Megaupload file-sharing site shut down
Megaupload charged users a fee to upload large files anonymously
19 January 2012 Last updated at 21:47
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
Megaupload, one of the internet’s largest file-sharing sites, has been shut down by officials in the US.
The site’s founders have been charged with violating piracy laws.
Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue. The firm says it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.
The news came a day after anti-piracy law protests, but investigators said they were ordered two weeks ago.
The US Justice Department said that Megaupload’s two co-founders Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and Mathias Ortmann were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand along with two other employees of the business at the request of US officials. It added that three other defendants were still at large.
“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,” said a statement posted on its website.
Third-party sites
The charges included copyright infringement, conspiracies to commit racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering.
A federal court in Virginia ordered that 18 domain names associated with the Hong Kong-based firm be seized.
The Justice Department said that more than 20 search warrants had been executed in nine countries, and that approximately $50m in assets had been seized.
It claimed that the accused had pursued a business model designed to promote the uploading of copyrighted works.
“The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicised their links to users throughout the world,” a statement said.
“By actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicise infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicise 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.”
Before it was shut down the site posted a statement saying the allegations against it were “grotesquely overblown“.
“The fact is that the vast majority of Mega’s internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay,” it added.
“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.”
Blackouts
The announcement came a day after thousands of websites took part in a “blackout” to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa).
The US Chamber of Commerce has defended the proposed laws saying that enforcement agencies “lack the tools” to effectively apply existing intellectual property laws to the digital world.
Industry watchers suggest this latest move may feed into the wider debate.
“Neither of the bills are close to being passed – they need further revision. But it appears that officials are able to use existing tools to go after a business alleged to be inducing piracy,” said Gartner’s media distribution expert Mike McGuire.
“It begs the question that if you can find and arrest people who are suspected to be involved in piracy using existing laws, then why introduce further regulations which are US-only and potentially damaging.”
Its quite obvious and it goes back to a few years ago at a Bilderberg meeting where they decided they needed to squash the internet quickly. Why? The internet has turned on them far more than they even imagined. People are waking up to the age old scams played upon them by the vermin thinking they were in control of the show. People no longer listen or trust the corporations masquerading as Governments, and the people are close to loosing all belief in the Government scam. Serious attacks to their authority are coming up, such as with lawful groups like the British Constitution Group and others Worldwide. We’re understanding all the levels of their control web, from Admiralty Law, to who these people really are and the groups they’re part of. They know they cannot hide any longer so they want everything removed off the web in a Sanitization process reminiscent of the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris, France on August 31st 1997. If they do not get this right now, The Worshipful Company of Fuellers via their U.S. Navy will soon enough introduce The Grid system.
From day one of the Grid opening all enemy content (domestic terrorism) will simply never exist, which includes talks about the Bible and quoting from the Bible. Then what? You guessed it, the regular internet or World Wide Web will be quickly phased out like a Pentium III processor in a World of Icore7s. Datamining software masquerading as operating systems will have you needing your finger prints and eventually iris scans to enter the web as proposed with the Internet-ID being pushed by the Soetoro Administration usurping the White House under the National Academy of Public Administration. Remember that Microsoft has been caught being in league with the National Security Agency. William Gates is nothing more than social engineering front man for the Club of Rome and New Jerusalem aka City of London especially The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. Take his Windows VISTA as an example, this is really a Virtual Instant Surveillance Tactical Application. This was why Linux became frowned upon as the U.S Navy would prefer you used surveillance Windows and/or Mac OS.
You’ll notice people are petrified their site will go off the Google search engine and others, but ask yourself this, what was it like before Google and even Yahoo? We managed and did fine by simply bookmarking everything and hosting links on sites far more than today, we can always do it again. If it comes to it, you need not worry because we can always go back to the dated bulletin board software and dial-up like systems to private landlines as we used in the days of the Commodore Amiga and the Bulletin Board System. This would certainly make life difficult for the National Security Agency and Government Communications Headquarters, especially if everyone also dumps wifi and its radiation designed for spying, tampering and population reduction.
So please don’t go around claiming we live in the free World and the land of the free, as you see today we live in a full blown hybrid marxist fascist state that hoodwinks the brainwashed by the day. Its economy is collapsing, its society is collapsing, its control is collapsing, its big pharmaceuticals is collapsing. The Worshipful Companies of World Traders, Mercers, Apothecaries, Fuellers and Haberdashers are losing a little more control of the engineered chaos than they would have liked with their Industrial-Financial-Pharmaceutical-Military-Educational complex. Lets hope it dies soon so we can start again and have all these treasonous swines Lawfully executed after Lawful trial for their crimes. Shall we give them what they won’t give us? Should we give them a real Court with three Judges and a 12 man jury or should we screw them as they have us with administrative Courts?
Whats needed is for Google to blackout completely as Wikipedia did on the 18th of January 2012 just gone in protest of SOPA. This also goes for the rest of the entire web including commercial sites. If this doesn’t work you know what you do? You walk, you dump the claptrap entirely and let all the ISP companies go bust or put enough pressure on the vermin to open it back up again. This is the only way to defeat this vermin today and its Lawful Rebellion where they cannot do a single thing to you and your personal protest. If you do not want the internet no more, you’ve not committed any crime whatsoever. Its far better than drones going out and causing mayhem in the streets which gets you no where, especially with todays system.
What I suggest you go and do is simply download everything you like on the web and all the data you can find. Store it on multiple medias and have these located in three difference locations and not all in your home. This will safeguard your information just in case of disasters and other such problems.
-=The Unhived Mind
This may be distributed in its entirety freely.