Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Megaupload: Too big for its reboots?

Megaupload has been around for ages. Why, then, did the copyright industry suddenly decide it had to act?

Shauna Myers ran an interesting post on her Google+ page. Linking to a DMN story, Shauna suggests it was less about what Megaupload had done, and more about what they were about to do:

I present to you... MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

"UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings," MegaUpload founder Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

"We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free," Dotcom outlined. "Yes that's right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works."
Using the criminal justice system of two nations in order to crush competitors? Could you believe a record label possible of such behaviour?

[Thanks to Michael M]


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, as nice as it sounds (and I'm usually the last person to defend the record industry), Kim "convicted inside trader and embezzler" Schmitz is hardly a trustworthy source of information. His history of fraudulent behaviour isn't exactly the mark of some musical world philanthropist and it's awfully convenient that he's only mentioning this now. Let's face it, if this was actually true then it would be the first time that the record industry has been aware of something on the internet before it crept up and bit them on the proverbial.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

The service was being discussed online before Christmas - http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2011/111221airvinyl - and had already launched in beta, partnering with 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon MP3.

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