post Tuesday April 8, 2014
Megaupload.com has always billed itself as a private data storage provider which let people download and upload copyrighted content for free on its site. The company of Kim Dotcom faces trial in court filed by big movie studios, such as Disney Enterprises Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
The movie studios accuse Megaupload.com of copyright infringement and theft on a massive scale. In January 2012, Dotcom was already accused of copyright infringement and money laundering, generating the so-called Mega Conspiracy over $175 million.
The senior executive vice president, Steven Fabrizio, of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said Megaupload.com had a business model that encouraged theft and meanwhile only made the owners very rich. When Megaupload.com shut down in 2012, it was the largest copyright infringing website in the world.
Kim Dotcom responded to the lawsuit with a tweet saying that the MPAA is repeating claims that are bogus. He referred to the number one rule of his policy, ‘no copyright infringement’. The attorney of Dotcom even says that the lawsuit is a worthless copy of issues raised in the case of 2012.
The movie studios also condemn the ‘Uploader Rewards’ program on the site. This program encouraged people to upload mostly entertainment content onto the library of the site. Based on the amount of people watching your uploaded content, you earned money. This way the site became very popular for uploaders and downloaders as well.
Megaupload.com itself earned money by offering paid subscriptions to users which enabled them to download faster and by selling advertisements on the very popular website.
Besides Kim Dotcom, there were two other individual suspects, Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortman. Both were the technological brain behind Megaupload.com and co-owners.
The judge already ruled that the search warrant used to search his house in New-Zealand in 2012 was valid. So far, it does not look good for Kim Dotcom and Megaupload.com.
Source: businessweek
Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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