Was Megaupload SHUT DOWN not for its illegal past/present but because of its FUTURE PLANS?
 

Interesting analysis on the REAL REASON why megaupload was anally power drilled by the government: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/was...kebox-service/

Who cares, hang the horse thief.

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Fuck it! It's all good!

There are plenty of legitimate and wonderfully put together hubs that allow artists to profit from their work directly. CDBaby, Bandcamp and even iTunes and Amazon allow you to sell your own work without any labels being involved. Let alone those a bit more technically inclined who can just set up their own cart system, like Louis CK.

They all are legitimate services that have zero backbone in piracy and not a single one has the RIAA after them.

he will walk... if theres one thing you can count on is a good ole fashioned mistrial when it comes to stuff like this.

lol, i wouldn't be surprised at all, actually i was expecting something like this to be the reason.

I doubt it has much to do with their future plans. When you are operating a criminal enterprise and you toss the success of that enterprise in the faces of the law enforcement by living in a mansion, owning 20 luxury cars and spending $11 million dollars in one year on yacht rentals you tend to get their full and undivided attention.

Death Penalty would be nice.

Sarcasm*

Would explain sending our agents abroad and not just waiting for him to fly here for Vegas weekend.

do you know how fucking hard it is to get your shit listed on itunes if you don't have a record label to sign off on their contracts.

It gotten so bad that artist have created paper labels just to get their shit on the site.

i think if they never made that song, dot com would be in his mansion still

This is what my friend did. He was in a very popular rock back signed to two major labels over the past 10 years. But he now releases his solo stuff in this manner. I don't see it as being impossible, at all. I will be going through this process myself soon, so I guess I will find out first hand.

I doubt it. There is another service setup almost exactly like that and it's still in operation. Not to say that it will be forever though, and no I will not name the service. I can tell you it's not pandora (yawn), mog or rhapsody.

More than 20 RIAA lawyers WERE appointed to the justice department in the last coupler of years, so there are plenty of RIAA people at justice who would want to stop that.

investigation began in 2012.

His PR people and supporters are working OT.

Hope they know the checks won't clear.

You can't rob banks, then expect everyone to let you be a banker. Fuck him.

yeah i heard about that

thought i typed 2010 i mean.

People that think that it has anything to do with something that was announced not long ago or with a song that was posted a month ago are just stupid.

An investigations like this takes a long time, at least a year or longer. And then after the investigations the planning for the arrests and seizures of bank accounts and cars etc, takes months and months of planning as well.

So no, this had nothing to do with the stupid video, nor the plans for megabox.

Common sense rarely prevails around here.

You have to admit, that Tech Crunch post has quite a few people thinking out loud (and quite a few scratching their heads).

From what I understand this investigation has been going on since 2010 long before this service was ever even mentioned. Perhaps they decided to make the busts now instead of a few months from now before the service was launched, but I highly doubt it is the reason behind it.

The two things are not mutually exclusive

years of prep time that is rushed at the end in response to the new service being announced is still a valid possibility.

And judging from some of the flaws in the complaint there was some rushing to get this shit out the door.

seriously if this was years in the coming, want to explain why they could have waited say 2-3 months to properly plan out how to protect all the independent artist who are getting fucked out $7-9 grand a year from the current program BEFORE they started this take down.


don't you think the fed saying the site is up for all the legitimate user of the site, but if you upload any pirated content we now are logging your ip address info, that all the piracy would have stopped cold too, of course it would have.

but that not what you said

2-4 grand in legal fees just to have the right to post your shit, in addition to all the cost to profession produce an mp3/music video/etc is a pretty big risk for most independent musicans.

and it just stupid to require a paper label just to sell your shit on itunes.

Pirates who then try to turn legit is nothing new, much like the mafia moving into respectable business.

Why didn't they try this business model from the start? Because then they wouldn't have become one of the top 15 sites on the internet. Grab traffic from piracy first, then dictate terms.

i can remember the early days of adult internet... everyone bought their content and no one stole ANYTHING it was like the Shire from Lord of the rings, i miss those days of running through the fields holding hands with other webmasters....

Sounds like someone is making up excuses.

words of wisdom as always, but you forgot to mention that hyped up bloated commercial they did as well ;)

Precrime.

Or Hollywood moving west as to avoid having to pay license fees to Thomas Edison.

Sure. They should have sticked to their illegal past. To avoid shut down. :upsidedow

I don't really care ...

Gideon, none of the other sites I mentioned require that, do not pick and choose what you want to reply to make the overall point seem more dramatic. And I looked into it more last night and CDBaby works as a liaison to post your stuff on iTunes, as well.

http://members.cdbaby.com/sell-on-itunes.aspx the service costs a whopping $40!

The point was there are already alternatives that exist. None have roots of millions of dollars in piracy and none are being shut down.

Good point. Changing bureaucratic culture due to shifts in manpower. Expect more such changes in the future due to the continuing soft economy?

With all the actual charges I dont think they needed other reasons.

Megaupload appears to be a criminal organization which is enough justification for shutting it down. Future plans are irrelevant.

Youtube is warez central.

Interesting range of reactions...

cdbaby acts as the record company for itunes and takes 9% for that "service"

they take 25% of all the sales they make that two and a half times as much as mega upload was going to charge


and they paid artist to give their stuff away for free (which none of those services do).

like i said before