One of the world’s largest file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, federal prosecutors said.

An indictment accuses Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart online piracy.

Anonymous was quick to target the Justice Department, Universal Music, the RIAA, and MPAA in the wake of this afternoon's Megaupload announcement, with the Web sites for all four organizations succumbing to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Justice.gov and universalmusic.com went offline around 430pm Eastern and have been largely unresponsive for the past 1.5 hours. RIAA.com and MPAA.org are also unresponsive.

JoeB wrote:Gotta love the 'lost revenue' crap.
"Hey Larry, let's go count all the downloads of our movie, and assume that every download was one purchase if it couldn't have been downloaded for free. Wow 500 million copies ?!"...

Futurist and digital culture expert Mark Pesce says it is interesting that megaupload.com, which accounts for about 4 per cent of internet uploads, has been targeted by the authorities.

"You can five years in jail for uploading a Michael Jackson video, which is a year longer than the doctor who killed him will get."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-20/h ... nt/3784456

(Kim) Dotcom, Megaupload’s former CEO and current chief innovation officer, is a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany who had his name legally changed. The 37-year-old was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor.

Two other German citizens and one Dutch citizen also were arrested and three other defendants – another German, a Slovakian and an Estonian – remain at large.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends free speech and digital rights online, said in a statement that the arrests set “a terrifying precedent. If the United States can seize a Dutch citizen in New Zealand over a copyright claim, what is next?”
http://techland.time.com/2012/01/20/u-s ... z1k0VKvlRE

The movie industry howled that the site was making money off pirated material. Though the company is based in Hong Kong and Dotcom was living in New Zealand, some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Virginia, and that was enough for U.S. prosecutors to act.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/01/20/u-s ... z1k0nPIU9S

mattwilson wrote:

JoeB wrote:Gotta love the 'lost revenue' crap.
"Hey Larry, let's go count all the downloads of our movie, and assume that every download was one purchase if it couldn't have been downloaded for free. Wow 500 million copies ?!"...

If they know how many times it's been downloaded they must know who has downloaded it or be able to obtain such information, if that is the case why are they not pushing forth 500 million prosecutions?

If they aren't able to give an accurate amount of transgressions then what is it doing in court?

lyingcheat wrote:New Zealand should have told the US to go fuck themselves.

I'm With Stupid wrote:

lyingcheat wrote:New Zealand should have told the US to go fuck themselves.

Every country in the world should be tearing up their extradition treaties with the US immediately, as far as I'm concerned.

JoeB wrote:Gotta love the 'lost revenue' crap.
"Hey Larry, let's go count all the downloads of our movie, and assume that every download was one purchase if it couldn't have been downloaded for free. Wow 500 million copies ?!"...