didn't manage to remove all the references to the actual policy.
They were actually used to host Linux software, and Linux drivers, and custom-built Android firmware images, and... Shortly after the Megaupload shutdown I was looking into USB DVB-T tuners and the official Linux drivers for one of the ones I was looking at were only available on Megaupload.
Pretty clear, actually: the law in the US, in the UK, and in New Zealand says there's criminal copyright infringement. The difference between civil infringement and criminal infringement tends to be "you tried to make a business out of it".
This is an article of faith among advocacy groups but I'm not sure (I'm not a lawyer) that's actually true. People have been held criminally vicariously liable for other criminal actions despite the lack of clear statutory language to that effect. They've then argued to appeals courts, "but there's no statute that clearly says I can be held criminally liable vicariously", and lost. "Vicarious liability" is not some crazy idea invented by the copyright cartels; it's a basic principle of common law.
I am just basing this view on the Sony vs Universal and Grokster vs MGM trials, which were both civil. Admittedly there is a legal argument that could be made for criminal vicarious liability, however from my understanding, that is usually only used for situations that could endanger the general public, where the lack of direct criminal action is deemed to be outweighed by the need to protect people, and that does not seem to apply in this instance. However, that said, I am also not a lawyer, so I could well be misunderstanding the issues completely.
Yeah, that was my first thought. Although they're essentially redoing the exact same code so they might have a fairly good idea of how long it would take.
It's interesting to know investors are still interested. The risk for them has shifted from "will this be successful", which they have experience in predicting, to "will this get shut down again", which they presumably don't.
Sometimes Torrentfreak takes a snippet of available information, then makes it into a full, long (and excruciating) article, nothing new is added after the opening paragraph here.
