In a dramatic response to the increasingly sucessful internet campaign to halt the draconian SOPA and PIPA bills before Congress, US authorities have targeted one of the major filesharing sites in an international operation.
Overnight, the Megaupload site and related portals were taken down by the Department of Justice after a grand jury indicted the company. The charges against Megaupload are extensive and reek of overkill; they include racketeering, conspiracy, money laundering and copyright infringement, with the indictment terming it all “Mega Conspiracy”. Four people were arrested in New Zealand, including millionaire CEO Kim Schmitz (AKA “Kim Dotcom”), a convicted embezzler and inside trader. Assets worth $50 million are said to have been seized as well.
In response, the websites of the Department of Justice, the Universal Music Group, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America were all taken down in a denial-of-service attack. At the time of writing, the Department of Justice site was still down. The attack, using a newer version of the LOIC software, appeared to have been coordinated by Anonymous, and was said to have been even bigger in user numbers than the attacks that took the Visa, Mastercard and PayPal sites down in response to the financial blockade of WikiLeaks in 2010.
A number of prosecutions are still pending in the US from those 2010 attacks. This time around, LOIC users are being told of the need to protect their IP addresses, and being offered legal services in the event they’re arrested.
Megaupload isn’t a torrent-based site like, for example, Pirate Bay (linking to which, incidentally, would be illegal in the US under SOPA) but an open file-sharing site used for uploading and downloading large files — which inevitably includes copyrighted content as well as legitimate content for corporate and personal use. The company behind it has long insisted it operates legally by complying with the requirements of the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but it is a major target of the copyright industry, and has also been blocked by China, Saudia Arabia and Malaysia.
US authorities insisted the takedown and arrests were unrelated to the SOPA debate, a claim made all the harder to believe given the US Department of Justice’s recent history of attacks on the internet. It is the DoJ that demanded confidential information from social media companies and Google about WikiLeaks supporters, and tried to keep it secret; it is the DoJ that brought together the parties that plotted an effort to destroy WikiLeaks and smear journalists and activists; it was the DoJ that proposed in November to criminalise breaching internet companies’ terms of service (you know, those 20,000 word screeds none of us ever read?).
The interesting thing about the raids, however, is that they demonstrate the remarkable power the copyright industry has under existing law to attack those it deems its enemies. The cartel was able to rely on the US Department of Justice and an international police operation to attack a company over what, before the internet, was a purely civil matter of copyright breach. In a world where the New Zealand police readily do the bidding of the US copyright industry, the provisions of SOPA are far beyond overkill.
Why cant we arrest the whalers in our waters if international arrests are so easy
Because the waters are not actually ours, we just pretend they are.
“New Zealand police readily do the bidding of the US copyright industry”
Oh come on. The NZ police are doing the bidding of the US department of Justice.
You can’t handle and distribute stolen goods (which is what Megaupload was doing) without some sort of effect. I think this was DOJ going after the low hanging fruit. Next will be bittorrent and piratebay.
It’s about time for this sort of stuff. Western countries do not have the advantage of low wages present in the developing world. The only competitive advantage we have is our ability to create IP. Why shouldn’t this be protected? We need the US, Australian and other like minded authorities to try and ensure that if you create content, software, music or any other form of intellectual property, the creators will get properly compensated for it’s use worldwide. If people can get it for free, it’s pure market failure meaning those that do the right thing (i.e pay) end up paying more due to firms compensating for this leakage effect.
Time for the free riders to start buying tickets.
@ shepherdmarilyn
Macquarie Island is ours, we should enforce the 12 mile limit
Yet again Bernard promotes the fantasy that sites like megaupload are innocent file sharing hosts when the majority of it’s traffic is to steal copyrighted work.
If this piracy continues then we will have no blockbuster films, no budget art films, no movie stars and no actors who barely live on the residuals from TV work, no concerts, no X-Factor and so on.
Yet not a word about the gigantic rapacious profit making corporations like Google who are predators-they simply link to other’s work (or host it on Blogger…does anyone want links to the tens of thousands of pirate blogs?) who because of their claims of innocence (turning a blind eye) they are going to force governments to impose draconian laws.
This is no difference to a vast drug chain of supply. If any business knows it is used for illegal purposes they would be in the dock. All the search engines know they are used but they do not self regulate.
It’s a sad day when I have to agree with Rupert Murdoch but the slavish devotion dished out to the t-shirted Zuckerbergs who are simply the new Murdoch style moguls is weird. The one thing Anonymous has shown us is that there are tens of thousands of kids sitting in their bedrooms who are every bit as clever as the modern day deities like the late Steve Jobs.
The internet may be the modern day frontier but the carpetbaggers are controlling it.