Dotcom’s Mega Removes Legal Files Citing Bogus DMCA Requests
Found on Torrentfreak on Friday, 01 February 2013
TorrentFreak has received reports from people whose perfectly legal files were locked in their Mega accounts for alleged copyright violations. In all cases this happened after these users published links to the files elsewhere on the Internet.
The censored content includes copyrighted music and movies, but also free to share software such as Ubuntu and copies of Kim Dotcom’s very own music.
To test how quickly a file is removed by Mega we decided to post some previously uploaded legal content to Mega-search.me ourselves.
Quite shockingly, the files were pulled down by Mega in a matter of minutes, claiming they had received copyright infringement notices for each of them.
This brings up quite a few questions. First of all why thousands of legal files vanish while Dotcom claims that Mega only received a couple of takedown notices. Judging from the speed of the takedowns, the process is pretty much automated without any review process what makes it way too easy to exploit. Sure, Mega can point at their ToS which say that they can pretty much do what they want, but that will only make users run away from an unreliable service. Pirates expect takedowns, but if you upload a Linux distro you of course expect it to stay online. Even if Mega restores those files, people will wonder why deleted files were not really deleted.