Megaupload One of the world largest file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, federal prosecutors said.

An indictment accuses Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart online piracy.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and three others were arrested Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Two other defendants are at large.

Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.

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Megaupload Goes Down

U.S. Justice department has shut down popular sharing website Megaupload and its founder, Kim Schmitz, has been arrested by the FBI in New Zealand, where he is been living.

As a way to fight back and revenge, hacker group Anonymous has been messing around with U.S. government and major record label websites such as those of the FBI, MPAA, RIAA, EMI and many more.

 

 

Anonymous Fight Back

Anonymous, however, quickly responded to this and has been hard at work shutting down various government and record label websites. Among the victims are the FBI, EMI, Universal Music Group, MPAA, Recording Industry Association of America and the US Copyright Office. All of them have been affected by Anonymous' vigorous DDoS attacks.

Earlier today, the Department of Justice also arrested three more company executives Megaupload CMO Fin Batato and CTO Mathias Ortmannand, both from Germany and Bram van der Kolk living in New Zealand. Furthermore, New Zealand police has seized Megaupload assets worth millions of dollars including luxury cars, cash and various property around the country.

The arrested Megaupload executives, dubbed the"Mega Conspiracy group" by prosecutors, will be charged for various crimes including copyright infringement, supporting piracy and more. It is been estimated by the U.S. Justice Department that Megaupload has done more than $500 million in economic harm to various copyright holders and with the advancement of the investigation this estimate could double or even triple.

Interestingly enough, this happens just two days after the major Internet websites went black as a form of protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is in U.S. Congress waiting to be voted on.

Also, Here are some photos of the luxury cars of the Megaupload CEO that were seized by the New Zealand police being taken away.

 

SOPA is DEAD

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill "until there is wider agreement on a solution."

"I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy," Smith (R-Texas) told Reuters. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."

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MegaUpload shut-down fallout continues, with rival file-sharing sites FileSonic and Uploaded.to each dramatically slimming their services to avoid allegations of copyright infringement. FileSonic has ceased any new sharing functionality whatsoever, the site now saying that "our services can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally," while Uploaded.to has blocked US traffic though remains accessible elsewhere in the world.

If you attempt to access Uploaded.to from a US IP address, however, you are greeted with the message that "Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry about that." Neither site has made any public announcement of the change in services, leading to speculation that the decision to curtail file sharing was a sudden reaction to the shock arrest of MegaUpload CEO Kim Dotcom and other employees of the site.

 

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Believe it or not, it was and is possible to track the traffic that MegaUpload and the rest of the piracy-laden file-sharing groups out there have compared to the rest of the web. In One hour following the January 19th raid of MegaUpload the Global entirety of the Internet lost between 2-3 precent of its total volume in traffic.

This first statistic comes from a report from DeepField Networks called File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era. This same study had MegaUpload downloads representing no less than 30-40% of all file sharing on the internet. As MegaUpload own MegaVideo and the other biggest sharer of files after that, Filesonic, both shuttered their doors effectively on January 18th, their percentages (34.1% for Mega and 19.1% for Filesonic) were distributed amongst the rest of the next biggest hosts. According again to DeepField, "MegaUpload sprawled over more than 1000 servers and 25 petabytes of data in Carpathia facilities." That is an intense amount of copies of Skyrim, that iss for sure.

On the 19th of January it was Putlocker up top with nearly 30% of all the file sharing on the web with several services next in line like MediaFire and NovaMov. Both the graphics you see above and below come from DeepField.

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The founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, has given his first interview by "3 News" since he was arrested over alleged copyright infringement and shutdown his company MegaUpload back in 2011. Dotcom is facing a litany of charges by the FBI in the US that include copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering. Kim still maintains that he is no piracy king, and that he will win in court.

Kim describes the whole situation as a nightmare that has been horrifying for his family. He also maintains that the entire legal drama and arrest was totally unexpected. He claims that in the seven years Megaupload has been in business it has only been sued once and that he and his legal team believed the website was protected by the DMCA law that protects likes of Google and YouTube. We Have the Full Video for the Interview Below!

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As the saga between Megaupload and the United States government continues, lawsuits are destined to come down strong from creators and copyright holders associated with the filesharing sites found distribution selection. The amount of cash that the group ValCom, Inc. is seeking is just part of the massive half-billion in copyright losses and $175 million in proceeds total the US government has already calculated. ValCom $42 million in suspected criminal proceeds have been seized in Megaupload.com and related entities raids thus far.

 

"Together with our friends at Microhits, Inc., we have implemented an aggressive initiative to acquire back-due royalties and compensation to assure that we receive all revenues that are due to the Company. Our suit regarding Megaupload.com is one of many situations we have identified where ValCom is due compensation." - Vallardita

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