Be Excellent To Each Other

Mrs AE and AE Jnr were left to their own devices with the media centre PC a couple of weeks ago, and when I got home from work AE Jnr was cheerfully watching The Lion King on it. This struck me as odd because we have a Lovefilm and a Netflix account, and The Lion King isn't on either of them, and we don't have a Lion King DVD.

Turns out Mrs AE had taken matters into her own hands and found a site called megashare, the URL is megashare.sh and as far as I can tell you can stream just about fucking anything from it.

I don't understand how it works, it's clearly very dodgy, there's no payment required, it runs through a web browser, it doesn't install anything, they were watching it with just a standard user account on the PC so it doesn't sneakily use admin rights to do anything, there isn't even much in the way of advertising or anything. A couple of pop-ups and stuff, but essentially you just press the play button, make it fullscreen, and you're streaming damn near anything and everything.

Of course AE Jnr, having no idea what piracy is, now insists on watching all the stuff we couldn't find on Lovefilm or Netflix, via megashare, there's pretty much the entire Disney back catalogue on there. (In fact, she now says 'I want watch a film on megashare tonight'......)

I've done a full sweep on the PC they've been using and it's totally clean, and I'm bemused, who the hell runs this site, and why?

My spidey-sense is tingling massively about it, but I'm at a loss to find anything 'wrong' with the site (apart from what I can only assume is its massive illegality), and I'm hard pushed to explain to AE Jnr why she can't watch the films she wants to on it.

Just stick to the facts. 'it's theft and that means you'll be sent to jail forever because you're worse than hitler. HITLER!'

There are lots of these sites around, I had one on a JB Ipad just the same, I wonder if there is one or two master sources of the files and lots of sites pointing to them?

They do get shutdown and then another one pops up.

The irony is that these sites are exactlty what a legal Netflix type site should be. TV is on there the same day as it’s shown in the US and is all advert free, same with films.

I read the other day that the Wonders Years may never get a DVD\Blu Ray release due to all the legal battles over the soundtrack, typical of what they need to move on from if they want to make a dent in piracy.

Maybe that Industry should learn from these sites before they shut them down, problem is that there are too many players wanting their cut before content is allowed to be streamed.

Well she was on there again last night, watching a pretty mainstream children's film that, once again, is nowhere to be found on either Netflix or Lovefilm.

Looking at the selection on there I'm half-wondering myself what the fucking point is of even paying for Netflix and Lovefilm, although I'll continue subbing to them both as it seems like 'the right thing to do'.

The megashare site itself is hosted out of Saint Helena (!?!) and it just links off to URLs from all over the place as far as I can tell, no content is actually hosted by them..

I still don't understand why anyone runs the site though, when by all accounts there's no money to be made out of it.

honeypot.

The obvious answer to your question is that Netflix and lovefilm are legal so it's risk/reward.

My understanding is that if you're not sharing the data, there's no risk.

Seems pretty unlikely. There's a few of these sites around (Mr Chris was bumming a different one the other day) and it's a hell of an effort to go to just to entrap users; especially when doing so would probably cause a whole mess of legal issues in itself with the various rights-holders of all the stuff available. It's been years since the RIAA et al have bothered to go after end users en masse and seem happy enough going after the site owners and people at that end of the operation. Obviously it's possible, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that, say, Disney have agreed to allow shitloads of people to illegally and freely stream their content for an amount of time in order to go after them in courts later.

TPB weren't sharing data, were they?

And that's why they still exist.

(Of course, they are sharing data, just not copyrighted data)

Who would take on the expense of running a website, just for others to use.

Lunacy.

I can't imagine BEEX attracting the ire of major litigious international copyright holders though.

One of it's child websites is an indexer, of course.

I DELIBERATELY DIDN'T MENTION THAT.

Oh, okay. Trooper was making a joke, anyway.

I know that, I just felt that the joke worked without any need to draw the attention of TEH FEDS.

(The Indexer is awesome though, BTW.)

There's loads of them, and they are easy to find. I have never had any issues from them, they all link to sites like megaupload. The bit I find more astounding than the sites themselves, is the people who must use shedloads of bandwidth to upload all of these things pretty much as they are screened. Some of these things are out there almost as quick as the iplayer!