Was this the real reason why Megaupload was closed down?

reply to post by MrWendal


Oops, I thought that was just the title there, didn't realize it was a link.

I'm wondering if it was more of a message to artists rather than similar sites. Other sites are bound to pop up with the same ideas, but the major record labels will want to scare the artists away from them somehow.

hundreds of other sites just like mega.....been operating for a long time

Why mega???....why them...not rapidshare...etc etc...??

Originally posted by Gixxer
If you like the music,game,movie,software then pay for it if you don't like it don't buy it, but do not try and justify stealing! and that is exactley what bit torrent sites do, allow people to steal.

You do realise that Hollywood was set up on the West coast by East coast movie makers to avoid paying copyright royalties to Thomas Edison?

en.wikipedia.org...



I would if I could.

Mmm let's see Obama says he won't support SOPA and PIPA.
Hollywood and the music industry say they are ticked and promise to give no more
money to Obamas campaign.
In turn the Obama admin tells justice department to go ahead and pull the trigger
On the Megaupload investigation and shut it down as an appeasement to Hollywood.
Not saying that any of that is true but the timing seems kind of suspicious.

Money, money, money. $$

Technology absolutely has the ability to take the middle man out of music and many artists ARE making it ok by themselves.

RIAA made a few artists rich and controlled music really, because before the public could get hear you, you had to get accepted by them - so I think they were enjoying the POWER of that as much as the money.

Then they colluded to keep the prices of CDs up - 16.99 for a CD - and come on, we know how much it cost to produce one. lol I had some professionally produced for a company I worked for, and it was less than a dollar a disk with nice artwork and all.(The cases doubled that.)

I've said for years and years that the RIAA really needed to go find some new cheese, but they want their OLD cheese. They should have mophed into a social media/marketing/video production type company that worked more for the artists, letting the artists sign THEM but in addition to the money cheese, they wanted the power and prestige cheese...the all the stars once kissed our butt and are ingraciated to us cheese.

I want to thank my producers...

And legally there's been no way to force a change. Maybe if we had some kind of legislation to prevent them preying on artists - sorta like Anti-music pimp biz legislation...lol

I don't know - I'm not FOR artists losing money - but they are actually making very LITTLE money - what - 50 cents on each of those 16.99 cds? The business of stealing music online would not have even evolved had a viable system like emusic or itunes been put in place years back when the demand sprang up.

NOW the problem is also moving into books, as books move towards digital. Hardback 19.99, Kindle edition 16.99 What's up with THAT? It's going the same way, and some of the anti-piracy legislation is trying to pre-empt it. I think Amazon knows they can corner the market on the e-books jumping into self publishing first. They are SMART to give folks lots of free books and free previews. If they could get the publishers to try the new cheese and somehow think it is ok, wow, we could see a real reduction in book prices. I doubt we will though. The old cheese tasted best to the fat rats.

reply to post by Gixxer


This is a fallacy in today's world. What people who use this line fail to realize is that it's a try-before-you-buy sort of thing. I have downloaded numerous albums before buying. Another thing is that the record companies fail to realize people don't want to buy anything from record companies. Who cares about the record label? People care about the artists who produce things. Fans, generally, have no problem paying a fair price for music or media if it's perceived as helping the artists. Record labels are stuck in the 80s and think that showing an artist off as some larger than life person who is disconnected entirely from his/her fans still works, it doesn't. My favorite artists are those who have a relationship with the fans, artists who are down to earth, who look like a normal average person. That's where people's tastes are headed. More localized distribution would improve the industry by leaps and bounds.
People can't spend $15-20 bucks on crappy albums with no eye or hand candy, even electronic downloads are often almost as expensive as the hard copy. What record labels need to do is cater to the consumer, be more creative, be more open, and be more accepting of change. Otherwise, there's no reason for people NOT to download music from a major label.

Every album I've bought in the last several years (Dark Side of the Moon 2011 reissue excluded) has been from the artists page or from Relapse records, I like their style and their bands. Devin Townsend's box set, I got straight from him. John Hiatt's new album, I got from him. One of Sonny Landreth's albums, I got from him. Red Fang, from Relapse. Etc.

Business models MUST change.

This makes a lot more sense than Mega being 'yanked' simply because it was a file sharing site; sites that are of near infinite, predatory satiation levels of abundance.

It makes a lot more sense from the point of view of the likes of 卐orny pressuring the US government into taking action to avert the monopoly these avaricious companies have over artists being challenged. I would not at all be surprised if some deals were cut between the various instigating parties; such as the relinquishing of personal user information in exchange for this crack down.

After all, 卐orny themselves had no problem about 'losing' 77 million users' personal data to Russian crime syndicates just a few months back without notifying anyone until it was obvious something was wrong. So a little quid pro quo for something as potentially devastating to their business model as this MegaBox idea, would hardly be inconceivably.

Wow, that is awsome. Artists keep 90% of the profits and are also payed for music users download for free. Both parties benefit. Their music becomes more accesable and they still make money.

It is time artists realise they don't need to pimp their music to get a 360 and make money. You are better off being independent and selling say 50,000 records, then being signed a going platnium. You will still make the same amount of money and you won't have to give into their idea of marketable music.

This comes to mind when I hear of piracy...



I'll admit that I've d/l'ed a lot of albums but a decent portion were from albums I had previously owned but had lost throughout the years or were badly damaged while others were albums that were hard to find in stores. On the other hand some were just to have for free... of course out of all the albums that I had d/l'ed and/or bough I only listened to maybe a select few songs or some I completely skipped in their entirety . Of course nothing compares to ripping off the cellophane wrapping and popping out a fresh CD and reading the booklet... when it USED to have some interesting artwork and lyrics within it. I remember having owned Radiohead's Kid A for a few years without knowing of the secret booklet in the back. Anyway, it's interesting to see how this MegaUpload case turns out

Originally posted by Gixxer
love the hypocracy here, if you owned something of your own creation and other people were getting it for free from a site like mega upload you would be angry and want the site shut down too.

and this site is supposed to be full of the people whom are awake............*sigh


If you like the music,game,movie,software then pay for it if you don't like it don't buy it, but do not try and justify stealing! and that is exactley what bit torrent sites do, allow people to steal.

if you think swallowing propaganda means you are "awake" then i'd rather be "asleep".

because the claims you are making are the same claims the people who would make it illegal to even post links to copyrighted things make.
yes that is right, even links to IP is sue worthy, do you find that rational?

also copyright infringement is not stealing, stop listening to the MPAA and RIAA they don't have your rights in mind when they say stuff like that, they are lying to you.
they determine their losses on potential not on reality, they lose nothing when people download stuff without their say so, they don't have proof that they would have lost anything at all.
potential does not equate to loss when you don't know if people would have bought your crappy music.
also, how would they know that in the future the person wouldn't have bought it? they don't. they base their losses on speculation.
they lie.
heck they rip off their artists more than anyone, or hadn't you heard of the huuuge billion dollar IP case in canada, where the recording industry ripped artists off?
do you realize that the companies bleating the loudest pushed the sharing software out themselves? the biggest named websites, cnet and znet are owned by the big corps! there is even a law suit over it!

don't tell me that people need to wake up, you need to wake up and realize that the very people you are defending are blood sucking leeches that made this mess.

Originally posted by Alaskan Man
Was this the real reason why Megaupload was closed down?

The last thing the music industry wants is there money boat taken away. This could have started a chain reaction where artist no longer needed major labels to represent them while only making pennies on the dollar. Gives all the power to the artist, the last thing someone making money off you wants is for you to realize you don't need them.

This type of thinking is also going down in the movie industry. Big time actors are tired of seeing crap, robot, CGI films being put out just to make money, when everyone knows they are sh*t. People in all walks of life are downright tired of the fake BS in all areas of our lives, because they are forced down our throats. People are waking up.

Australian star Joel Edgerton, who has earned raves for his turn in Aussie feature "Animal Kingdom" and this fall's "Warrior," told The Hollywood Reporter over the weekend that he aims to use his new company to create well-made films of which he can be proud, a diametric opposite of what Hollywood is doing.

"I have an issue with the commercial aspect of moviemaking: I don't see why a movie can’t make a lot of money and also be good. We see at least two or three of them every year," he said. "But there is some sh*t movies out there now. It f*cking pisses me off - and I hate it when a sh*t movie comes out that's obviously made just to make money, and it does make that money and it lets everybody know that it's okay to make # movies because you can get rich off of it. I hate those people."

Hollywood's pre-eminent A-lister, George Clooney, says he's done making blowout movies, preferring to concentrate on more serious works and earning his salary elsewhere.

"I do films for scale and I go do coffee commercials overseas and I make a lot of money doing those so I get to live in a nice house," Clooney said during Newsweek's recent actor's round table, defending his choice not to do big budget films. "I don't rape the budget of a movie, we shot 'The Ides of March' for under $12 million, we shot 'The Descendants' for under $20, and if they make money, great... As an actor all bets are off if you need money. I've done really sh*tty movies or sh*tty jobs when I was broke, and people go, why did you do 'Return of the Killer Tomatoes?' Because I got the job, a**hole!"

The ever-outspoken Daniel Craig has also called into question his own films, dissing the 007 sequel "Quantum of Solace" for its lack of script -- and how he had promised himself to never be in a film as ill-prepared as that one.

"You swear that you'll never get involved with # like that, and it happens," he told Time Out London. "On 'Quantum,' we were #ed. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers' strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, 'Never again,' but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not."

Then there is George Lucas, who recently slammed Hollywood for not wanting to finance his Tuskegee Airmen film "Red Tails" because it had an all-black cast.

Actors fed up with Hollywood moviemaking

It was a retaliation to the protest that killed SOPA.

There's also this from late last year...

Megaupload to Sue Universal, Joins Fight Against SOPA

File-hosting service Megaupload has told TorrentFreak that it will sue Universal for wrongfully taking down its content from YouTube. Universal took action Friday to remove a Megaupload-produced pop video which featured leading artists singing the cyberlocker service’s praises. The move has also prompted the company to enter the SOPA debate, with a call for like-minded people to join forces and fight for an Internet without censorship.

But whatever Universal’s motivations for the takedowns were, according to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom the label will now have to justify their actions in court. TorrentFreak can confirm that Mega’s legal team have already been instructed to sue Universal over the illegitimate copyright takedown of the Mega Song, an act which Kim says was an attempt to sabotage their viral campaign.

Well there it is ladies and gentlemen, the reason behind it all. I really hate these government goons

reply to post by Gixxer

love the hypocracy here, if you owned something of your own creation and other people were getting it for free from a site like mega upload you would be angry and want the site shut down too.

Yeah, sure, that's logical - take down a whole website because a group of people are using the website to share copyrighted material. Why don't we just take down RapidShare, MediaFire, SendSpace, all of them! Lets just take them all down and make sure no one can ever upload anything to the internet ever again! File sharing shall be forbidden because it allows people to share copyrighted material. Screw all those people who share legitimate files, they don't even need a warning before we destroy the sites. All their files and data will simply be lost without any sort of warning.

All I know is that MegaUpload removed copyrighted material just as much as any of the other file hosting services. Therefore I say it's perfectly fine to take them all down.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder


Better outlaw bricks too. They can be used to build structures, sure; but criminals use them to break windows.

On a good note this could horribly back fire on them. Think of the message and what will happen to their industry once this is taken to court and they lose!!!

reply to post by MrAndy


The Insane Clown Posse comes to mind . More and more artists, especially from the 80s & 90s are making new songs/records and releasing them onto their website. Sometimes for free! The music industry has destroyed music, so this is a welcome change. The change being artists being free from the music industry.

Clearly our Fascist in Chief had to stop this. The recording industry throws millions at the Democrats. Total corruption... this is as plain as can be.