Megaupload Shut Down

F

Fizzy

Mid-Card Championship Winner
One day after an extensive Internet blackout in protest of two pending anti-piracy bills, the Justice Department on Thursday announced that it had charged the owners of Megaupload with online copyright infringement.
Seven people and two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by a New York grand jury on Jan. 5 and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. If convicted, those involved face up to 50 years in prison on all charges.
The accused generated more than $175 million and caused more than $1 billion in harm via megaupload.com and other sites, the DOJ said.
The effort was spearheaded by Megaupload Limited founder Kim Dotcom (aka Kim Schmitz or Kim Tim Jim Vestor), a 37-year-old resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom was arrested today in Auckland, along with Megaupload chief marketing officer Finn Batato, co-founder and CTO Mathias Ortmann, and programmer Bram van der Kolk.
Also named in the indictment were graphic designer Julius Bencko, head of business development Sven Echternach, and programmer Andrus Nomm.
More than 20 search warrants were executed in the U.S. and eight other countries today. About $50 million worth of assets and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers as well as 18 domain names were also seized. Megaupload.com is currently offline.
The group is accused of running Web sites that illegally profited from the distribution and reproduction of copyrighted works for more than five years. That content included movies that hit Megaupload before their theatrical releases, as well as music, TV shows, e-books, and entertainment and business software.
Megaupload used a rewards program that provided financial incentives for uploading popular content that drove traffic to the site, the indictment said. "The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world" according to the DOJ.
Megaupload did not include a search function; the owners used third-party linking sites to publicize content. In violation of the law, Megaupload failed to delete the accounts of those that contained infringing material.
"For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file," the DOJ said.
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Say goodbye to the internet as we know it.
 
Ummm, can anyone honestly say that MegaUpload WASN'T guilty of piracy?

In fact, this may actually be wonderful news. It shows that even without SOPA/PIPA, online piracy can be dealt with, and that SOPA/PIPA are not necessary. Every pirate website that gets busted prior to SOPA being passed is one more argument against why SOPA is needed, which serves a higher purpose.
 
Yet Youtube is guilty of the same things. Only difference is that Youtube has a program that scans videos for copyrighted material. Megaupload only takes a file down if it receives a complaint from the company with the copyright. Megaupload could not even defend this, they opened their files to all companies to check for copyrighted materials and everything. Let's be honest, the government would never attack Youtube or Google for instance because they have to many assets to fight with.
 
Fizzy said:
Yet Youtube is guilty of the same things. Only difference is that Youtube has a program that scans videos for copyrighted material. Megaupload only takes a file down if it receives a complaint from the company with the copyright. Megaupload could not even defend this, they opened their files to all companies to check for copyrighted materials and everything. Let's be honest, the government would never attack Youtube or Google for instance because they have to many assets to fight with.
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You don't make money off Youtube, do you?
 
klunderbunker said:
You don't make money off Youtube, do you?
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Not me personally, but there are many that do. People pay for platinum accounts on Megaupload. One person backed up his entire file history on Megaupload and had a lifetime platinum account. He lost all of that.
 
Fizzy said:
Not me personally, but there are many that do. People pay for platinum accounts on Megaupload. One person backed up his entire file history on Megaupload and had a lifetime platinum account. He lost all of that.
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Well that was rather stupid of him. My backups are sitting over here next to me.
 
Fizzy said:
Not me personally, but there are many that do. People pay for platinum accounts on Megaupload. One person backed up his entire file history on Megaupload and had a lifetime platinum account. He lost all of that.
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Yeah, but if you have a youtube account that makes you money you have to be very careful about not uploading anything copyrighted material or breaking any of the terms of service.
 
Kotre Ibushimix said:
Yeah, but if you have a youtube account that makes you money you have to be very careful about not uploading anything copyrighted material or breaking any of the terms of service.
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Plenty of people do gaming and music reviews/play throughs, so they're all fucked under this, no?
 
A message, perhaps? Hmm.

There are still an abundant number of locations at which one can acquire all manner of such content, however, most of which are better protected from these sorts of intrusions than MegaUpload.

This isn't really much more of a big deal than when isohunt got shut down. The Internet adapted. The notion that piracy can be fought by shutting down sites is laughable. It's a mild inconvenience that will be irrelevant in six months.
 
It's a bit frustrating because I was watching a fan-subtitled Japanese TV show that had its SD quality files uploaded to MegaUpload. It has its HD-quality uploaded to another site, and there are still the torrents for each individual episode, but it's still a pain since I can't really torrent when at college.
 
Ah just bought another subscription as well...
I'll just have to view my content on any of the thousand other websites out there.
 
Diamond Dallas Page said:
It's a bit frustrating because I was watching a fan-subtitled Japanese TV show that had its SD quality files uploaded to MegaUpload. It has its HD-quality uploaded to another site, and there are still the torrents for each individual episode, but it's still a pain since I can't really torrent when at college.
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... Really? :icon_neutral:
 
And on cue Anonymous has shut down government, music and movie sites. Get your popcorn ready.
 
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