> Sure, some artists used Megaupload to share their own works, but these uploads were far outnumbered by their illegitimate counterparts.
Has this been demonstrated yet? (I currently slightly favor your belief but I could see it being the other case.) I know that Megaupload provided tools for the labels et al. to remove infringing content in a very easy way (just like Youtube offers), and there was a lot of outcry from people over their personal files being lost because they were treating it like dropbox.
It was an unspoken truth, as for any other platform or protocol used primarily for the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted works (P2P networks, torrents, usenet, etc.)
When called into question, users will argue these platforms/protocols can be used for legitimate purposes, and point to examples of people using them as such. In this case it was Megaupload attempting to do this to defend itself.
It doesn't, however, change the reality of the situation.
Unspoken truths often turn out to be false. Without hard figures it's a tough call to say what the reality really is. (I'm still amazed Netflix itself takes up ~20% of the US internet traffic, and it's all authorized.) For torrent sites it's easier to get the figures, for Megaupload it isn't. Hence my curiosity, I guess I'll just have to wait for the trial.
The more interesting case to me is whether one paints a service on distinct counts of items or on total traffic per item. PirateBay makes it easy to see what the hottest torrents are (http://thepiratebay.se/top/all); I'd be surprised if any are authorized. If we assume a power law then most of torrent traffic certainly infringes. For Megaupload, perhaps it was the same. But I'm more inclined to think Megaupload's distinct counts fall closely in line with Youtube's--it's trivial for copyright owners to take their content down with either a DMCA request or the tools the sites provide, meanwhile tons of user-generated content is appearing that actually belongs to the user. MediaFire seems like the place to go these days for sharing your songs, even professional artists use it sometimes. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to consider that for Youtube and perhaps Megaupload, there is more non-infringing content than infringing in absolute terms even if the infringing content takes up the supermajority of traffic.
I would personally be beyond astonished if this one turned out to be false.
It's interesting you point to The Pirate Bay's list of most popular torrents though. The Mega indictment cites an email from one of the alleged conspirators to another employee instructing said employee to alter the Megaupload 'Top 100' list. Elsewhere it is alleged that this list did not accurately reflect the most popular downloads on the site, and that this was done deliberately to make the site appear more legitimate than it was.
Demonstrated enough up until now to have an indictment written up and acted upon by law enforcement officers on the other side of the world.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted, but the simple fact is that there was enough evidence to have an indictment written up, signed off on and then authorities in another country agree it had enough merit to be acted upon.
New Zealand is a small country highly dependent on the US for trade and tourism. If the US says "jump", our police and politicians are probably going to jump, whether or not it's merited. Hopefully now that the pressure is off a bit our court system can sort out the questions of merit properly.
Has this been demonstrated yet? (I currently slightly favor your belief but I could see it being the other case.) I know that Megaupload provided tools for the labels et al. to remove infringing content in a very easy way (just like Youtube offers), and there was a lot of outcry from people over their personal files being lost because they were treating it like dropbox.