I saw that a well known ‘anonymous’ file sharing site won on appeal their right to continue ‘unknowingly’ hosting copyrighted movies, music, games etc, this week. A great victory against ‘the evil megacorps’ that already have too much money blah blah.<\/p>\n
Except of course, that the site in question is a huge company, one of the biggest online users of bandwidth, and likely all of it’s ‘sticking it to the man’ directors are millionaires. Undermining the system from within?<\/p>\n
I have no problem with people using online dropboxes. Quite a few contractors in my industry use them to transfer finished art assets to customers, for example. And every time someone, fairly reasonably points out that 99.99999% of rapidshare\/megaupload etc’s content is copyrighted, they always wave their arms at the odd graphic designer who uses their site for legit reasons.<\/p>\n
I think the solution is simple. Continue for it to be legal to host file drop-boxes, with the normal DMCA takedown procedure, but make it non anonymous. Ensure you need to buy a one-off account, for maybe just $1, with a proper bank account. A traceable one, basically. One that, if *horror of horrors* someone uploaded a copyrighetd movie\/game, they could easily be traced by their bank details, and prosecuted for damages.<\/p>\n
I’m sure people will say ‘what about whistleblowers’, and yay, what a great point. By all means, allow anonymous uploads. Cap it at 10MB a day. 1 MB is a comrpessed copy of War & peace. Exactly how many classified documents do you need to upload in a day? You can still leak those emails to the press, you just can’t upload\u00a0 Spiderman3_HD1280_RiPpEdByMe_3434.rar.<\/p>\n
There is absolutely no justification to allow unlimited uploads to a server you run in the multi-gigabyte range from someone anonymous. Especially in the form of password-protected rar files. Try going along to one of those self-storage places and saying<\/p>\n
“I want to store 4 lorryloads of stuff in your warehouse, and I want the only key. By the way, yes I look a lot like the guy who stored stuff here every day for the last 2 weeks, and every single time it turned out to be stolen goods, but clearly it won’t be this time, honest guv!”<\/p>\n
At some point, hopefully, the era of ‘anonymous file hosting’ will be put to rest by lawyers. I doubt it though. Lawyers are good at earning themselves money, not seeing the right thing done. I won’t shed a tear if one of those companies gets a huge business-destroying fine though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw that a well known ‘anonymous’ file sharing site won on appeal their right to continue ‘unknowingly’ hosting copyrighted movies, music, games etc, this week. A great victory against ‘the evil megacorps’ that already have too much money blah blah. Except of course, that the site in question is a huge company, one of<\/p>\n