Archive for the 'megaupload' Category

In one of his first interviews since being released on bail, MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak that the charges against him and his company are “nonsense.”

In the interview, Dotcom addressed the two infringing files that the indictment claims he personally uploaded: a 50 Cent song and a Louis Armstrong song. He claims the songs were purchased legally and uploaded to test a new private link email feature.

He also says that allegations that MegaUpload prevented Warner Bros. from deleting infringing content are bogus. In fact, MegaUpload wasn’t legally required to provide companies with a direct-delete feature at all, and Warner was allowed to remove more links from MegaUpload than any other copyright holder.

Dotcom says he has emails showing that Warner Bros. and other entertainment companies were actively using MegaUpload and wanted to partner with the company. He says Warner even asked MegaUpload to create a tool to automatically upload their content.

“We did nothing wrong. Watch out for our first motion in response to the MPAA-sponsored Department of Justice indictment. It will be enlightening and maybe entertaining,” Dotcom said.

[geek]

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom may be about to have some of his seized assets returned by New Zealand authorities due to a paperwork error surrounding the raid of Dotcom Mansion.

Police applied for the wrong type of restraining order before raiding Dotcom’s home back in January. Instead of an interim restraining order, they used a foreign restraining order, which prevented Dotcom from mounting a defense.

Police did eventually file the right paperwork after the fact, but a New Zealand High Court Justice has ruled that the initial order should never have been filed, and is now “null and void.”

It remains to be seen whether the mistake will result in the return of the Megaupload chief’s property. New Zealand law does allow for such mistakes, but if Dotcom’s lawyers can prove the wrong order was filed with “a lack of good faith,” authorities will have to give back the seized assets.

[ars]

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has given his first TV interview since being arrested, appearing on 3News New Zealand’s Campbell Live to make the case that he’s no “pirate king,” and Megaupload hasn’t done anything wrong.

Dotcom says he’s accused of causing $13 billion of damage to the U.S. music industry, which he calls “mind-boggling and unreleastic,” considering that the entire industry is worth $20 billion.

“It’s really, in my opinion, the government of the United States protecting an outdated monopolistic business model that doesn’t work anymore in the age of the internet and that’s what it all boils down to,” he said.

Dotcom also wonders why none of the companies allegedly damaged by Megaupload ever sued him for those damages.

“If you are a company that is hurt so much by what we are doing, billions of dollars of damage, you don’t wait and sit and do nothing. You call your lawyers and you try and sue us and try to stop us from what we are doing,” he said.

As for the suggestion that Megaupload should have been proactively checking users’ accounts for copyright-infringing material, Dotcom says it wasn’t possible, because doing so would have violated U.S. privacy laws.

The Megaupload founder is still out on bail — despite an attempt by the U.S. government to have him locked up again — and awaiting a date for his extradition hearing.

[3news]

Megaupload Update of the Day: MegaUpload co-founder Mathias Ortmann has been released on bail by a New Zealand court, and will join fellow Megaupload employees Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato at Van Der Kolk’s home in Auckland. All three have been banned from accessing the Internet.

Authorities plan to extradite the MegaUpload defendants, including founder Kim Dotcom, to the U.S. under a United Nations treaty designed to combat international organized crime. Copyright offenses aren’t covered by the treaty, but authorities contend that they can try the MegaUpload crew in the U.S. on racketeering allegations.

Kim Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison, says it is “not at all clear” that Dotcom and the others can be legally extradited, and he plans to litigate the issue.

The actual extradition hearing is scheduled for February 22nd.

[torrentfreak]

Megaupload Shutdown Has No Effect on Piracy of the Day: Before it was shut down last month, file-sharing site Megaupload accounted for between 30% and 40% of all file-sharing downloads. Despite those numbers, though, the Megaupload takedown has barely impacted the overall amount of file-sharing traffic on the web.

A study by DeepField Networks, analyzing web traffic from six companies that provide storage for 80% of the Internet’s file-sharing, found that sharing traffic bounced back almost immediately when Megaupload went down, with users switching to other services like Rapidshare and Mediafire.

DeepField says that could impact American Internet Service Providers, as the huge amount of data that used to go to Megaupload’s US-based servers is now headed to Europe via more expensive transatlantic links.

It appears the takedown of Megaupload didn’t stop piracy, it just relocated it.

[bgr]

Megaupload Police Raid Details of the Day: New details have come out about the raid on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion, including the involvement of New Zealand’s elite counterterrorism force, the Special Tactics Group.

3Newz took a tour of Dotcom Mansion with Dotcom’s security chief, Wayne Tempero, who described the raid by police officers and STG personnel with sidearms and automatic weapons, and showed some of the damage done to the mansion in an attempt to find the Megaupload boss.

Tempero says the officers handcuffed him and then raided the part of the house where three kids — ages 3, 4, and 15 months — live with their five nannies. One of the nannies says they demanded to know whether she had any guns or bombs.

Police smashed down three doors to get to Dotcom, and used sledgehammers to bash a hole through a wall that they apparently thought concealed a secret hiding place. It was actually an unused dumbwaiter.

If a couple of officers had showed up — minus the helicopter and automatic weapons — Dotcom “would have complied with everything, we would have sat at the large table, he would’ve probably offered them breakfast and he would have complied with everything,” Tempero told 3newz.

[torrentfreak]

Follow Up of the Day: Yesterday, Megaupload’s lawyer warned that all of the site’s user-uploaded files could be destroyed this Thursday, because the company’s assets are currently frozen, leaving them unable to pay their hosting fees.

Today, hosting companies Carpathia and Cogent have agreed to preserve the files for another two weeks, while Megaupload attempts to work out a deal with the U.S. attorney to keep the data intact.

Although many of the files on Megaupload are allegedly copyright-infringing, users have also uploaded legitimate personal and business files. There are also files that could be entered as evidence in Megaupload’s defense, which gives the company another reason to want them preserved.

[atlantic]

Megaupload Data Wipe of the Day: All of Megaupload’s user-uploaded files could be destroyed this Thursday, according to the embattled file-sharing company’s lawyer.

After Megaupload was taken down and its assets were frozen, the company was unable to pay for the server space to host users’ files.

Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken says he’s trying to work with the US Attorney’s office to unfreeze enough money to pay for “bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping.”

Although Megaupload was busted for allegedly hosting copyright-infringing files, there are plenty of non-infringing personal and work files stored on the cloud service. Rothken says destroying those files could have “a chilling effect” on the entire cloud storage industry in the United States.

[torrentfreak]

Megaupload Update of the Day: The criminal case against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has turned even stranger, with new evidence that Dotcom is a flight risk, gun charges, and an inflatable tank turning up in front of “Dotcom Mansion” in New Zealand.

The tank, which wasn’t brought up at Dotcom’s extradition hearing, is an expensive replica normally used by the military. The mansion took delivery of its new lawn ornament sometime after last Friday’s FBI raid on the property, and it’s said to be annoying the neighbors.

The judge in the hearing for Dotcom and three other Megaupload employees reportedly denied Dotcom’s bail after hearing secret evidence about how “porous” New Zealand’s borders are, and how someone like Dotcom (who has passports under three different names) could easily defeat it.

Two other Megaupload employees, chief marketing officer Finn Batato and lead programmer Bram van Der Kolk, have been granted bail, but they’re both banned from owning or using a device capable of connecting to the Internet.

Bail is still pending for the fourth defendant, longtime Dotcom associate Mathias Ortmann, after prosecutors found a difference of several million dollars between his bank records and his reported income.

As for the gun charges, they’re being brought against Dotcom’s head of security, Wayne Philip Tempero, because of a semi-automatic shotgun found in Dotcom’s saferoom when the FBI raided the mansion.

Tempero says the gun was licensed, and Dotcom’s lawyer said it was purchased to protect the Megaupload founder’s wife Mona, a model from the Philippines. He claimed that it was necessary because kidnapping of the rich and famous is “common” there.

[ars]

RapidShare Responds to Megaupload Shutdown of the Day: With Megaupload taken down and its founder locked up, there’s speculation about what might happen to some of the other major players in the file sharing industry.

Daniel Raimer, attorney and spokesman for RapidShare, one of the world’s largest file sharing sites, says he doesn’t think his company has anything to worry about.

In an interview with Fast Company, Raimer downplayed comparisons between RapidShare and Megaupload, and said RapidShare is more akin to Microsoft’s SkyDrive or Apple’s iCloud.

He said he doesn’t think federal prosecutors will target his company, because it’s more proactive than its competitors when it comes to preventing piracy.

“A third of our whole company is dedicated to taking down illegal content. Our response to takedown notices is probably less than an hour during our regular business hours. We really do a lot, and I really believe that others aren’t doing half of what we are doing.”

As for whether the takedown of Megaupload was fair, Raimer said it was up to a jury to decide, but that Megaupload did “things that [RapidShare] wouldn’t do, and that we strongly discourage.”

[fastcompany]