Anti-Piracy Company ‘Tests’ Mega’s Copyright Takedown Skills
Posted: 27 Jan 2013
What a first week for Mega. The official launch last weekend, the big and loud press conference and party on Sunday, plus a massive influx of users throughout the week shooting the site into the big league in record time.
As predicted, the site has indeed become the most scrutinized start up in Internet history with lawyers, security experts and the media looking at every aspect of the site.
Outside of the site’s approach to encryption, one of the key issues has rightly been the site’s attitude to the law. At this stage (unsurprisingly) there is nothing to suggest that Dotcom and his associates are being anything other than the good corporate citizens they have claimed to be all along.
Mega has a robust policy for dealing with infringement and it has already been put to the test this week, although at a somewhat subdued rate. According to Dotcom only 50 DMCA-style takedown notices have been received so far, which considering the sheer numbers of files being uploaded is a mere drop in the ocean.
The Mega boss says that currently a mind-boggling 500 uploads are completing “every second” which according to the TF abacus is 43.2 million files a day. Thats a LOT of uploading, but not yet close to Dropbox where over a billion files are added every 24 hours.
So how did Mega perform on its takedowns? According to information sent to TorrentFreak by Guillaume Champeau, editor of Numerama, Mega has already been ‘tested’ on that front by a French anti-piracy company.
LeakID, which operates a system called LeakSearch, apparently sent a batch of DMCA-style takedowns to Mega on Tuesday. The notices, sent on behalf of Citel Video, requested deactivation of five links to the manga show Naruto. According to Numerama’s source, all files were removed within 48 hours.
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As expected Mega requires those submitting DMCA takedowns to operate in good faith and only attempt to take down content which is actually infringing on their copyrights.
However, while a company like Google can do limited testing on the validity of the notices it receives, due to its encryption presumably Mega can do none and must operate entirely on trust when it takes files down. This could ultimately prove problematic for wrongful takedowns since Mega has rules in place to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
Finally, those hoping to track the numbers of allegedly infringing files on Mega by using Google’s Transparency Report will be disappointed. Currently and presumably due to Mega’s setup, Google is unable to index the site. If that stays the same Mega will never appear in the report and Google won’t receive any notices for the site.