Bitcoin Forum

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/megaupload-indicted-shuttered/

This story has  :o written all over it.  Who's next?

Yeah, and this is before SOPA and PIPA.

Anonymous has retaliated BTW;
http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-doj-universal-sopa-235/

Boy, am I ever glad we have anon to look out for us.

It wasn't a DNS takeover, their servers in VA actually got seized and confiscated. If you whois the domain, it's still pointed at their private nameservers.

According to btc-e namecoin prices havent moved significantly in the past two weeks.

Just sayin...

Government keeps up their crap, namecoin will jump.

Gotta be cautious people. government is not your friend. Thanks for the news feed, BTW BitcoinBaltar

Namecoin will never jump until it is considered a serious candidate for a DNS system for Tor hidden services.

+1

This is disgusting. This is a clear "shut up" message to all companies that protested against SOPA. The level of authoritarianism and arrogance of the USA government is outstanding already, and it's growing fast.

I hope American citizens remember one day why their founding fathers gave them the second amendment. Its reason to exist isn't only so you can protect your home and family from burglars.

MU isn't the first, others have come and gone before. Welcome to the internet.
I don't see how namecoins will solve this problem really, i do see the internet getting worse by the day.
Also i don't think we can prevent this from happening, all we can do is find counter measures to preserve our own freedom.
Use and built on existing and new darknets, set up mesh networks, things like that, where they have no control by design.

We already have p2p, and decentralized websites/technologies ... megaupload was a downgrade.

Very interesting rant about Cnet and many other companies, owned by the very companies that are heading the anti piracy charge, not only encouraging file sharing but directly offering the file sharing software and many of them direct links to actually share the pirated files. Only to later sue the very people they profited millions from by offering such software~!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc

I always hated megaupload, but it sucks that its government action that took them down

Not until its supported by OpenDNS or GoogleDNS - its just not adoptable in its current state... Simple Firefox/Chrome addons?. Also Namecoins could not have prevented this, MegaUpload hosted their servers in America and even those outside of the US (leaseweb) was seized.

btc-e has disabled namecoin deposits

just sayin...

use this; https://exchange.bitparking.com/main

it's gone down there over the past few weeks. Mostly in keeping with the rising BTC/USD price though.

Eh, they're just looking for someone to sue. I doubt MegaUpload did anything much different from the plethora of other similar file-hosting sites.

While I agree with you, it also is a clear message that SOPA/PIPA are NOT NEEDED and existing laws seem to cover things quite well.  Megaupload had substantial non-infringing uses, and that is what (I hope) the internet community is trying to protect. 

I also object to the fact that anyone was arrested this early, let alone the number of people.  They clearly wanted to DESTROY megaupload, because even if they are found not guilty huge damage has already been done.    Where there civil lawsuits first that I did not hear about? 

That's what I call the "yankee way" of doing things, from the Civil War, to Alabama in 1965, to Iraq in 2003 we see it time and time again that no one and no thing is safe from the raging arrogance of the tiny subset of Americans entitled with beauracratic wrath and moral hubris of being "right."   Like the Union Army burning to the ground http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1863) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1863)) 4 counties of Missouri. 

They would burn down and destroy all of America if they thought it was in their personal interests to do so.

If we just put more government on top they can make burning America illegal then we'll all be safe.

I lold

HAHAHA, aye.

Thanks for that, FreeMoney!

as did I!

If you bothered to read the actual indictment then you'd know that they did do things differently from other file-hosting sites.  For a start, they paid users for uploading illegally obtained files and then charged other users for downloading them.  They also knowingly and quite deliberately failed to comply with take-down requests (the emails show the extent to which this was intentional) by not actually removing content.

Kim Schmitz is a nasty piece of work who's been prosecuted in the past for credit card fraud, embezzlement and insider trading (to name a few).  You're incredibly naive if you don't believe that he intentionally used the model he did so that users would be the ones at risk of prosecution and that the business itself could claim safe harbour.  Fortunately, he's not as smart as he likes to think he is - he also recently lost a copyright infringement action brought by a porn distributor.

File-hosting sites will never gain legitimacy unless people like Kim Schmitz are prosecuted.  He's not some kind of free speech champion - he'd have assumed the legal risk himself if he was instead of operating in a manner he thought made him immune to prosecution while transferring that risk to his users.  He's a scum-bag opportunist who has always sought to enrich himself at the expense of others and international conspiracy charges couldn't happen to someone more deserving.

I stand corrected. I read multiple news stories, but not the indictment itself. Thank you for that information! I agree, that sort of behavior discredits file-hosting sites and is immoral.

Hear hear

There are plenty of megavideo clones the US didn't go after with the exact same biz model. The only reason they were able to extradite Kim dotcom and his cronies is because they were stupid enough to use US hosting where the Feds could get access to their internal emails and get all the evidence they needed to launch an extradition request.

exactly, and thanks for the info, m8.


TL;DR

  Megaupload were a bunch of thieving bastards who promoted profiting from stolen 'works'.

  This case also serves as good evidence that we don't need SOPA to fight entities that would seek to 'pirate' for profit.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fighting theft of IP for profit is good.
Treating everyone that does not want to buy your damn product like they are a thief is BAD.
And making everyone else responsible for the protection of your IP, costing everyone else a HUGE amount more than what you are supposedly protecting is theft through legislation.

The interesting part is that megaupload was able to make so much money selling access to pirated IP while the IP holders claim to be losing money left and right. They refuse to adapt their business model and instead fall back on lobbying and lawsuits.

^ This. I say it is the fault of the labels for not being innovative, in the slightest.

They made hardly any money from premium accounts they made 700 million/yr from feeding you forced ads everytime you clicked to watch something.

So? Apparently it was acceptable to people so it worked. I don't see how that makes my point less legitimate.

Things might not be as clean as it seems on first sight. Kim Schmitz has worked for and against US agencies in the past.

Expect a drawn out extradition process in the NZ courts and maybe a failure to bring a successful prosecution against this seemingly "made-for-television" villain that the FBI couldn't have asked a better poster child to act as "dr. evil copyright pirate" ....

tl;dr ... prosection fails ... SOPA passes. (fbi and kim both win).

It doesn't make your point invalid, I just corrected you they didn't make all their loot selling access.
There's just too many middle men at the trough getting fed from studios, corporations and agents they can't change their model as they've all signed ridiculous huge contracts for 10+ years to each other.

Ah, thanks for the insight. So it is due a bunch of people signing contracts with no foresight creating an environment that stifles innovation.  That is an interesting failure mode that I can see occurring in an industry functioning in a libertarian society.

I have read the indictment and it is fair to say that this is no "dancing baby" copyright case. It will be interesting to see if the United States Government will be able to prove this in court, in particular the part about the $500,000,000 in losses.  If they can make this criminal case stick, I have no sympathy for Mr. Dotcom and his co conspirators. Interestingly the fact that these people could make so much money of pirated content serves to demonstrate how wrong the big copyright business models really are.

Why? My understanding is contracts would be king. The difference is it would be easier for the organizations running this failed industry to be replaced.

Basically corporations like the leasing rights model where they make all their money. They lease the rights to other corporations for insanely huge fees in one lump sum and now that corp is responsible for making back the money, so they go after anybody else doing it since they're probably already operating at a loss for paying so much in fees in the first place.

For instance any US network TV show is sold to my country for exclusive network rights that they pay hundreds of millions for per year. If that company doesn't have online streaming, I'm fucked I can't watch it online anywhere unless I pirate it or ssh/proxy/vpn with a US ip, or buy a $700 box set. This is why megavideo and it's clones are so popular. Also they (usually) don't make you sit through ads before getting content, and the ads were most likely stuff people would be interested in like gambling, online gaming and pr0nz.

I suspect the bulk of megavideos users were in foreign countries trying to get access to US made content which is geoIP restricted. Content holders in the US instead of leasing out their rights to the highest bidder possible and signing 10+year contracts with them should instead have an open leasing system where absolutely anybody can stream their content and pay them monthly instead of a huge lump sum. Then Megavideo could've given half of that 700 million to the rights holders and everybody wins but no.

Right, this could still occur without a state though. People don't always think long term (and can't predict the advent of paradigm changing technologies) when creating contracts. If the industry was large enough, there would still be a sizeable barrier to entry imposed on any newcomers due to lack of mindshare, etc.

I agree, that's a good way of putting it. Granting a monopoly on force -> competition = civil disobedience. I wonder if this can be proved as a formal deductive argument.

filesonic basically shutdown itself as a precaution. several others closed their affilliate programs and/or are massively deleting files. looks like the feds were quite effective in making an example of megaupload.

I'm just glad I had a backup of my film files on my 2 computers.I used MegaUpload to promote my portfolio of films to prospective employers (in the field of film making,editing,e.t.c) as well as friends and family.I used to have them available on my blog from those MU links,now they're gone.

MU was one of my favourite hosts due to speed and flexibility for me which is valuable for me as a filmmaker.I'm not happy with the fact that MegaUpload (MU) got shutdown.That makes me question why bother with SOPA/PIPA when the US Govt clearly has enough powers to shutdown 'infringing' sites.

How valuable are namecoins in USD,GBP and BTC now?

I'll sell you 30 namecoins for .17 bitcoins, based on the rates below
https://btc-e.com/exchange/nmc_btc

*cough* ripoff *cough* atleast @ 0.00566~   :P
https://exchange.bitparking.com/main  has em a bit cheaper anyhows.

 :D went off the first exchange i saw. Not trying to rip anyone off.

Namecoin is very-very raw project in current time. It has no strict rules for name resolution and name resolution is actually tricky there.

I am fall into namecoin -> I2P integration development (fully anonymous domain and destination) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60879.0 and found there many questionable points.

Overall question is: how many terabytes will eat local domain database if there will be more that 1 million domains changing their records. Each resolution record is recorded forever. Will the regular users want to install such heavy software on their computers in the future?

Once bitcoin implements a pruning mechanism for the block chain, namecoin can implement the same.

Or, maybe the Namecoin can use the same approach of "supernode / light client", or, more or like the Bitcoin Lightweight Client, called Electrum.

What about adding support for multiple currencies to Electrum? Like Namecoin or even Litecoin?!

Cheers,
Thiago

With a bitcoin lite client, the worst the server can do to you is lie about your balance or not relay your transactions. You can't be tricked into having your coins stolen.

With a namecoin lite client, the server could direct you to a phishing site (which a public DNS can do anyways) but your client would trust the fake ssl certificate. That's a deal breaker for me.  Most users of namecoin probably won't even have any coins so having their balances protected isn't really helpful.

I'm not sure of a good solution for a namecoin lite client.

the US is a joke of a democracy

they should invade themselves, if you see what I mean

Damn, I miss megaupload!

I don't follow this. If the legitimacy of the certificate is somehow depending on how/where you look up the name, maybe whatever the problem is that you are perceiving could be fixed by putting a hash of a self-signed certificate into the namecoin blockchain or something?

I do not follow though how the way you go about looking up the name has anything to do with whether the cetificate presented at the IP address or i2p destination or .onion address or whatever you end up at is going to be thought by your browser to be a legitimate certificate.

-MarkM-

I am only talking about lite clients here.  The full client has no trouble with checking the validity of a name or SSL cert.

If you are running a lite client, you don't have the blockchain.  Any verification of data against the blockchain is impossible because you don't have the blockchain.

If you ask a remote provider to resolve a namecoin name for you, you have to trust them.  Trusting someone to hand you the real SSL certificate is not a good idea

It seems that Kim is going to open his new service MegaBox.
Is there anyone that can support him to add bitcoin currency as payment?

His twitter account:
http://twitter.com/KimDotcom

Go Kim!