TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Lonely ISP Wants Other Providers To Disconnect Pirates
- Kim Dotcom: The US Government is Wrong, Here’s Why
- Entertainment Industry Was Eager to Work With Megaupload
- Kim Dotcom: US Military Had 15,634 Megaupload Accounts
| Lonely ISP Wants Other Providers To Disconnect Pirates Posted: 27 Mar 2012 01:31 AM PDT
The so-called Big Four labels – EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner – wanted the ISP to install proactive filtering technology aimed at stopping unauthorized file-sharing among Eircom’s customers. Eircom refused, IRMA sued, and the case ended up in court – but not for very long. At the 11th hour in February 2009 the companies came to an agreement which would see Eircom introduce a graduated response system for dealing with errant subscribers. However, Eircom needed something in return. The agreement had left Eircom in the unenviable position of being the only ISP in Ireland with an official policy of disconnecting customers on the mere allegations of the music industry. But the first recording industry target, ISP UPC, refused to play ball and after being sued it eventually won its case. While the labels did ‘reward’ Eircom’s compliance with the MusicHub service, the product has been labeled lacklaster and when PaidContent asked how many users the service had, Eircom refused to tell them. So with Eircom now at a commercial disadvantage and no immediate sign that the industry will force any other ISP to implement 3 strikes, the ISP is being left to go it alone. In making the best out of a bad situation it’s now describing what it is doing as an “obligation”. “Eircom is of the view that these obligations are part of a role that all responsible companies must serve,” Eircom's consumer managing director Stephen Beynon said. Eircom insist that they want to respect their customers’ right to privacy but from fighting IRMA in 2008/9, they now believe that other ISPs should do as they have done, and do a deal with the recording group. “We think that it would be better for everyone if the industry and the rights-holders found a way to tackle this problem. It's not going to go away. The current situation is not ideal but we could create something that moved the issue forward if we worked together,” Beynon added. Or in other words, the water’s great, come on in. Beynon says that Eircom believes it has an obligation to uphold the law when illegal activity is brought to its attention but it’s taking the word of a private P2P tracking company as final and there is no judicial oversight, something that causes controversy in every jurisdiction it’s suggested. It’s interesting to note that if Eircom had held its ground back in 2008 when it was sued by the labels to proactively filter subscriber upload data, by now it would have heard Europe’s highest court dismiss what they were being asked to do as illegal. Had they known that in 2009, would they have felt so compelled to do the 3 strikes deal? Source: Lonely ISP Wants Other Providers To Disconnect Pirates
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| Kim Dotcom: The US Government is Wrong, Here’s Why Posted: 26 Mar 2012 05:17 AM PDT
The Megaupload founder is convinced of his innocence, and instead of letting fear or anger get to him, he is excited. Deep into the night, Dotcom digs through heaps of paperwork, collecting evidence that shows how he was framed by the US Government. Talking to TorrentFreak by phone, he gives example after example of why he thinks the indictment twists the truth. While Megaupload’s lawyers are still working on the first motion in response to the indictment, he agreed to exclusively share the first details with us. Stealing from 50 Cent?One of the claims of the US Government is that Kim Dotcom personally shared copyrighted files on Megaupload, so-called ‘direct infringement’. He supposedly shared a link to a 50 Cent song, but the indictment fails to include the necessary context. “A link distributed on December 3, 2006 by defendant DOTCOM links to a musical recording by U.S. recording artist ’50 Cent’. A single click on the link accesses a Megaupload.com download page that allows any Internet user to download a copy of the file from a computer server that is controlled by the Mega Conspiracy,” the indictment reads. Dotcom told TorrentFreak that the file in question wasn’t infringing at all. He explained that he actually bought that song legally, and that he uploaded the file in private to test a new upload feature. He quickly picked a random file from his computer, which turned out to be this song. “The link to the song was sent using the private link-email-feature of Megaupload to our CTO with the file description ‘test’. I was merely testing the new upload feature,” Dotcom said. “The URL to this song had zero downloads. This was a ‘private link’ and it has never been published,” he added. Aside from the above, Dotcom told us that the US may not even have jurisdiction over the issue. The song was uploaded from a Philippine IP-address to a European server. Also, since the upload occurred in 2006, the statute of limitations renders the evidence unusable. Dotcom further said that the Louis Armstrong song mentioned in the indictment wasn’t an infringement either. “I also bought the Louis Armstrong song that was sent to me by a co-defendant via the private link-email-feature of Megaupload. According to the Department of Justice I am an infringer, and this is all they got? One song?” Warner’s Mass DeletionsIn addition to direct infringements, the indictment also suggests that Mega was actively preventing copyright holders from taking down content. An example given in the indictment is that Warner Bros. at one point was unable to delete content through the abuse tool, because they had hit the limit. Warner Bros. contacted Megaupload about the issue, and an email quoted in the indictment shows that Dotcom refused to raise the limit above 5,000 deleted per day. However, according to Dotcom this version of the truth leaves out some crucial facts. “First of all, Mega’s direct delete feature was provided to content owners voluntary and was not a legal requirement,” Dotcom says. But there is more. “The indictment contained an email in which I suggested to provide Warner Bros. with a limited number of deletes per day. In fact, days later Warner Bros. got the maximum quota of 100,000 deletes per day.” With the limit of 100,000 links per day Warner Bros was certainly not limited anymore. This is also apparent from takedown statistics provided to TorrentFreak. In total they show that Warner removed 1,933,882 links from Mega sites, making it by far the largest deleter of all copyright holders. To provide some context, Disney removed 127,934 links in total, the RIAA removed 17,108 links, Sony removed just 3,003 links in total and the BBC was least bothered with just 132 removals. Google to the RescueAnother controversial part in the indictment is that Mega should not be eligible for DMCA safe harbor protection because it only removed links, and not the actual files. The indictment describes this issue as follows. “During the course of the Conspiracy, the Mega Conspiracy has received many millions of requests to remove infringing copies of copyrighted works and yet the Conspiracy has, at best, only deleted the particular URL of which the copyright holder complained, and purposefully left the actual infringing copy of the copyrighted work on the Mega Conspiracy-controlled server and any other access links completely intact.” The indictment suggests that not removing the actual file is wrong, but as Google pointed out in the Hotfile lawsuit recently, this is exactly what a content provider is supposed to do under the DMCA. Removing the actual file is not standard procedure at all, and could lead to all sorts of problems. The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg. According to Dotcom he can refute pretty much each and every claim in the indictment. Also, Dotcom can do much more than that, and he was willing to share more details with us that shows how Megaupload and Megavideo were not the big bad pirate sites the indictment claims they are. Big Content & US Soldiers Loved MegaMegaupload’s founder shared five emails with TorrentFreak that were sent by representatives from big media companies including Disney, Warner Bros. and Fox. Instead of requesting Mega to take down content, they suggested various partnerships.
More details on these partnership emails are published in a separate article here. And then there’s the issue of the millions of site users that didn’t use it as a pirate haven. US Government workers had many accounts at Megaupload, as did those at MPAA member companies and those employed by the US Military. Many of these users paid for a premium account and uploaded a variety of content. Talking to TorrentFreak, Kim Dotcom suggested that of the 15,634 soldiers that used Megaupload, many were probably using it to share pictures and videos with their loved ones at home. More details on the government, MPAA and military users are published in a separate article here. A Political Scandal?Having digested the above, it does indeed seem that the US indictment doesn’t tell the whole story, or that it’s one-sided to say the least. This begs the question of why Mega was so aggressively targeted. What we do know is that the copyright lobby, headed by the MPAA, has been one of the main facilitators of the criminal investigation. It’s also not a secret that the MPAA and other lobby groups hire former high ranked Government officials and vice versa. The current head of the MPAA for example is former Senator Chris Dodd, and in recent months alone the MPAA also hired former employees from the Justice Department, the White House staff and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Needless to say, the movie industry group is well-connected in Washington. On the other hand we see that Neil MacBride, the U.S attorney who filed the Mega indictment, has connections to the copyright lobby as well. In fact, he served as the Vice President for Anti-Piracy and General Counsel of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), MPAA’s software counterpart. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the Mega investigation was somewhat of a ‘gift’ to Hollywood, a theory which Megaupload’s founder subscribes to. “Mega has become a re-election pawn in the White House / MPAA affair. If I was a Republican presidential candidate I would investigate this,” Dotcom says. However, this gift isn’t as free as it may seem. Dotcom says that the witch hunt against his company is putting the US technology sector at a disadvantage. "The MPAA / White House corruption has weakened US technology leadership. Internet businesses, hosting, cloud, payment processors, ad networks, etc. are going to avoid the US," Dotcom told TorrentFreak. "There is an opportunity for liberal countries to welcome those businesses with better laws," he predicts. "The loss of IT business & jobs in the US will substantially outweigh the inflated losses claimed by the MPAA & their billionaire club." For now, however, Dotcom is mainly concerned with taking the criminal indictment apart. He is confident that he and his legal team will succeed in this and promises fireworks when the complete motion is published. “We did nothing wrong. Watch out for our first motion in response to the MPAA-sponsored Department of Justice indictment. It will be enlightening and maybe entertaining," Dotcom concludes. Source: Kim Dotcom: The US Government is Wrong, Here’s Why
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| Entertainment Industry Was Eager to Work With Megaupload Posted: 26 Mar 2012 05:16 AM PDT
As statements go, they don’t get much more harsh than that, so one might think that hostilities between Megaupload and the member companies of the MPAA are a long-standing thing. But as we know, despite all the rhetoric the likes of the usually-aggressive Disney never sued the Hong Kong based file-hosting service, and instead opted to let the FBI do their work for them. While this government-financed approach will have proven substantially cheaper than dragging Megaupload through civil court, some potentially embarrassing things would have inevitably come out in such a case – such as this selection of emails just obtained by TorrentFreak. In an eyebrow-raising email penned by Disney attorney Gregg Pendola, the counsel contacts Megaupload not to threaten or sue the company, but to set up a deal to have Disney content posted on the Megavideo site. Subject: Posting on Megavideo.com My name is Gregg Pendola. I am Executive Counsel for The Walt Disney Company. Certain properties of The Walt Disney Company have content that they would like to post on your site. However, we are uncomfortable with a couple of the provisions of your Terms of Use that we feel may jeopardize our rights in our content. We were hoping that you would be amenable to reviewing a 1-page agreement we have drafted that we would like to use in place of your Terms of Use. Is there someone I can contact to discuss this? Or someone I can email the Agreement to for review? Thanks. Gregg Gregg Pendola In another email, Shelina Sayani, Digital Marketing Coordinator for Warner Bros, offers a deal to syndicate “exciting” Warner content to Megaupload’s Megavideo site. Subject: Warner Bros. – Looking for Content Manager Dear Megavideo, I’m writing from Warner Bros., offering opportunities to syndicate our exciting entertainment content (e.g. Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Sex and the City clips and trailer) for your users. Could you please pass on my information to the appropriate content manager or forward me to them? Thanks so much for your time. Shelina Sayani In a later email, Joshua Carver from Warner’s Advanced Digital Services department made inquiries as to how the company could save time by using RSS “to upload our content all at once.” Subject: Media RSS Feed from Warner Brothers Hello Megavideo, My name is Joshua from the Warner Bros. Advanced Digital Services department. Thank you for your time and funny content, Joshua D. Carver Jonathan Karron, Director of Marketing at Turner Broadcasting System, contacted Megaupload suggesting a partnership to “promote some of Turner’s great properties” and “original programming.” Subject: Promotion of Turner Broadcasting videos on Megavideo Hi My name is Jonathan Karron and I oversee digital marketing for tbs.com, TNT.tv and TCM.com. I’d like to talk to someone in editorial/marketing about your site and how we might be able to work together to promote some of Turner’s great properties and lineup of on Megavideo. I’ve attached some basic information on our websites for your review. I’m unable to find any contact info you your site so can someone please email me or call me at the # below to start the conversation? Best, For Fox, the interest in Megaupload wasn’t necessarily aimed at spreading studio content, but to utilize Megaupload’s considerable reach by setting up an advertising deal. In this email former Senior Director Matt Barash touts FAN, the Fox Audience Network. Subject: Fox Ad Partnership I’m reaching out to see if you have a few minutes to discuss the recently launched Fox Audience Network. FAN is now up and running and fully operational, utilizing best of breed optimization technology to bring cutting edge relevancy to the ad network landscape. Please let me know if you have some time to chat this week about how we can work together to better monetize your inventory. Best, Matt Barash So as we can see, as recently as November 2010 member companies of the MPAA were making contact with Megaupload and trying to do business with the company. According to the authorities the investigation into Megaupload took two years, meaning that these contacts and the start of a criminal investigation could have been just weeks apart. More on Kim Dotcom’s response to the US indictment is published in our feature article. Source: Entertainment Industry Was Eager to Work With Megaupload
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| Kim Dotcom: US Military Had 15,634 Megaupload Accounts Posted: 26 Mar 2012 05:16 AM PDT
While the MPAA and RIAA insist that the site was simply a huge piracy hub, the facts point to a much bigger picture of people using the site for countless legitimate transfers of files simply too big to email. As mentioned earlier this month, Megaupload’s legal team is working hard to reunite site users with their data, an aim also shared by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with their MegaRetrieval campaign. As part of this process, Megaupload discovered that a large number of Mega accounts are held by US government officials. Today, thanks to fresh information provided to TorrentFreak by Kim Dotcom, we can reveal more details. From domains including dhs.gov, doe.gov, fbi.gov, hhs.gov, nasa.gov, senate.gov, treas.gov and uscourts.gov, the number of accounts held at Megaupload total 1058. Of these, 344 users went the extra mile and paid for premium access. Between them they uploaded 15,242 files – a total of 1,851,791 MB. While a couple of million megabytes of lost data is bad enough, another group – the ladies and gentlemen of the US Military – stands to lose much, much more. From domains including af.mil, army.mil, centcom.mil, navy.mil and osd.mil etc, a total of 15,634 are registered with Megaupload. Of these an impressive 10,223 people paid to upgrade to a premium Megaupload account and between them they uploaded 340,983 files – a total of 96,507,779 MB. There is no suggestion that any of these military operatives or government employees were using Megaupload for infringing uses but it is almost guaranteed that documents, photographs and videos are now at serious risk of deletion. More on Kim Dotcom's response to the US indictment is published in our feature article. Source: Kim Dotcom: US Military Had 15,634 Megaupload Accounts
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In 2008, the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) took legal action against Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP.
For a man who’s the main defendant in one of the biggest criminal cases ever brought in the US, Kim Dotcom is surprisingly composed.
Warner Bros., for example, asked Megavideo if they could provide a tool to automatically upload content from the movie studio. “We would like to upload our content all at once instead of one video at a time,” Warner’s Joshua Carver wrote.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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