I always thought this case was quite odd. YouTube has 100000000x more copyrighted content on it without the copyright owners permission but they don't go after Google, you don't find the CEO's of Google locked up do you? - Instead they go after the individual uploaders, doing copyright strikes and in some cases taking them to court.
My point is, why is it that in this case they chose to go after the platform operator instead of the individual users uploading the content? Megaupload was not a piracy centric site, just like YouTube is not. They had issues with piracy but they also had a DMCA takedown system that they operated and even gave the movie studios the ability to remove content themselves with zero oversight.
To me it seems like a rather large breach of the protections offered to service providers. If you're an ISP you don't get sued or go to prison because your customers are uploading pirated material. It's like how far back do you get to start making charges, why not charge the ISP, Electricity Provider and the company that sold the pirate the computer?
At the end of the day when you post copyrighted works on the internet that's your responsibility as an individual, not the companies whose services you're using or misusing to spread the content. I personally have a dim view of copyright in general which is for a whole other discussion but my point is, there are copyright laws and if you break them it should be on you and not on innocent third parties like megaupload.
I've seen some people argue that megaupload encouraged this usage of their service by splitting ad revenue with people who uploaded popular content, thus encouraging people to upload movies and tv shows to get paid. To that I say, doesn't YouTube do the exact same thing? Why isn't Sergey Brin in a jail cell huh?
