SOPA - Internet as we know it about to be gone?

[Fox '09 14]

isn't that wonderful.

[sudayev 27]

another evildoer motion picture of america lies on its knees

edit: two more. the war is on

+ RIAA

+ copyright.gov

Edited January 19, 2012 by Sudayev

[taro8 806]

The Series of Tubes Strikes Back!

EDIT: Check this out (from Wikipedia):

Megaupload song controversy

On December 9, 2011, Megaupload published a music video titled: "The Mega Song", showing artists including Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys and will.i.am endorsing the company. The music video was also uploaded to YouTube, but was removed following a takedown request by the record company Universal Music Group (UMG). Megaupload said that the video contained no infringing content, commenting: "we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign". Megaupload requested an apology from UMG, and filed a lawsuit against the company in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on December 12, 2011. UMG denied that the takedown was ordered under the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and said that the takedown was "pursuant to the UMG-YouTube agreement," which gives UMG "the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube's CMS (Content Management System) based on a number of contractually specified criteria." The video was subsequently returned to YouTube, with the reasons for the UMG takedown remaining unclear. YouTube stated: "Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YT unless they own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it." Lawyers for will.i.am initially claimed that he had never agreed to the project, but on December 12, he denied any involvement in the takedown notice.

Just a month ago, and remember that Megupload was around since 2005, either feds are really slow or something is fishy (adjusting tin foil hat).

BTW: Oh the porn! Somebody think of all that porn!

Edited January 19, 2012 by Taro8

[sudayev 27]

hey I cant access universalmusic.com what a coincidence :D

[-GR-Operative 10]

So the Megaupload scheme is the SOPA-way of doing things: accusing the owners with the users crimes.

Do you really think the people that watches movies on the internet would go to the teathers to watch them? I think everybody know most of these people wouldn't anyway, so it's not lost profit.

[-martin- 10]

Megauplaod is down? :butbut: That was the best file sharing website If this continues the future looks bleak...

EDIT: And whats going on with this SOPA, did it pass? Why are all these sites down? We're not getting much info here in the UK...

Edited January 20, 2012 by -Martin-

[Nicholas 5]

SOPA or PIPA has not passed yet. Megaupload was taken down by the government. Then Anonymous (A hacking group) took down several government websites.

[ryguy 10]

WTF? Under what law was it taken down from?!

[Nicholas 5]

This is direct from the United States Department of Justice:

Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement

WASHINGTON – Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced today.

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.

The individuals and two corporations – Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited – were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

In addition, the following alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:

Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;

Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;

Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;

Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;

Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;

Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.

According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies – often before their theatrical release – music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale. The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.

The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. The conspirators further allegedly offered a rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites. The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world.

In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize 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.

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.

The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the infringing content.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Philippines also provided assistance.

This case is part of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force) to stop the theft of intellectual property. Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation’s economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce.

12-074

Criminal Division

[taro8 806]

Can someone summarize this? Lots of words make my tiny brain go ouchie.

[Blackhawk 0]

If SOPA gets through, then the US Government are going to have to deal with A LOT of pissed off people. Obama can forget being re-elected.

[-martin- 10]

If SOPA gets through, then the US Government are going to have to deal with A LOT of pissed off people. Obama can forget being re-elected.

Heh, forget about Obama and elections, it doesn't matter who gets elected and who is in power (And it probably doesn’t matter that much to him if he gets re-elected or not). If SOPA gets through, the internet will never be the same again because taking down SOPA will be a very hard thing to do and America is the key player when it comes to the internet.

I don't know if any political parties in the US are promising to stop SOPA or to remove it if they get elected (because I don't live there) but take my advice and make sure that SOPA doesn't get through, because even if they get elected you can be damn sure they won't even think about SOPA.

Not to go off topic but in the UK, we were promised that tuition fees would not rise, but they did, and what is the opposition doing? Saying that they will lower the fees Guess what will happen after they get elected

So don't wait, sign any petition and do whatever you can before it’s too late even if you're not from the US, even if you don't like the US.

Edited January 20, 2012 by -Martin-

[STALKERGB 6]

SOPA

And anyway, didn't SOPA (initially at least) have bipartisan support in the US? So I dunno how big a difference it would make to an election campaign.

As for Megaupload, won't Kim Dotcom and the others arrested have to be put in front of a US judge (if they are extradited) to determine whether their arrest had just and probable cause seeing as it was an indictment? (based on my limited legal knowledge lol)

[ProfTournesol 956]

So a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia can dictate the whole world what it decided ? BTW they owe me 20 € for my premium account !

Edited January 20, 2012 by ProfTournesol

[rangerpl 13]

So a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia can dictate the whole world what it decided ? BTW they owe me 20 € for my premium account !

Well if that's where Megaupload was hosted, then yes, they can.

[maddogx 13]

Well if that's where Megaupload was hosted, then yes, they can.

Megaupload was based in Hong Kong.

[Nicholas 5]

This is from what I posted earlier:

Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.

Now if Megaupload would not have had servers in the U.S., the U.S. government would not have been able to do anything. I'm also sure that they have servers elsewhere that were not involved in the raid.

Edited January 20, 2012 by Nicholas

[walker 0]

Hi all

Once again innocent until proven guilty is ditched by US justice in favour of protecting big corporate dinosaurs.

The Megaupload site which is praised by Musical and other artists as freeing them from the clutches of the likes of Universal who miss used anti piracy provisions on YouTube to take down this advertising jingle by Artists supporting Megaupload:

o0Wvn-9BXVc

Shows the real purpose of this action and all the SOPA and PIPA legislation is about protectionism for the dinosaurs of the content industry preventing new market entrants from entering the market and allowing artists to take a control of their own content.

Only an artist who cannot do the math signs to the old labels who will take 95% of your earnings for a distribution model that is so out of date that it uses trucks to move data.

Kind regards walker

Edited January 20, 2012 by walker

[b0b 10]

First video: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom appears in court

nZPe97vZJXM

Hmm done for laundering money eh, odd how its one rule for one and different rules for government. U.S Gov weren't complaining when Miami and Florida was built on money from Cocaine trade. Comparing the two maybe off a little but it just p"s^%s me off when gov's do this, like they arnt as corrupt, taking the moral high ground., utter bollox.

Edited January 20, 2012 by b0b

[topas 1]

It's on indeed.

And not only in the US.

We are going to adopt ACTA next week. Our Ministry of Culture and Heritage and Ministry of Economy have yesterday informed that the (controversial) act it's due to be signed January 26th in Japan.

There was no public consultation on this matter and it's being clearly introduced through the back door, without any mainstream media even telling a word.

zJELoVd-OXE

Edited January 20, 2012 by topas

[dekster 1]

Hope the us government gets hacked big time.

[walker 0]

It's on indeed.

And not only in the US.

We are going to adopt ACTA next week. Our Ministry of Culture and Heritage and Ministry of Economy have yesterday informed that the (controversial) act it's due to be signed January 26th in Japan.

There was no public consultation on this matter and it's being clearly introduced through the back door, without any mainstream media even telling a word.

Hi all

In reply to topas.

The mainstream media are the ones this law is for. The internet frees the artists from their clutches they want it shut down. Hense their hatred of internet TV boxes Netflix and Google TV as well which they are not mentioning or are panning in review.

This is a battle about who controls the market for the media, the artists and film makers or the big corporate businesses who style themseles as the marketing term "producers" while the produce nothing they just tax those who do.

Kind regards walker

[topas 1]

big corporate businesses who style themseles as the marketing term "producers" while the produce nothing they just tax those who do.

+1

Kind regards

T.

[metalcraze 290]

What's more ridiculous is that dudes who post videos on YouTube with a copyright music don't get anything for this (like money) and in fact do a free advertising for that band.

I bet if stupid stuff like this passes - it is likely soon there will be a law to allow EA & Co to sue people for posting gameplay videos since they contain copyrighted content.

[vilas 473]

eh.... i can only say - i knew it :|

all freedom we had in world in past was thanx to 2 oposite big blocks

each block wanted to tease citizens "look they have worse, we are better, we can give you this and that, fight for us"

when there is no 2 blocks but one block, there is no need to tease anyone, now it is time to "obey and listen and shut up and work for us"

+1 to Topas and Walker

if they want fight piracy, let they pay us more money, let corporations have lower profits

it cannot be the way, that in my country monthly salary of average person is not enough to buy Photoshop

without eating anything i am able to buy 2 Windows copies

but it is not act against piracy

it will be used against quoting someone or against free media (which for example qoute other gazette saying "politician x told to y gazette that something"

and now you will not be able to quote it

later they will start fighting freeware, they will destroy freeware in future and you will only have to pay and pay to big companies, who will buy small companies and make prices twice bigger

Edited January 20, 2012 by vilas