Megaupload closed by FBI

[Swindler]

Megaupload.com, alleged to be one of the world's most popular sources of online piracy, has been shut down by a federal indictment issued Thursday.
The cyberlocker enabled file-sharing said to be teeming with movies, music and TV shows for as many as 50 million daily visitors a day. Megaupload.com has been measured as the 13th most popular website on the planet.

The FBI, which led the investigation, characterized the indictment as "among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States." The indictment says the site's backers have generated revenues totaling $175 million.

Hours after the indictment went public, the notorious hackers known as Anonymous claimed to be behind an attack on the websites for Universal Music Group and Department of Justice, which were rendered inaccessible. Anonymous explained the attack was in retaliation for the crackdown on Megaupload.

The indictment targets seven individuals including Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, the alleged ringleader of the operation. He and three others were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, on Thursday.

The indictment hits the ring with a raft of charges including racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering that each carry anywhere from five to 20 years of prison time.

All told, the Megaupload empire is spread across 18 different domains with servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada.

The shuttering of Megaupload comes as piracy has emerged as hot-button issue on Capitol Hill, where the SOPA and PIPA proposals could provide the government with powerful--and controversial--new tools for fighting copyright infringement.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048883

TL:DR:
So the feds shuts down Megaupload, Anonymous gets mad and start's Operation Megaupload where they currently DDoS serval government and musical websites.

Megaupload Indictment(72 pages long)

This is a brief list of some of the closed websites:
justice.gov
universalmusic.com
mpaa.org
riaa.org
riaa.com
copyright.gov
hadopi.fr
bmi.com
doj.gov
bgi.com
wmg.com
fbi.gov
fbi.com
whitehouse.gov

You can pretty much follow it "live" from here: https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews

Megaupload however, is up and running on http://www.megavideo.bz if someone is interested

[TheDrop]

very interesting..because as far as i remember megaupload would take out copyrighted material pretty quick- which is why i didnt use it as much more than downloading shit uploaded by people that wanted their shit to be downloaded (to be shared like pserver clients, etc..)

them already having a new site just after a few hours of the news coming out just shows theres no point in shutting down sites, lol.

[Mirosuke]

I support this

[penfold1992]

they have a new site already?

[Shomari]

Mega was the best of all file hosters. RIP.

[_Dutchy_]

Serously when did the United states turn into a second china with the internet

[inky]

Megavideo's out too huh. There are and will always be other ways download/stream files online no matter how much they try to monopolize the revenue (or rather, the hypothetical what-could-have-been revenue).

[William-CL]

So this is why I couldn't watch my megavideo >.> bastards
videobb/novavid are going to be next or even sidereel.

[asusi]

[Toshiharu]

Serously when did the United states turn into a second china with the internet

The the amount of information they had on them was just.. haha. They were stealing youtube videos, knew about copyright issues, they became popular and thought about "should we cooperate now?", and more.

Also I laughed when I read "Graphic artist still at large." from the fbi site.

[William-CL]

Serously when did the United states turn into a second china with the internet

Well with Megaupload I can see their point. They took copyrighted content and displayed it along with ads and generated revenue. How would you feel if someone took something you made and profited off of it? It's the ones that profit that they should go after IF they were to.
Websites are playing a very risky game with all of the ads plastering. I've noticed some have been doubling the same ads and adding in longer ones to the videos. I don't know the exact wording of the copyright law, but I do know that it explicitly says something about using the material for financial gain.

[_Dutchy_]

Serously when did the United states turn into a second china with the internet

Well with Megaupload I can see their point. They took copyrighted content and displayed it along with ads and generated revenue. How would you feel if someone took something you made and profited off of it? It's the ones that profit that they should go after IF they were to.
Websites are playing a very risky game with all of the ads plastering. I've noticed some have been doubling the same ads and adding in longer ones to the videos. I don't know the exact wording of the copyright law, but I do know that it explicitly says something about using the material for financial gain.

The thing is Megaupload offerd to take down material that was a copyright breach prove it and its GONE! and lets face it, Well atleast in my opinion most of the stuff on Megaupload was not copyright infrightment material, Most of it is Freewhare,Shareware etc.

[*BlackFox]

The "Internet War" is starting to take shape. eh?

[William-CL]

Serously when did the United states turn into a second china with the internet

Well with Megaupload I can see their point. They took copyrighted content and displayed it along with ads and generated revenue. How would you feel if someone took something you made and profited off of it? It's the ones that profit that they should go after IF they were to.
Websites are playing a very risky game with all of the ads plastering. I've noticed some have been doubling the same ads and adding in longer ones to the videos. I don't know the exact wording of the copyright law, but I do know that it explicitly says something about using the material for financial gain.

The thing is Megaupload offerd to take down material that was a copyright breach prove it and its GONE! and lets face it, Well atleast in my opinion most of the stuff on Megaupload was not copyright infrightment material, Most of it is Freewhare,Shareware etc.

Let's be realistic about it. The people running it knew pretty well that 90%+ was copyrighted material. If they took it all down, the site would have it's appeal and undefined purpose.
I'm not saying I agree with it being take totally down, but I do agree that the law was broken in a HUGE way and people made hundred of thousands of dollars just by reposting what other people made(Tv shows mainly on Megavideo). I don't think it could be any more obvious that what they were doing was profiting off of other people's work.

What I would have proposed to be done differently though, would be go after individuals that uploaded the content rather than the site. That's thousands of people.

[PureStr]

It was up a few hours ago on that IP: http://109.236.83.66/
Dunno if it will come back

[Toshiharu]

The thing is Megaupload offerd to take down material that was a copyright breach prove it and its GONE! and lets face it, Well atleast in my opinion most of the stuff on Megaupload was not copyright infrightment material, Most of it is Freewhare,Shareware etc.

They knew about that it was copyrighted materials. After they became successful they said "should we cooperate now?" which is why the entire thing being shut down is hilarious.

Other messages appear to indicate that employees knew how important copyrighted content was to their business. Content owners had a specific number of takedown requests they could make each day; in 2009, for instance, Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase, one employee suggested that "we can afford to be cooperative at current growth levels"— implying that if growth had not been so robust, takedowns should be limited. Kim Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... upload.ars

Not quite the page I read before, but close enough.

[_MvP_]

The government tries to control the information.
When will you understand that your govermment sucks.

[BuDo]

Good riddance....I never liked mega upload anyways....I'm against the government trying to flex its strong arm to stop us from freely sharing information but what I hate even more is leeches and parasites like mega upload exploiting the sharing of web content/information....

[William-CL]

The government tries to control the information.
When will you understand that your govermment sucks.

When will you understand that every government sucks.
In this case I don't give a shit. There's a difference between freedom of information and stealing peoples work to make a shit load of money. If you made something awesome and someone copied it and made hundreds of thousands of dollars from it, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy.

[_Dutchy_]

The government tries to control the information.
When will you understand that your govermment sucks.

Perhaps you would like the Goverment beter in Egypt ? Syria ? or Yemen ?

Don't complain about the goverment they might do stupid stuff but they still take care of the nation


@Toshiharu i wasn't aware of that information i always thougt megaupload offerd to remove content right away makes more sence now then.

[heroo]

that mothrfcker had one badass car collection. big fan of AMG, just like me

[SNAPPA77]

We can't have it both ways guys.

Can't say we are ANTI-SOPA then bitch about them shutting down individual sites.

[Toshiharu]

The government tries to control the information.
When will you understand that your govermment sucks.

It wasn't even that, but yes it sucks. Megaupload was ran by morons. On the outside it looked like a legit site. Behind the curtains you can see it was dealing the wrong ways. You should learn to read the thread.

@Toshiharu i wasn't aware of that information i always thougt megaupload offerd to remove content right away makes more sence now then.

The amount of information they have against them is funny. There's more than 'we should cooperate now'.

[William-CL]

We can't have it both ways guys.

Can't say we are ANTI-SOPA then bitch about them shutting down individual sites.

Sopa threated to do MORE than just prevent copyright infringement.

[Avalanche]

It wasn't even that, but yes it sucks. Megaupload was ran by morons. On the outside it looked like a legit site. Behind the curtains you can see it was dealing the wrong ways. You should learn to read the thread.

Explain.

[Toshiharu]

It wasn't even that, but yes it sucks. Megaupload was ran by morons. On the outside it looked like a legit site. Behind the curtains you can see it was dealing the wrong ways. You should learn to read the thread.

Explain.

Other messages appear to indicate that employees knew how important copyrighted content was to their business. Content owners had a specific number of takedown requests they could make each day; in 2009, for instance, Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase, one employee suggested that "we can afford to be cooperative at current growth levels"— implying that if growth had not been so robust, takedowns should be limited. Kim Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... upload.ars

Not quite the page I read before, but close enough.

I should reword "moron" with bad legitimate business. Take a look at the link. What's funny about the entire megaupload being shutdown other filesharing sites have suddenly taken action to show that they're scared. Uploaded.to no longer works for United States ip. Many others are mass deleting files. Funny, right?

They're only providing a server just like the ISPs. Is it their fault how the users use it? Not at all. Is it their fault when they take no action? Absolutely. Spoiler! ISPs still don't give a shit. They just want your money.

I wonder what happened. Could it be court says ip = / = you and they stopped with that? Afterall filesharing sites does tie people down to accounts, email addresses, payments, etc etc. Who really is behind shutting down megaupload?

Should I put on my tin foil hat? I think I should.

[SNAPPA77]

We can't have it both ways guys.

Can't say we are ANTI-SOPA then bitch about them shutting down individual sites.

Sopa threated to do MORE than just prevent copyright infringement.

Not disagreeing.

My point is we can't bitch about them shutting down an individual site. We can't have it both ways.


I'd much rather them use the law on the books and go by a case by case basis than that all encompassing piece of shit bill that SOPA was.

[William-CL]

We can't have it both ways guys.

Can't say we are ANTI-SOPA then bitch about them shutting down individual sites.

Sopa threated to do MORE than just prevent copyright infringement.

Not disagreeing.

My point is we can't bitch about them shutting down an individual site. We can't have it both ways.


I'd much rather them use the law on the books and go by a case by case basis than that all encompassing piece of shit bill that SOPA was.

Sopa and this Case are a little different though. In this case it's blatenly obvious that they were profiting on copyrighted material. Sopa would have people that use that material for fun be removed. A lot of the people that bash Sopa don't do it for the Copyright portion of it, it's the fact that it's not limited to copyright protection. In the case of Megaupload, it's purely copyright issues that got it removed. So yea I'm glad copyright profiteering was shutdown in this case, but sopa is still FAR from that answer to doing this more in the future.

Now if Megaupload wasn't profiting from the material they posted, I would be a little pissed off about it. Look at all the youtube videos that have music in them. Every one of them would be a separate case of a felony with Sopa. Each gamer would need explicit permission from a copyright holder to upload footage of gameplay to be completely protected from Sopa given it's specific wording.

[*BlackFox]

Pretty interesting article

Yesterday a massive operation took down MegaUpload, one of the world’s leading file-storage services and one of the world’s biggest sites, period.

While the timing came as a huge post-SOPA protest surprise, the fact the site was targeted was not – for many months there have been rumblings behind the scenes that something might be “done” about MegaUpload.

------------------------------------

a little background on how MegaUpload’s user uploading system worked because this is absolutely crucial to the case against the site.

Mega had developed a system whereby files set to be uploaded by users were hashed in order to discover if a copy of the file already exists on the Mega servers. If a file existed, the user did not have to upload his copy and was simply given a unique URL in order to access the content in future. What this meant in practice is that there could be countless URLs ‘owned’ by various users but which all pointed to the same file.

Megaupload’s “Abuse Tool” to which major copyright holders were given access, enabled the removal of links to infringing works hosted on MegaUpload’s servers. However, the indictment claims that it “did not actually function as a DMCA compliance tool as the copyright owners were led to believe.” And here’s why.

The indictment claims that when a copyright holder issued a takedown notice for content referenced by its URL, only the URL was taken down, not the content to which it pointed. So although the URL in question would report that it had been removed and would no longer resolve to infringing material, URLs issued to others would remain operational.

Read More Here

[poehalcho]

Filesonic has killed it's services now too. It's servers were in hongkong as well. It seems it crumbled under the pressure and the creators decided to end it before it goes wrong.

Got my info here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmes ... _id=305549

on a less important note, apperantly Kim Dotcom was the world's number 1 mw3 player XD
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/meg ... -3-player/