Megaupload shutdown, execs arrested

[Jasper]

At least it wasn't mediafire...yet.

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-feds- ... 3QD;_ylv=3

McLEAN, Virginia (AP) — 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.

The Justice Department said in a statement said that Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and three others were arrested Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Two other defendants are at large.

Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.

The Hong Kong-based company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO.

Before the site was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were "grotesquely overblown."

"The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch," the statement said.

A lawyer who represented the company in a lawsuit last year declined comment Thursday.

Megaupload is considered a "cyberlocker," in which users can upload and transfer files that are too large to send by email. Such sites can have perfectly legitimate uses. But the Motion Picture Association of America, which has campaigned for a crackdown on piracy, estimated that the vast majority of content being shared on Megaupload was in violation of copyright laws.

The website allowed users to download films, TV shows, games, music and other content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to people who wanted access to faster download speeds or extra content. The website also sold advertising.

The indictment was returned in the Eastern District of Virginia, which claimed jurisdiction in part because some of the alleged pirated materials were hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Virginia.

Dotcom, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand, and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany, made more than $42 million from the conspiracy in 2010 alone, according to the indictment.

Dotcom is founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer of Megaupload.

[Hokahey]

What's the difference between this and arresting companies that produce blank CD's? Both are legitimate products that people use for illegal purposes. Its like Napster all over again. How can a service that allows people to share data be held responsible for people sharing copyrighted data? Obviously there are laws dictating that but it just seems a little ridiculous to expect a products creator to be responsible for how people use that product, especially a product with a clear legal purpose.

[Jasper]

What's the difference between this and arresting companies that produce blank CD's? Both are legitimate products that people use for illegal purposes. Its like Napster all over again. How can a service that allows people to share data be held responsible for people sharing copyrighted data? Obviously there are laws dictating that but it just seems a little ridiculous to expect a products creator to be responsible for how people use that product, especially a product with a clear legal purpose.

That's why I almost put it in the SOPA thread, but ultimately I decided that this deserved its own.

Megaupload can still put up a fight, but this is an extremely aggressive move, especially considering the arrests. Interesting timing. After mass protests against SOPA and the White House coming out against it, despite Obama getting lots of contributions from Hollywood, (there was the issue of pissing off his Silicon Vally contributors vs. his Hollywood contributors) it almost seems like this is an attempt to appease some of the powerful pro-SOPA force$.

[Hokahey]

Interesting analysis. Makes a lot of sense.

[drifter]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/enterta ... -feds.html

[Pandemonium]

What's the difference between this and arresting companies that produce blank CD's? Both are legitimate products that people use for illegal purposes. Its like Napster all over again. How can a service that allows people to share data be held responsible for people sharing copyrighted data? Obviously there are laws dictating that but it just seems a little ridiculous to expect a products creator to be responsible for how people use that product, especially a product with a clear legal purpose.

Well there's clearly a gray area but in essence a key difference in the two examples you mention is that in theory Megaupload can "police" and therefore restrict "illegal" content being uploaded and downloaded through its servers. For example, DIME does a fairly good job policing content bit torrented through its web portal. A company like say, TDK clearly can't control what kind of content is saved, traded or sold on blank physical media like a CDR or DVDR once someone buys it from a store. Although if SOPA ever becomes reality in anything close to its current form, I guess anything's possible.

Based on how and what the Feds went after Megaupload and the key execs, if I was the CEO of Youtube, I'd be sweating bullets about now.

One more thing .... Megauploads founder's first name is really ..."Dotcom?"

[Jasper]

What's the difference between this and arresting companies that produce blank CD's? Both are legitimate products that people use for illegal purposes. Its like Napster all over again. How can a service that allows people to share data be held responsible for people sharing copyrighted data? Obviously there are laws dictating that but it just seems a little ridiculous to expect a products creator to be responsible for how people use that product, especially a product with a clear legal purpose.

Well there's clearly a gray area but in essence a key difference in the two examples you mention is that in theory Megaupload can "police" and therefore restrict "illegal" content being uploaded and downloaded through its servers. For example, DIME does a fairly good job policing content bit torrented through its web portal. A company like say, TDK clearly can't control what kind of content is saved, traded or sold on blank physical media like a CDR or DVDR once someone buys it from a store. Although if SOPA ever becomes reality in anything close to its current form, I guess anything's possible.

Based on how and what the Feds went after Megaupload and the key execs, if I was the CEO of Youtube, I'd be sweating bullets about now.

One more thing .... Megauploads founder's first name is really ..."Dotcom?"

It sets a very worrying precedent, and we can only hope that this whole thing is sorted out in a court of justice and the megaupload execs are acquitted, and the site returns to normal. It really is funny how all of the artists (content creators) came out in support of megaupload. Just shows who really is against it - the dinosaur record execs, who are of far less use than they once were, and know it. They should be lucky that their sales are what they are. There's even been an upswing recently. They want to keep their outdated business model in place as lo
ng as they can, even if it means destroying freedoms, reshaping the net into a restricted, regimented piece of shit, and taking down innocent sites. If they go down because they can't adapt to the times, they will do everything they can to take the web (as we know it) down with them. This a terrifying moment in time. I am glad that there is so much protest, but that such an outrageous and anti-American bills such as SOPA and PIPA are even being considered is horrifying. The internet gave people all over the world a loud voice where they could finally fight the powers of governments, police, and giant corporations. All of that is now at risk. It's truly tragic that a few big corporations, and the politicians in their pockets, would try to save their own a$$es in a manner that would have such far-reaching implications for freedom of communication, information, speech, and expression. These people have gone beyond greedy and entered into the realm of pure evil.

P.S. - Dotcom is not her original last name, but that's what she goes by, and it may well be her legal name.

[Update, 2:55 p.m.: The websites of the Justice department and Universal Music Group, which had been involved in litigation with MegaUpload, were down on Thurday. The sites were attacked by members of the hacker group Anonymous in response to the actions against MegaUpload, according to a report on CNET News.]

[Hype]

Based on how and what the Feds went after Megaupload and the key execs, if I was the CEO of Youtube, I'd be sweating bullets about now.

You old folk are funny. You know Youtube has been owned by Google for years now, right? And it was when Google bought Youtube that they began actively policing content. They're fine.


Also, all people have to do is rename files, or find a new format to upload them in, to evade any kind of active policing of content. The only way around that would be to pay people to watch everything uploaded... and that's ridiculous.

[Mescal]

The internet gave people all over the world a loud voice where they could finally fight the powers of governments, police, and giant corporations. All of that is now at risk.

This is the point, isn't it?

It's just manipulation on their part. They're doing it in China already, monitoring the content and blocking certain sites.

"They're" (whoever they may be) are gonna have to do something, cause they're always running behind the facts.

Napster -> Torrents -> filesharing using blogs and megaupload -> whatever's next

[Larry B.]

It sets a very worrying precedent

Exactly. Too much power in people's hands and the big guys don't like it.

[bman]

So the feds shut down Mega Upload..Thoughts??? How does that affect us?

[Hokahey]

Do you read the other forums?

[bman]

Do you read the other forums?

Only now!

[Pandemonium]

Based on how and what the Feds went after Megaupload and the key execs, if I was the CEO of Youtube, I'd be sweating bullets about now.

You old folk are funny. You know Youtube has been owned by Google for years now, right? And it was when Google bought Youtube that they began actively policing content. They're fine.

Also, all people have to do is rename files, or find a new format to upload them in, to evade any kind of active policing of content. The only way around that would be to pay people to watch everything uploaded... and that's ridiculous.

You're missing the point, Duff.

That being with new, more stringent, yet vague laws in place to control so-called piracy, sites like Youtube despite their (unquestionably ineffective and lax) self-policing policy are very vulnerable to the same sort of draconian action Megaupload and it's execs have seen this week.

[Hype]

Based on how and what the Feds went after Megaupload and the key execs, if I was the CEO of Youtube, I'd be sweating bullets about now.

You old folk are funny. You know Youtube has been owned by Google for years now, right? And it was when Google bought Youtube that they began actively policing content. They're fine.

Also, all people have to do is rename files, or find a new format to upload them in, to evade any kind of active policing of content. The only way around that would be to pay people to watch everything uploaded... and that's ridiculous.

You're missing the point, Duff.

That being with new, more stringent, yet vague laws in place to control so-called piracy, sites like Youtube despite their (unquestionably ineffective and lax) self-policing policy are very vulnerable to the same sort of draconian action Megaupload and it's execs have seen this week.

Youtube isn't.

[Hype]

In a December interview with TorrentFreak, a popular news site in the file-sharing community, Mr Dotcom said he was now married with three children, including twin girls.

“For your information, my criminal record has been cleared under Germany’s clean-slate legislation. Officially, I can say I am without convictions,” he told TorrentFreak. “I know that I am not a bad person. I have grown and I have learnt.”

But, in the same interview, he also lambasted the music industry for its failure to get to grips with the digital revolution, after Universal Music attempted to have the “Mega Song” pulled from YouTube.

“You need to understand that some labels are run by arrogant and outdated dinosaurs who have been in business for 1,000 years,” Mr Dotcom said. “These guys think an iPad is a facial treatment, the internet is the devil, and wired phones are still hip. They are in denial about the new realities and opportunities. They don’t understand that the rip-off days are over.”

He's right.

[chaos]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/techn ... lobal-home

By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
Published: January 20, 2012

BERLIN — Some uninvited guests showed up at Kim Dotcom’s mansion outside Auckland, New Zealand, on Friday: the police, in two helicopters.

They had an arrest warrant for Mr. Dotcom, 37, who was born Kim Schmitz and is accused by United States authorities with criminal copyright infringement through the Web site Megaupload, which he founded.

Finding their target was not easy. When Mr. Dotcom, who holds Finnish and German citizenship, first saw the police, he ran inside and activated several electronic locks, part of the estate’s sophisticated security system. As the police made their way through those, he barricaded himself in a safe room. Officers cut their way through to get him, standing near a firearm that they said looked like a sawed-off shotgun.

“It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door,” said Grant Wormald, a detective inspector.

In what the American authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. shut down Megaupload.com and instigated the arrest of Mr. Dotcom and three other people in New Zealand. In all, seven people connected with the site were charged with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.

The arrests come in the middle of a controversy over Congressional efforts in the United States to curtail Internet piracy.

Megaupload, a so-called locker service, allows users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously over the Internet, and media companies have long complained that some files are being transferred in violation of copyright law.

A grand jury indictment says seven people in all were part of a criminal conspiracy involving Megaupload, charging each with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. The possible penalty is 20 years in prison. The indictment says Megaupload caused $500 million in damages to copyright owners and made $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.

The United States authorities say the case is one of the largest criminal copyright actions ever brought.

Megaupload’s lawyer has said that “the government is wrong on the facts, wrong on the law.”

The police in New Zealand said they were continuing to search the Auckland property. In all, about 20 search warrants connected to the case were executed in the United States and in eight other countries, including New Zealand.

About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites. The police said they seized 6 million New Zealand dollars ($4.8 million) in luxury vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé and a pink 1959 Cadillac. They also seized art and electronic equipment and froze 11 million dollars in cash in various accounts.

The arrest of Mr. Dotcom, the central figure in the case, was not his first encounter with the law.

In February 2001, Mr. Dotcom told Die Welt that he had spent three months in a Munich jail in 1994 and had served two years’ probation for breaking into Pentagon computers and observing real-time satellite photos of Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Dotcom received a suspended two-year sentence for a swindle that made use of stolen phone card numbers.

In 2001, at the height of the dot-com hysteria, Mr. Dotcom was accused in what was then the largest insider-trading case in German history. Prosecutors in Munich said he bought shares in a struggling online business, letsbuyit.com, then announced that he planned to make a major investment in the company and rescue it from insolvency.

Mr. Dotcom reportedly made more than $1 million when the shares soared.

Around that time, Mr. Dotcom, then still going by his former name, disputed the accusations mounting against him during an appearance on the Harald Schmidt Show, a popular late-night talk show in Germany.

“It is true that I offer a lot of open flank to attack because of my lifestyle and the public way I live with my success,” a congenial Mr. Dotcom, with a crew cut and black clothing, said. “It’s clear that that’s why people are looking for things to hang on me.”

Mr. Dotcom eventually fled Germany to escape those charges but was captured in Thailand, extradited and convicted in 2002. He spent five months in jail awaiting trial but received a suspended sentence on the underlying charges.

Mr. Dotcom dropped from view until last year, when German newspapers started reporting rumors of his luxury compound in New Zealand and possible involvement in Megaupload.

In the German television interview, which is posted on YouTube, Mr. Dotcom attributed the rumors swirling around him to a German tendency to envy those who have more. “If I were in the United States, I would be just one of many with my lifestyle and would not draw any attention to myself,” Mr. Dotcom said.

Mr. Dotcom and the three others who were arrested in New Zealand appeared in court Friday afternoon and were denied bail. Extradition proceedings will continue Monday.

The police said the other men arrested in New Zealand were Finn Batato, 38, a German citizen and resident; Mathias Ortmann, 40, a German citizen who is a resident of Hong Kong; and Bram van der Kolk, 29, a Dutch citizen who is a resident of New Zealand.

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, in 1999. He was arrested on Friday in a raid, but while it was his most dramatic encounter with the law, it was not his first.

[Jasper]

Renowned attorney Bennett to represent Megaupload


ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (AP) — When Megaupload executives arrive in court to answer charges that they orchestrated a massive online piracy scheme, they'll be backed by a prominent lawyer who has defended Bill Clinton against sexual harassment charges and Enron against allegations of corporate fraud.

Washington attorney Robert Bennett said Friday that he will represent the company, which was indicted in federal court in Alexandria Thursday on copyright infringement and other charges.

The U.S. government shut down Megaupload's file-sharing website on Thursday, alleging that the company facilitated illegal downloads of copyrighted movies and other content. Seven individuals — including the company's founder, who had his name legally changed to Kim Dotcom — were also charged. Dotcom and three others were arrested in New Zealand; three others remain at large.

New Zealand police raided several homes and businesses linked to Dotcom and seized guns, millions of dollars and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials said.

In Hong Kong, where Megaupload is based, customs officials said they seized more than $42.5 million in assets. They said the company operated out of luxury hotel space costing more than $12,000 a day, and they seized high-speed servers and other equipment from the offices.

The shutdown and indictment generated headlines around the world in part because of the size and scope of Megaupload's operation. Sandvine, Inc., a Canadian company that provides equipment to monitor Internet traffic, said the website alone accounted for about 1 percent of traffic on U.S. cable and DSL lines. The site is even more popular in many foreign countries.

Bennett said that "we intend to vigorously defend against these charges" but declined to comment on the case in detail.

Bennett is best known for serving as President Bill Clinton's attorney when he was accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones. He has also represented Defense Secretaries Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger.

Megaupload was no stranger to accusations that its website existed for the sole purpose of mass copyright breach. Before its website was taken down, Megaupload offered a more detailed defense of its operations, claiming in a statement that such accusations are "grotesquely overblown."

The company said it had a clear, easy-to-follow procedure if movie studios or other copyright holders saw that their products were being illegally shared on Megaupload, and said that it responded to those "takedown notices" as required by law.

"Of course, abuse does happen and is an inevitable fact of life in a free society, but it is curbed heavily and efficiently by our close cooperation with trusted takedown partners. It is just unfortunate that the activities of a small group of 'black sheep' overshadows the millions of users that use our sites legitimately every day," the statement said.

Indeed, sites like megaupload.com, known as cyberlockers, can fulfill legitimate needs and are used every day by people looking for an efficient way to share or transfer large files that can't easily be sent by email.

In their indictment, however, federal prosecutors offered a detailed glimpse of the internal workings of the website. They allege that Megaupload was well aware that the vast majority of its users were there to illegally download copyrighted content.

According to the indictment, in a 2008 email chat session, two of the alleged coconspirators exchange messages, with one saying "we have a funny business . . . modern days pirates :)" and the other responds, "we're not pirates, we're just providing shipping services to pirates :)".

In another instance, one of the defendants allegedly laments in colorful language that an episode HBO's "The Sopranos" has been uploaded to site, but the dialogue is in French, limiting its appeal.

In fact, prosecutors allege that the entire website was specifically designed to encourage piracy. The website provided cash bonuses to users who uploaded content popular enough to prompt mass downloads — such content was almost always copyrighted material.

Stefan Mentzer, an intellectual property partner with the White and Case law firm in New York, said it's likely that Megaupload will try to argue at least two defenses: One is that its service qualifies as a so-called "safe harbor" under Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the federal law governing copyright infringement — if they can show, for instance, that they had no actual knowledge that infringing material was on their system. Another possible defense would be jurisdictional — specifically, that a case can't be brought in the Eastern District of Virginia against a Hong Kong-based company like Megaupload without evidence that they directed criminal activity related to the district.

But Mentzer said both defenses would be a challenge, given the evidence that prosecutors appear to have collected.

"The Department of Justice doesn't just cavalierly file these lawsuits," Mentzer said.

Federal prosecutors have made Internet piracy a priority in the last decade, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia, which can claim jurisdiction over many such cases because large portions of the Internet's backbone — servers and other infrastructure — are physically located in northern Virginia's technology corridor.

The vast majority of those cases have resulted in guilty pleas and prison time. On Friday, a day after announcement of the Megaupload case, a federal judge sentenced Matthew David Howard Smith, 24, of Raleigh, North Carolina, to 14 months in prison for his role in founding a website called NinjaVideo. That site was one of many shut down in 2010, at a time when it facilitated nearly 1 million illegal downloads a week.

NinjaVideo was what prosecutors called a "linking site" to Megaupload. Casual users of Megaupload would be unable to find popular movies and TV shows on the site without the proper links. Sites like NinjaVideo allowed users to easily search for the desired movies or music and provided the links that enabled them to download the content from Megaupload.

The other co-founder of NinjaVideo, Hana Beshara, was sentenced earlier this month to 22 months in prison. While she admitted guilt, she portrayed herself as a sort of Robin Hood of the online world, stealing from greedy movie studios to provide entertainment downloads to the masses in the form of free films, TV shows, videogames and music.

While the legal defense for piracy may be difficult, accused Internet pirates clearly have their supporters, as evidenced by the millions of people who use their sites as well as the response to Thursday's Megaupload shutdown. Within hours of the indictment being unsealed, the loose affiliation of hackers known as Anonymous caused temporary shutdowns of the Justice Department website as well as the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America and other industry groups that support a tougher piracy laws.

It could be months before the criminal case against Megaupload gets underway. The four defendants arrested in made an initial appearance in a New Zealand court Friday and are scheduled to make a second appearance on Monday. Authorities have said it could take a year or more to bring them to the U.S. if they fight extradition.

http://news.yahoo.com/renowned-attorney ... 42683.html

[tubro]

disclosure: i'm a lawyer with a decent bit of copyright and constitutional law experience. as such, my personal view, prior to all the SOPA talk and, more recently, the megaupload arrests, is that copyrights should and must be protected but SOPA is almost as wrong as any overreaching statute imaginable.

This megaupload case proves it, really. The laws exist and if prosecuted correctly, they're enough to satisfy hollywood and most any other industry or individual that relies on their ability to stop others from stealing their original ideas. SOPA is a joke - it criminalizes legal behavior instead of criminal behavior and abdicates the role of government and property owners in enforcing laws and civil rights. its lazy, overreaching, out of touch with modern technology and wrong. i agree with whomever said that its no coincidence that obama satisfied the civil libertarians (for once) by coming out against SOPA (finally) but at almost the same minute, had his justice department prosecute existing laws to show that IP rights could be protected without SOPA. I haven't studied the indictment against dotcom and his company so i don't know if what they did rose to the level of prosecutable behavior. my guess is that it did. maybe i'm a cynic but usually, if you follow the money, you find the truth, and dotcom had millions of dollars under his mattress, figuratively if not literally. the dime example of self policing is on point here. but the law still shouldn't punish someone who doesn't self police, as SOPA would have it do. what the law should do, and does do in patent, trademark and copyright issues, is allow the property owners wide and semi-prosecutorial rights to sieze property using civil means, but also allows the government to step in and prosecute criminally an individual or entity who is given the chance to cease and desist its bad behavior and refuses to do so.

i am not an expert at all in international law and mega's best defenses here may be tied to that, since they're not doing their acts in the US, but that'll all play out in court. bottom line is that if you own and register an original idea, there is a basic wrong in someone else making money off of it which money should be yours. but investigating these matters as torts and crimes for civil attorneys or law enforcement to sort out is the way to go. SOPA overreached so its wrong.

The US often has a problem prosecuting crimes as crimes. 9-11 was a crime. john kerry lost his bid for preident for pointing that out. he said to prosecute it as a crime but not to enact statutes like the patriot act or fight multiple wars over 9-11. two wars and over a trillion dollars later, we have not gotten the message. our government makes laws which affect everyone's freedoms to respond to crimes affecting less people being committed by even less.

there's a whole other set of facts and arguments here about IP owners having some obligation to keep up with modernizatino of technology rather than just expecting to ignore advances and count on prosecutors to do their enforcement. and that's good fodder for tweaks and changes in the laws on these subjects. but it doesn't and won't change the fact that stealing is stealing and aiding someone else in stealing, particularly for a profit, is also a crime.

[Hype]

there's a whole other set of facts and arguments here about IP owners having some obligation to keep up with modernizatino of technology rather than just expecting to ignore advances and count on prosecutors to do their enforcement. and that's good fodder for tweaks and changes in the laws on these subjects. but it doesn't and won't change the fact that stealing is stealing and aiding someone else in stealing, particularly for a profit, is also a crime.

This is an interesting couple of sentences. Yes, it is obvious that "stealing is stealing", because stealing IS stealing. The question is whether file-sharing is stealing. Certainly, it may be true of leaked pre-air TV shows (or albums) or of DVD-screeners of movies, that the original leak was a direct result of straightforward theft, and, arguably, downloading/sharing copies of these shows/movies would make those who do it complicit in the theft, but arguably not thieves themselves. It's a double-disanalogy in the following way: Imagine some real sea-faring pirates board a cargo vessel and steal the contents of the ship. Then they sail to another country where they settle with the bounty, and, over time, others come to share in the wealth, so-to-speak. Well, now, it's obviously true that these later folk are not thieves. They did not do the stealing. So what are they guilty of? It's not clear, but maximally, of consorting or being complict in, or aiding and abetting thievery. However, the second part of the disanalogy is that with ordinary concrete goods, theft is the taking away of another's property, so that they do not have it anymore. In the case of intellectual property, something different is usually going on (except in cases like the aforementioned literal theft of say, a particular DVD-screener hard-copy).

When the printing press was first popularized, book publishers freaked out because anyone with a printing press was now going around making copies of already existing works and selling them cheaper, or for free, and perhaps corrupting the quality (by removing/replacing authors, and such). But this did not result in laws which prescribed the end of the printing press, it just required clearer and more effective copyright laws. The problem with the Internet is that it is much more difficult to adjust copyright law to it without destroying the medium itself (in a way much different than with a physical thing like a printing press). It would have been bad if whenever copyrights were infringed by a printer, the government went in and completely shut down the entire organization immediately and permanently. I can't imagine that's the way the law did work, or at least, if it did, then it shouldn't have.

It is also just straight-up idiotic of the media industries to pretend like they can legislate the value of their products.

[CaseyContrarian]

All of this is what I do for a living. I've been fighting SOPA and PIPA forever in the halls o' power. Bringing musicians right straight to the lawmakers to get their perspectives heard. Washington typically only listens to the powerful trade industry groups (RIAA, MPAA), but my org has been an artist-driven counter to this for more than a decade. I speak all around the country and in the media about this shit. Frankly, I'm tired of it, and wish the content industries would focus on something productive like licensing reform and tailoring their distribution to consumptive realities.

One thing to keep in mind, re: Mega is that it's a criminal case, not a civil one. So there's a higher standard, and a higher burden of proof. It's also why it is not likely that similar action would ever be brought against YouTube (they're already facing a civil challenge from Viacom, which is on appeal). There may, however, be a "chilling effect" with other locker-and-link style platforms, and we're actually already seeing some of that. Still, the assumption is the vast majority of legit services that actively comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act provisions will continue to enjoy their safe harbors.

More here:

http://futureofmusic.org/blog/2012/01/2 ... megaupload

[Hype]

I can tell you right now, the legislators and enforcers don't understand what they're doing. There are already new places with just as good speeds filling the same niche (not gonna post them here... I'll just say that you can find them so easily it's ridiculous... so unless they want to shut down all file-hosting services on the planet...), and there always will be (unless deeper controls over the Internet are implemented, stronger than SOPA/PIPA that actually kill the Internet, ala Malaysia/China and the like). These industries deserve to die for not understanding and adapting to the changing paradigm. There's a shitload of money to be made if instead of protecting an outmoded model, they paid some money and took some risks (cf. iTunes, but better...)