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The US government has shut down one of the world's largest filesharing destinations, calling the service an "international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy." In cooperation with the United States, New Zealand arrested four MegaUpload executives including founder Kim Dotcom today, while authorities are pursuing three other site operators.
The charges stand "among the largest criminal copyright cases investigations ever brought by the [US]" and investigations are underway in the Netherlands, Philippines, UK, Hong Kong, Germany, and Canada. The DOJ issued over 20 search warrants in the US and eight other countries, seizing more than $50 million in assets, including a luxury car collection as well as 18 MegaUpload-related domains.
The filing says Dotcom and his associates are responsible for $175 million in criminal proceeds (i.e. income via subscription fees and advertising) on top of costing copyright owners more than $500 million in lost revenue. Ironically, TorrentFreak notes that only a few weeks ago, Dotcom boasted that his ventures had nothing to worry about (legally speaking) because they complied with the law.
Dotcom, his workers, MegaUpload Limited and Vestor Limited (another firm associated with Dotcom) are charged with two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement, engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, as well as conspiring to commit copyright infringement and money laundering. If convicted, they could face 50+ years in prison for the combined charges (TorrentFreak offers a breakdown).
User Comments: 62
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RH00D said:
If anyone is looking for an alternative to MegaUpload I give a huge recommendation to MediaFire, their site is easy to use and they don't have wait times and you can download as many files as you want without getting cut off like RapidShare and other popular sites do.
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The future will look like this:
- when there will be no so called illegal or pirate sites left to distribute free content, the content producers will have to offer the content for free because people will have no money left to buy it.
At that time everyone will be in debt so with what money to purchase ?
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If the jury thinks the likely sentence is excessive, it can acquit regardless of the "law" and the facts, and the acquittal is binding. It's called "jury nullification". But the jurors won't be told this in court. They'll need to hear about it from elsewhere. Spread the word!
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How the F*** can the US go into another country to stop their website?? Makes no sense...
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Damn that sucks! I was about to renew my membership, at least I didn't loose my money!
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Here's a fun fact... Lets say you've paid for a membership before with megaupload (I know i have, more than 3 times) The Department of Justice is currently Holding on to your IP address. That is assuming that megaupload keeps its information stored for more than 30 days.
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hello ...
"it has begun ...."
& I'm afraid the worst is yet to come (at some point of view)!
& what i've read about some hacker's retaliation plan would just give the perfect excuse for more actions
cheers!
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marinkvasina said:
inventix1136 said:Vrmithrax said:inventix1136 said:What is the difference between megaupload and Amazon Cloud drive? One didn't give campaign contributions last year and the other did. Otherwise they are the same, providing sort of a digital locker.
P.S. If the exec's are found guilty then we can kiss the "cloud" industry good bye.
I think you are confusing just what the "cloud" is. You store your files, personal information, run your programs from "the cloud." You know, things you actually have paid for, are legally licensed to use, etc. At the worst, you are storing illegal stuff in the cloud, but that's storing.
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The cloud industry is safe. Violators of cloud policies on copyrighted materials will not be. And with the cloud, it's not as anonymous as P2P or other forms of sharing.
Trust me, all it takes is ONE file in the cloud that is in violation and that is it. If they can sue and terminate websites like piratebay, which is only storing LINKS to content but not the actual content, then actually STORING the content would be much worse -- regardless of the cloud policy or what the cloud user did.
They can't take down thepiratebay, stop acting smart
You don't know how they work, go on their site and read their letter about SOPA
it clearly states that they can't take them down
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Could this be the beginning of the sexpocalypse? The end of free porn as we know it....?
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Just skimmed over the indictment and man some of this looks really bad. They apparently 'willfully built up a racketeering enterprise since 2005', have several very bad looking e-mails dating back for years, money laundered millions included having rented yachts in the Mediterranean to promote infringement and a lot more if I'm reading this correctly.
So ya...these allegations if true look to be pretty serious and more than just some cloud service which hosted 'copyrighted content' that they tried to police.
SNGX1275 said:Who needs SOPA/PIPA when this can happen already?
+1, this should be more than enough to convince congress that we already have enough laws on the books to handle these situations, if not too many.
captaincranky said:Could this be the beginning of the sexpocalypse? The end of free porn as we know it....?
Highly unlikely considering they upload everywhere and there are hundreds of tube sites.
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I'm wondering if "megaupload" saw the writing on the wall. They changed their name to "Croko file" or something similar a couple of months ago.
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treetops said:
Never really used mega, when I did I usually got a virus. But as far as I could tell users paid to upload whatever they wanted and let other download it for free. Idk what money laundering none sense they were doing but I am surprised they got yanked.
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RIAA got their way. Sure, the "Mega Conspiracy" are dirty pirates of the interweb, whatever.
Truth is Megaupload used a viable business model which promoted an alternative media outlet besides the traditionnal disc and dvd.
So my question is when will those media companies learn that there is no more zillions to make in CDs? When will they learn they have to shift to a cloud based media outlet?
Offer and demand is the law of economics and anyone can create or duplicate a CD by themselves, it's not a highly demanded and costly item anymore: there is no point putting such a high price tag on those CDs when mp3s take seconds to create at the cost of nothing.
The only way the music business I imagine can work out is if the music artists distribute by themselves their production. Nobody needs a cd factory to share their music, that concept is outdated ever since people encoded .mp3 files from a CD.
About the big music labels,they are desperately holding on to the old ways that made them rich and now they can barely follow the technological progress made by digital distribution.
To all copyright holding artists, I urge you to turn yourself to new music labels that promote artists through media outlets such as Spotify. That's the new way, the future. Don't be as greedy as the boys at UMG and friends....
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And that happens right after the UMG youtube takedown bull**** and MegaSong...
Coincidence?
To be honest, a few years ago that might've sounded a bit too theory-ish ti me but now it seems quite possible.
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Well now i have a problem will have to migrate to torrents completely.
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"The charges stand "among the largest criminal copyright cases investigations ever brought by the [US]" and investigations are underway in the Netherlands, Philippines, UK, Hong Kong, Germany, and Canada."
... Interesting. We know how the first two of those countries are regarding these kinds of things, more so for the Asian country among the two, which virtually doesn't have any strict cybercrime laws. They're probably not going to get anything from investigating in those countries.
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Finally some justice!
Seems like the pirate days of so many thief's are coming to an end.. and i am very glad of this turn of event's.
I hope that this trend will continue to all the major and small filesharing companies.
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Oh noes! I'll have to use one of the 50 other http download sites or bittorrent or usenet or gnutella or irc, or if all else fails, actually pay for ****!
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Guest said:
If the jury thinks the likely sentence is excessive, it can acquit regardless of the "law" and the facts, and the acquittal is binding. It's called "jury nullification". But the jurors won't be told this in court. They'll need to hear about it from elsewhere. Spread the word!
Acquittal means the jury would find the defendant(s) not guilty. The reason jury nullification doesn't happen often may be more that the jury actually thinks the person is guilty than because they don't know about it. Why would you acquit someone who has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to have committed the crime?
I'm not on the jury so I'm not about to hang Dotcom and his associates, but the evidence is pretty damning, and it looks like he's probably guilty.
Also, if the people automatically assuming this is just about piracy would take off their tinfoil hats for a second, they'd notice that a lot of the money numbers being thrown around involve actual money that these guys allegedly spent, not imaginary money "lost to piracy".
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I would assume that the will of the people will pervail. Other sites have been obliterated by such legal wranglings, such as MiniNova a couple of year ago. Kazaa and other sites as well have had to either shut down or modify the way they do business. There is a new program called Telex that will basically make the whole internet a proxy server, letting you slip into any website undetected and unstoppable. That may come into being if SOPA and whatever else the legal beagles try to conjure up in an effort to enforce internet censorship.
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YanFr said:
Seems like the pirate days of so many thief's are coming to an end.. and i am very glad of this turn of event's.
I hope that this trend will continue to all the major and small filesharing companies.
Just shows up much the general public actually knows about pirates.
Real pirates don't use Torrents or Megashare, Mega upload etc etc.
The only thing this will do it is make it more difficult for the novice users to get free stuff.
This isn't going to do anything to the real scene.
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This is ridiculous...!
Why don't they take down yahoo, msn, youtube, opera and others down aswell? Yahoo and msn messenger offer file sharing aswell, and opera browser has a file sharin system aswell.
What would be left of the internet? Government sites? No thanks.
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Haven't you been paying attention? The US can apparently enter any other country and do whatever it wants to.
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nice job USA & New Zealand. Let's put these prick-less pirates into butt rape jail where they belong! Next up, get those anonymous losers, they should be easy to find with their pasty skin, lack of a job or girls, and live in their mom's basement!
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"Haven't you been paying attention? The US can apparently enter any other country and do whatever it wants to. "
As it should be! Third world countries need to learn not to mess with the best!
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