I was just surfing net when the news hit me that the file sharing website megaupload.com is shut down and 7 from the staff have been arrested! Some of them are Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, and Kim Tim Jim Vesto.
The indictment is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States, according to the FBI. It accuses seven individuals and two corporations — Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited — of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday, says that at one point Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.
The indictment comes the day after a 24-hour “blackout” of Wikipedia, a protest doodle on the homepage of Google, and numerous other protests across the Internet against proposed anti-piracy legislation that many leading websites — including Reddit, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others — contend will make it challenging if not impossible for them to operate.
The Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are bills backed by the motion picture and recording industries intended to eliminate theft online once and for all. S. 968 and H.R. 3261 would require ISPs to block access to foreign websites that infringe on copyrights.
- http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/19/feds-shut-down-file-sharing-website/#ixzz1jwKnBmqM
- http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-shut-down-120119/
