Article by George Norman

On 20 Jan 2012

Copyright infringement keeps making the news: one day after numerous sites around the word took part in a scheduled blackout to protest against SOPA, the feds took down MegaUpload and several other related websites. In the words of Program Director with Demand Progress, David Moon, it’s like the US Government is responding to Blackout Day by showing protesters the middle finger.

On Thursday, the 19th of January 2012, federal prosecutors in Virginia shut down MegaUpload, one of the largest file-sharing sites on the web. They also shut down streaming site MegaVideo and several other domains connected to the Kim Dotcom-founded MegaUpload Limited corporation. And speaking about Kim Dotcom, New Zealand police arrested the entrepreneur (and several other key figures on the company) at the request of US authorities. And speaking about the authorities, they executed more than 20 search warrants, raiding data centers in Washington, Canada, and The Netherlands.


Why did the US authorities shutdown MegaUpload and arrest its founder Kim Dotcom. On January 5th a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia found MegaUpload Limited and Vestor Limited guilty of “engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.” According to the 72-page indictment unsealed by the Department of Justice, MegaUpload caused the entertainment industries more than $500 million in lost revenue and generated $175 million “in criminal proceeds.”

The indictment covers the abovementioned Kim Dotcom and the following (list provided by TorrentFreak, site that specializes in everything torrent-related):

• Finn Batato, 38, Mega’s chief marketing officer and a citizen and resident of Germany
• Julius Bencko, 35, Mega’s graphic designer from Slovakia
• Sven Echternach, 39,Mega’s German head of business development;
• Mathias Ortmann, 40, the German CTO, co-founder and director of Mega
• Andrus Nomm, 32, programmer and head of the development from Estonia
• Bram van der Kolk, 29, a Dutch citizen who oversaw programming and network issues.

Dotcom, Ortmann, Bato, and Bram have been taken into custody. The others are still at large.

The Department of Justice says that all the people named in the indictment could spend many, many years in jail. 20 for conspiracy to commit racketeering, 5 for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 for conspiracy to commit money laundering, 5 for each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

So to sum it up, the US authorities say that the “Mega conspiracy” made millions of dollars illegally by operating sites that willfully distributed pirated movies and other copyrighted works.

Hacktivist collective Anonymous responded to the news that the feds took down MegaUpload by launching a mass distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) against several websites – the website of the Department of Justice (DoJ), Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA),Universal Music, the White House, the FBI, the US Copyright Office. The attack knocked some of the sites offline, others were crippled but not taken offline.



Tags: MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, Torrent Freak

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