[yuezhi]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369

what a coincidence that it happens a day after the blackout. personally, i'm not fond of megaupload anyways since it only lets you download one file at a time... or am i thinking of some other site?

EDIT: i guess the kardashians love having pics of their stupidity exchanged and that's why they support megaupload.

[Ghostavo]

http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/justice-department-charges-leaders-of-megaupload-with-widespread-online-copyright-infringement

[Aardwolf]

And Anon retaliates, shutting down fbi.gov (and thus making it impossible to read that press release)

[Flipside]

What's the odds that SOPA supporters will try to twist that retaliation into "And this kind of thing is why we need SOPA!" (and yes, I know they have nothing to do with each other, but do the lawmakers?)

Round and round it goes...

[Klaustrophobia]

those guys are fking retards

edit: was talking about anon but applies to SOPA supporters also.

[yuezhi]

does lulz do anything nowaydays? atm i figure they're either doing low profile stuff unworthy of the headlines or they've finished their mission and picked up shop or they've been shut down by an0n or law enforcement completely, reasons being rivalry for the former and justice for the latter.

[Bobboau]

they quit abruptly, did one or two things after that, but stopped the rampage.

[achtung]

A coupleof (alleged) members got arrested, so they stopped.

The copyright war is entering full swing. I think disturbing changes are ahead.

[Grizzly]

And Anon retaliates, shutting down fbi.gov (and thus making it impossible to read that press release)

Well, if you can't read it... (I can now, but there might be another strike, so I will just post it here:)

WASHINGTON—Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced today.

This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.

The individuals and two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, 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. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

In addition, the following alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:

    Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
    Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
    Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
    Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
    Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
    Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann, and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach, and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets, and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands, and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.

According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies—often before their theatrical release—music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale. The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors, and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.

The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. The conspirators further allegedly offered a rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites. The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world.

In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. 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 indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the infringing content.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand,and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines also provided assistance.

This case is part of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force) to stop the theft of intellectual property. Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation’s economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation, and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce.

[JCDNWarrior]

Conspiracy charges... I feel that's pretty ironic. The way they frame the wording it's like 'terrorists on computers' or something.

Anyway, this to me shows the USA lost the moral high ground (this has quite an effect around the world as the USA seems to be an example to many other countries) and that the internet as we know it may soon  (ie: several years) be replaced by a intranet type system (Corporate Internet2, pay per view/minute apparently). Typical that after the backlash against SOPA and PIPA they respond like this.

I think it's a good time to think about alternatives to communication, contact, hosting, and so on to preserve places like HLP from becoming unreachable in the future. The internet won't get shut down immediately but when you still have time to work on alternatives and communicate them I think it should be done.

[deathfun]

If Megaupload is down, I'm sure Mediafire, Rapidshare and other similar sites are sure to follow
Afterall, they're really all the same thing

[JCDNWarrior]

Perhaps this also has to do with it?

http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-to-sue-universal-joins-fight-against-sopa-111212/

Read full article, it also has to do with something called 'Mega Song' that they wanted to put out.

Furthermore, if they can already shut places like this down, why even need SOPA/PIPA?

[Mikes]

So nope I didn't read the whole thing, but I am just wondering.... did Megaupload actually do anything other than allow other people to host content?

I mean... how about next, we ban car rentals because cars are always used in robberies,
ban private ownership of houses because criminals usually hide in privately owned houses
why don't we take down airlines because a terrorist used one of their planes, sheez.


I.e. did they actually do any crimes (money laundering was mentioned), in which case this whole mess becomes understandable, or were they merely banned for allowing people to host files?

[Klaustrophobia]

they ALLEGEDLY "encouraged" copyright infringement for monetary gain (advertising).  the amount of detail they describe what they think is the master-plot of the site founders/owners is quite something.  i'd love to see what evidence they have to back it up other than pure speculation.  hell they even called selling the premium memberships criminal. 

as for the rest of the file sites following, i HIGHLY doubt that.  there are so many different ones it's rediculous.  there's no way they think they can actually put a stop to this method of downloading.  to me, this smells of the same "sue the pants off them" scheme for a quick buck that copyright "protection" groups have been using forever.  i know this is a criminal case, but the civil suits are sure to follow.  oh, and $500 million in damage MY ASS.  assuming every copy downloaded is a lost sale is just flat out wrong. 

[zookeeper]

As much as I think actions like this are silly and pointless and how IP laws tend to suck and all that usual stuff:

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. 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.

If the above is true, then I don't really care if they get taken down, just like I wouldn't if The Pirate Bay was taken down. Yes, they're only allowing people to host files or links or torrent files or whatever and it's not nice to hold them accountable for what their users do. However, if someone points out infringing uploads to them and they specifically refuse to take them down, then it's not especially unfair to get charged for that (in a legal sense, that is; in a moral sense IP wouldn't exist in the first place).

Most of everything else about how the case and how it has been handled is probably bollocks, as well as the sentences these guys might end up getting, but that bit is one thing which does kinda make sense.

[Grizzly]

If the above is true, then I don't really care if they get taken down, just like I wouldn't if The Pirate Bay was taken down. Yes, they're only allowing people to host files or links or torrent files or whatever and it's not nice to hold them accountable for what their users do. However, if someone points out infringing uploads to them and they specifically refuse to take them down, then it's not especially unfair to get charged for that (in a legal sense, that is; in a moral sense IP wouldn't exist in the first place).

The problem with a site as big as mega upload is that hard to keep track of all the downloads. So if a copyright holder says "You ahve been hosting THe INcredibles, here are the links" and MegaUpload does a scan to get rid of the Incredibles, it is very likely that it will simply miss a few files, or that new files with a slightly differnet name will be re uploaded. Quite sure that it is either bollocks or a failure to understand how these sites work.

Either way, it looks good to megaupload

I do not understand WHY the site was taken down though. Doesn't a charge first have to be proven in court? Innocent untill proven guilty and such? Or is taking down the site part of the arrest process?

[zookeeper]

If the above is true, then I don't really care if they get taken down, just like I wouldn't if The Pirate Bay was taken down. Yes, they're only allowing people to host files or links or torrent files or whatever and it's not nice to hold them accountable for what their users do. However, if someone points out infringing uploads to them and they specifically refuse to take them down, then it's not especially unfair to get charged for that (in a legal sense, that is; in a moral sense IP wouldn't exist in the first place).

The problem with a site as big as mega upload is that hard to keep track of all the downloads. So if a copyright holder says "You ahve been hosting THe INcredibles, here are the links" and MegaUpload does a scan to get rid of the Incredibles, it is very likely that it will simply miss a few files, or that new files with a slightly differnet name will be re uploaded.

Sure, if that was the case then slapping them with anything more than a very minor fine (if that) for being sloppy would be unreasonable.

[Colonol Dekker]

 


So many...............mods,..................perished.

[mjn.mixael]

Actually this shows that the Government doesn't need SOPA to take down sites.

[JCDNWarrior]

The more I think about it the more the whole case made against Megavideo feels and comes across as total idiocy, it's almost like a play of power to show the people resisting SOPA and PIPA only a day earlier that they can just destroy a big service like Megaupload without a care for anyone.

If everyone that has been duped by this act would file charges, that could certainly change things around. There's plenty of businesses, organisations and communities that put their work on Megaupload.

Anyhow, for solutions, time to download, back-up and save all mods, work, programs, that are important to you that would vanish if, say, Rapidshare or other hosting services go belly up. I'm pretty certain all SCP and mods of HLP are safely stored and backed up but saving stuff locally is in my opinion a good idea until the attack against free flow of information stops, or a underground alternative can be readied.