what happens if SOPA passes?

jonathan lamy of the RIAA misspells "blackout" as "blackrout" which makes me think that he talks like scooby doo

putting aside entirely the ethics of either anonymous attacking fbi.gov or the fbi shutting down megaupload... it's pretty exciting to watch!

Thanks for the background Contenderizer

Holy shit @ Schwantz link tbh

warner music group? come on down

Low Orbit Ion Cannon
just wanted to say that.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

thanks for this post, Le Bateau Ivre. yeah there was enough in here to take them down for sure.

Other messages appear to indicate that employees knew how important copyrighted content was to their business. Content owners had a specific number of takedown requests they could make each day; in 2009, for instance, Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase, one employee suggested that "we can afford to be cooperative at current growth levels"— implying that if growth had not been so robust, takedowns should be limited. Kim Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon
just wanted to say that.

― Porto for Pyros (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Thursday, January 19, 2012 4:25 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sure sounds cooler than "ping"

it was also alleged they used the abuse tool to take down a bunch of links they had no ownership of whatsoever.

abused the abuse tool

Aaaaaand fbi.gov is down

wow

works fine for me

hah well the homepage loaded but that's it.

horrible website btw

i stopped using megavideo cuz they took down lynx so quick

curious to see how the obama administration feels compelled to respond to this on monday, can't help but feel that by anonymous being anonymous they've shit the bed and we're gonna have a WAR ON INTERNET TERROR or some other such nonsense

i didn't know about the swizz beatz connection! curiouser and curiouser.

rumor is that's just a distraction while 'just blaze' is hacking drones

a friend of mine just approvingly posted this on facebook

http://maddox.xmission.com/

ugggghhhh

vlad of global revolution made the same argument in a roundtable i was in the other night, we were all kinda caught off guard, but its fits a certain line of thinking--'anything that makes things worse is a step towards sheeple waking up and revolting'

radical nihilism

shitting on the subway = revolution

yeah, but what's pathetic about that site is that it only shifts to the radical nihilism thing after they previously made the argument that nothing matters and it's not worth raising a fuss about SOPA in the first place and it's never going to pass and UDPATE: ok it passed but it had failed then the world would realize that...

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.

this is pretty damning tbh

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.

This is technically grey to me. One of the things file sharing and storage sites do is de-duplicate files. Eg, if you and I both upload an identical file, instead of storing two copies they store one and point us both at it. Dropbox does this, it's not uncommon.

So if someone gets a takedown notice on a copyrighted file being shared via a service like this -- should that file be disabled for everyone using the service? What if I am the rights holder and I have the file in my dropbox, and Joe McPirate has the same file in his. Does the takedown notice for McPirate mean *my* legitimate "copy" of the file also must be deleted?

The forfeiture bit at the end of the Megaupload indictment is amazing...

You will pay us $175m AND we'll seize the following 60 bank accounts AND we'll have yr Rolls, Maserati, Mercs, Harley, 108" TVs, £17k Sony camcorders and accumulated works of art, ta.

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...the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function

This doesn't seem too dodgy to me. On the other hand it seems like there's easily enough evidence of them knowing about specific content and doing nothing about it that this probably doesn't matter.

The leaked list of cars seized was insane. Like, some 1 of 300-made Lamborghini SUV or some shit like that, among 20 crazy cars.

wait, they aren't gonna take the lotus are they? NOT THE LOTUS!!!!

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/tamarawarren/files/2011/12/swizz-beatz-lotus-1.jpg

"The conspirators"
Is it true that an affidavit can use any designation for the accused parties? i.e. "The pirates", "Those clowns"

Check out the plates on those cars.

Who broke rateyourmusic? The FBI or Anonymous?

xpost, Yeah, one plate was "GOD."

okay, i post the lotus picture and now i find out that swizz was the "VP of creative design and global marketing" at Lotus!?? curiouser and curiouser...

he gets the blame for everything he does

never before occurred to me, but if you're a manufacturer of super high-end luxury or sports cars, yeah, you might want people with ties to hip hop in your marketing department

SOPA now postponed fully in House, PIPA vote cancelled in Senate.

Chris Dodd sounding all conciliatory all of a sudden. Barely but even so.

"Megaupload.com employees Bram van der Kolk, also known as Bramos, left, Finn Batato,second from left, Mathias Ortmann and founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer of Megaupload.com Kim Dotcom (also known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor), right, appear in North Shore District Court in Auckland, New Zealand, Friday, Jan. 20, 2012. The four appeared in court in relation to arrests made to Megaupload.com, which is linked to a U.S. investigation into international copyright infringement and money laundering."

coincidentally, i went to high school with a Kim Tim Jim Vestor!

NYT:

The police arrived at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland on Friday morning in two helicopters. Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun.

lol they really have to type "Mr. Dotcom"

None of the arrested were native NZers, it seems-- all finnish/german/dutch...

Dude was in his panic room with a sawed-off.

does anyone know what happened to the Oink webmaster?

he was found not guilty of all charges

is this where i post to get an oink invite

Dude was in his panic room with a sawed-off.

― Axolotl with an Atlatl (Jon Lewis), Friday, January 20, 2012 4:07 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

for real wtf is this life he is leading

Hiding in your panic room with a sawed off shotgun doesn't set you up very well for a "we didn't know anything we did was illegal" defense imho.

that is hella hip hop tho

is he related to Dot Com from 30 rock

Well, in his defense, if you have a safe room, a) damn well everything in there will be "close by," whether a shotgun or can of beans and b) if you're going to bother with a safe room, you damn well likely will have a gun in there, too.

This is all weird, though. These alleged ancillary perps were holed up in a New Zealand mansion, up to no good in relation to an American file serving site run by a famous hip-hop producer?

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly0482FW9K1qiphs4o1_500.jpg