MPAA: the Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown Was 'Massive'

An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success. In a filing to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the group representing major movie studios says the file hosting and sharing industry has been massively disrupted. Yet the MPAA says there is still work to be done, identifying sites that make available to downloaders 'unauthorized copies of high-quality, recently-released content and in some cases, coordinate the actual upload and download of that content.' Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."

Piracy down, along with ticket sales

[Anonymous Coward]

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/11/25/1654201/researchers-find-megaupload-shutdown-hurt-box-office-revenues
Let's cut off our nose to spite our face!

Speaking as a pirate,

[Anonymous Coward]

If not for all the slashdot coverage, I wouldn't even have noticed.

They completely missed all the new sites

[Anonymous Coward]

:) They totally missed the largest streaming sites or link sites entirely.

http://www.solarmovie.so/ (http://www.solarmovie.eu/)
http://www.tv-links.eu/
http://www.vidics.eu/
http://www.movs.eu/
http://www.watchseries.eu
http://www.youtube.com/ (mostly good old stuff, but still a great source for that content)

If you want more just do a Google search for ”some obscure movie or tv show site:eu” and you'll find it on the first page of Google's results. This works for any movie and not just obscure stuff. Humorously it is easier to find stuff this way then Netflix, Hulu, etc.

Re:Doesn't help

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... what? The shutdown of Megaupload, especially in the way it was handled, was a massive disaster in terms of legitimacy, due process, and justice, which is why the case is now completely falling over, as you say.

However, to suggest that Megaupload was not used by many as a gigantic, mostly unregulated store for pirated content is utterly ridiculous. Megavideo links of a vast array of television shows and movies were present in essentially every streaming links website, now mostly replaced with sites like videobb and vidbux. Yahoo Answers still has quite a few questions from naive users asking about how to find movies and tv shows on Megavideo, along with numerous answers. Searching for warez and pirated books from prior years will come up with quite a few megaupload links.

Megaupload certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that Megavideo, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, Youtube or Vimeo.

Re:Yes, yes it was.

[GoatCheez]

The only time I ever used Mega services was for legitimate files. If I ever wanted anything illegitimate I'd search for a torrent. People forget a VERY common use case: I need to post large content on the internet for download by a lot of people, and I don't want to use my own hosting bandwidth. Wallpaper pack? Recordings from class? Video of a friend's concert? The list goes on...

Re:Thanks

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Also, the copyright bill recently passed, though it has terrible digital lock provisions, does actually differentiate between commercial and non-commercial infringement and caps the latter at $5000 for all infringement up to the point the lawsuit was filed. Also also, that section of the bill contains explicit instructions to judges for considering statutory damage amounts to take into account the nature of the infringement and how widely it was used, and they can drop it as low as $100. That's not even worth the costs of filing the suit. This severely limits the likelihood that people will cop to settlements for thousands of dollars to avoid a trial. There are some silver linings.