Department of Justice takedown of MegaUpload provokes Anonymous reprisal

One day a number of sites "blacked themselves out" in SOPA / PIPA protests around the Internet, the Department of Justice did what critics of the proposed legislation (SOPA in the House, PIPA in the Senate) have said they already could do: use existing law to take down a site that has been accused of facilitating piracy.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an indictment against MegaUpload.com. That indictment accuses Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The DOJ said that at least part of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which it says gave it jurisdiction over the site.

That site is based in Hong Kong, and is a site where anyone can upload files of any type. Once that's done, they are given a link that they can provide to others. MegaUpload generates revenue through memberships that allow faster access and unlimited transfers. Basic downloading is free, but there are restrictions that can "annoy" downloaders into memberships.

The site boasted it had 50 million daily users. As of the current time, it has none, as it is currently "off the Web."

There is a safe harbor clause to the DMCA that protects websites against infringing content that is uploaded by its end users. It was that clause that protected YouTube from Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against the now-Google-owned site.

However, the Department of Justice says that MegaUpload was well aware that many of its users uploaded infringing material. The government says it has numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of all the copyrighted material on the site and even shared the material with each other. According to the DOJ's statement on the indictment, Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other MegaUpload employees have been arrested, as of Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Three other defendants are still at large.

Prior to MegaUpload going down, the site carried a statement. In part, it said, "The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch." It's true that MegaUpload does have legitimate uses. In fact, a look around Twitter shows tons of end users angry because their legitimate files are now inaccessible.

Even BitTorrent, the popular P2P transfer protocol, has legitimate uses. What percentage is legal and what percentage is pirated is the big question, for either of those services.

While MegaUpload has been knocked off the Web, so was --- at least for a time --- the Department of Justice. Loosely tied together hacker group Anonymous targeted several sites in reprisal, including the DOJ's. The DOJ's website is now accessible, at the time of this writing, but it was down or loading slowly on Thursday. Other "revenge targets" of Anonymous have been .the RIAA, the MPAA and Universal Music Group, all huge critics of MegaUpload.

The arrests came one day after "SOPA / PIPA Blackout Day." Among the sites that "blacked themselves out" on Wednesday in a coordinated protest against SOPA and PIPA were Reddit, Craigslist, Google, and Wikipedia. Wikipedia said it "wasn't done." Neither, most likely, is Anonymous.

Image Source: Anonymous Postings Around the Web

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