There are big differences in the details there. I suggest you go to the Megaupload Wikipedia article and go to the “basis of indictment” section.
Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.
Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.
Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.
Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.
Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
> Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.
Of course not, but they had no moderation for a long time so that that's what people were using it for. At that scale it's not an oversight, it's a customer acquisition strategy.
Once they hit critical mass they killed the feature as one would expect before negotiating lucrative deals with distributors via Google Play Music and eventually Youtube Music.
I think the line is very blurry, the only difference is one side is doing it very quietly and strategically, while the other was blustering their way through.
Megaupload wasn’t even hiding behind a legitimate use case. It couldn’t be used as a personal file storage service because infrequently downloaded files would be deleted. The company paid people to upload popular files. The service had a comprehensive CSAM takedown process but no such process for copyright infringement.
Basically, the US government was saying that Megaupload’s intent was extremely obvious.
Sites like Crunchyroll and YouTube which started off being a haven for piracy had DCMA compliance as their shield. They complied with requests to take down content and weren’t building the entire business around infringement.
Plex doesn’t enable you to distribute content beyond your household, and it’s also facilitating legal personal backups of commercial content.
Google Play Music (and iTunes for that matter) were the same thing: making backups of your music is completely legal. Google Play wasn’t telling you to jump on LimeWire to illegally download your music.