Megaupload Back Up in New Form

The government took down a lot of file sharing sites a year ago, of which Megaupload was one, and one of the biggies. Now its leader has started a new one to bypass being attacked, or so he hopes. People are going to anonymize the uploads and the downloads through cryptography. That’s my amateur understanding of it. Mainly I wanted to record that I got a boot out of this. The government, under the eye of the movie industry, is also attacking torrents, where people will receive warnings for downloads. The Megaupload mogul has a line: “In the dark ages … the enemies of progress burned books, and now today they are burning websites. And Mega is going to be the website that is going to end all of that.”

Reading about the history of jazz, I ran across a statement that more music was created between 1900 and 1910 than at any time in history. The copyright was not on music and/or was not enforced. The creativity was huge without it! However, this spurred on some creators and publishers who could see much larger profits if they got royalties each time their songs were performed or sold as sheet music. ASCAP was formed to promote this government-enforced system in 1914. Oliver Wendell Holmes, as usual on the wrong side of the judicial issues, sided with this coercion, forcing a restaurant to pay Victor Herbert a royalty when a song of his was played on a player-piano during the dinner hour.

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7:26 pm on January 19, 2013