MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested

[Jeepers]

http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-shut-down-120119/

[CBlacksheep]

What a victory for the MPAA/RIAA.

Meanwhile, the federal government threatens trade barriers upon other countries for not implementing similar legislation to those on the floor.

[Coded-Dude]

justice.gov, mpaa, riaa, and other websites are down as a direct result(anon took action).

[Jeepers]

a lil more info .... and i would bet a paycheck ANY public online file storage will contain copyrighted content, meaning ANY and ALL filesharing site are @ risk of prosecution from the good ole USofA no matter where you are or how legal you are in your country .... sad sad sad ....

MegaUpload provided no index or search function to the public, and sister site MegaVideo filtered its search results to remove copyrighted content. That seems like a good thing from an anti-piracy standpoint, but the indictment contends that it's a bad thing because it made it harder for copyright holders to see how much piracy was occurring on the service. (Other, unaffiliated sites provide the ability to search MegaUpload lockers. The indictment contends that company executives knew about and relied on those sites to generate the traffic it monetized through advertising sales.)
The list of the "Top 100" files at MegaUpload is edited to exclude copyrighted works. You might interpret that as an effort to avoid alerting users to infringing files available in the lockers. The indictment, however, asserts that it "makes the website appear more legitimate and hides the popular copyright-infringing content that drives its revenue."
Users could not stream a file on the affiliated MegaVideo site for more than 72 minutes unless they were paid subscribers to MegaUpload. Although that's a lengthy segment, it's not long enough to watch a typical Hollywood movie. The indictment contends that the point wasn't to discourage illegal movie viewing, but rather to monetize it.
The indictment also alleges that MegaUpload executives furthered their conspiracy to violate copyrights through actions they didn't take, including the following:

[T]he Conspiracy made no significant effort to identify users who were using the Mega Sites or services to infringe copyrights, to prevent the uploading of infringing copies of copyrighted materials, or to identify infringing copies of copyrighted works located on computer servers controlled by the Conspiracy.

In other words, the company is being faulted for not monitoring what each of its users did on its service, not inspecting content as it was being uploaded for copyright violations, and not combing through its servers for infringing material.

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla...load-case.html

[Scratch705]

there is a lot of "alleging" going on in the charges brought against the megaupload CEO.

which means they will have to convince the jury by emotion and not facts.