• • • • • • Legitimate file-sharing sites could face prosecution, say experts, as the shockwaves from the shutting down of Megaupload.com fan out. Last Thursday the founder of the site, Kim Dotcom, was arrested and charged with internet piracy and money laundering. Now other established file-sharing sites such as Amazon, Dropbox, MediaFire, YouSendIt, Rapidshare, Box.net and FileSonic could find themselves under the spotlight of the law, with the latter already cancelling its file-sharing services. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO. Share Meanwhile Mike Masnick, editor of the Techdirt blog, said: ‘There's a real worry that [the Megaupload case] creates chilling effects for lots of legitimate services who do things like de-duplification, or have legitimate backup services. If you're running Amazon S3 or Dropbox, do you now suddenly change how you do business, just to avoid the possibility of being accused of racketeering and criminal copyright infringement? That's worrisome.’ Last Thursday police swooped on convicted fraudster Kim Dotcom’s £16million home outside Auckland by helicopter, with officers having to cut their way in to arrest him after he retreated into a fortified safe room.
Dotcom, 37 – nicknamed Dr Evil – has Finnish and German citizenship. He and six of his employees face charges by U.S. Prosecutors in what they say is one of the biggest criminal copyright theft cases ever brought. Impact: This graph shows how the shutdown of Megaupload caused a noticeable drop in global internet traffic MegaUpload, which the U.S. Government shut down on Thursday, is a Hong Kong-based ‘cyberlocker’ service that allows users to download pirated films, TV shows, music and e-books with just a few clicks. It is accused of costing copyright owners £322million in lost earnings and of making £113million by selling advertising and premium subscriptions.
A neighbour of Dotcom's told the New Zealand Herald she heard a helicopter circling the property at about 6.30am. 'I thought it was his private helicopter, which is parked up behind the trees, and I thought he was going out for breakfast, as he sometimes does,' said the neighbour, whose name was not given. 'I thought 'this is going on a bit long' and it was a bit annoying at that time of the morning and so I got up and realised it was a police helicopter. 'It was there for about an hour and then my friend texted me that a lot of cops had arrived.'
Police said that in total officers served 10 search warrants at businesses and homes related to Dotcom around the city of Auckland. Police spokesman Grant Ogilvie confirmed that the seized cars included a Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe worth more than $400,000 as well as several Mercedes. Two short-barreled shotguns and a number of valuable artworks were also confiscated, he added. Hawk Reporter Pro Software. Along with the assets, Police seized more than $8million invested in New Zealand financial institutions, which has now been placed in a trust pending the outcome of the cases. Confiscated: Others cars including a collection of Mercedes vehicles were removed from the Schmitz's home Although music stars such as Kanye West and Alicia Keys have supported MegaUpload, film and record companies say the seven-year-old file-sharing site is making a fortune off their work without paying them a penny. Hollywood film companies have been the main victims of piracy.
Jan 23, 2012. File-sharing sites such as Amazon, Dropbox, MediaFire, YouSendIt, Rapidshare, Box.net and FileSonic could find themselves under the spotlight of the law. The website allowed users to download films, TV shows, games, music and other content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to. Torrentz will always love you. © 2003-2016 Torrentz.
The seven accused MegaUpload executives – including two other Germans and a Dutchman also seized in New Zealand – are each charged with five counts of racketeering, copyright infringement and conspiracy, and could be jailed for up to 20 years. The 'Distributed Denial of Service' attacks rely on thousands of PCs sending information to sites at once to crash them.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at computer security company Sophos, said: 'In the past, Anonymous has encouraged supporters to install a program called LOIC, which allows computers to join in an attack on a particular website, blasting it with unwanted traffic. 'This change in tactic from Anonymous, which allows attacks to be launched by simply clicking on a link, means that internet users need to be extremely careful when clicking on unknown URLs or they could unwittingly be joining this latest zombie army.' 'Don't forget, denial-of-service-attacks are illegal,' Mr Cluley continued. 'If you participate in such an attack, you could find yourself receiving a lengthy jail sentence.
'I'm not sure if participants in this instance would get away with claiming that they innocently clicked on links by mistake, so make sure you always trust the links you click on, even if they're shared by a friend on social networking sites.' Internet hackers from the group Anonymous hit back by attacking the websites of the U.S.
Justice Department, the FBI and music companies such as Universal. They used a technique called ‘distributed denial of service’ that in effect shuts down sites by overloading them with web traffic. Detective Inspector Grant Wormald said that after police arrived at Dotcom’s home in two helicopters early yesterday, he ‘activated a number of electronic locking mechanisms... Then further barricaded himself into a safe room within the house which officers had to cut their way into’. He added: ‘It was not as simple as knocking at the front door.’ Dotcom has previous convictions for credit card fraud, computer hacking and insider trading. There were reports that an Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account had boasted of the success of the attacks, but the profile had been removed by the time MailOnline checked today. A statement posted on document sharing site Pastebin.com purportedly by Anonymous claimed responsibility fot the attacks in retaliation for the Megaupload indictment.
It said: 'We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites. 'The FBI didn't think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us.' The statement also included home addresses and phone numbers for the MPAA chief executive, Chris Dodd, and details of the organisation's corporate offices. Megaupload hosted large files and was often used to store mp3 music and digital video files, but claims most of its users used it as a legitimate file storage service.
Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the site was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were ‘grotesquely overblown’. 'The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay.' The statement said.
'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.' Megaupload is considered a 'cyberlocker', in which users can upload and transfer files that are too large to send by email. Such sites can have perfectly legitimate uses. But the MPAA, which has campaigned for a crackdown on piracy, alleged that the vast majority of content being shared on Megaupload was in violation of copyright laws.
The website allowed users to download films, TV shows, games, music and other content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to people who wanted access to faster download speeds or extra content. The website also sold advertising.
Several sister sites were also shut down, including one dedicated to sharing pornography files. Taken down: The Megaupload.com homepage boasted the endorsement of a string of high-profile celebrities News of the indictment came just one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest at two congressional proposals intended to thwart online piracy. The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act - bills designed to crack down on sales of pirated U.S. Products overseas - have pitted internet giants, consumer groups and freedom of speech advocates against film studios and record labels. Even search giant Google joined the protest, albeit in a less extreme manner, with a black rectangle slapped across the logo on its home page. But the search engine's involvement immediately drew accusations of hypocrisy, as online activists pointed out that it routinely blacklisted legitimate websites from its news aggregator and followed government orders to remove material from its search results and YouTube.
One such example was YouTube’s compliance with a request from the UK government to censor footage of a protest, during activists attempted to civilly arrest a judge. Another example was the taking down of footage released by Wikileaks taken from an Apache helicopter showing the pilots killing two Reuters photographers in Iraq. As the indictment was issued against Megaupload on Thursday all four remaining contenders seeking the Republican presidential nomination condemned proposed new anti-piracy laws Critics say the proposed legislation is too aggressive and earlier this week several major web services, including Wikipedia and Craigslist, blacked out their sites in protest Mitt Romney said the law is 'far too intrusive' and too broad. He warned that if the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) becomes law, it could stop job creation and hurt the economy. Newt Gingrich said the law pre-emptively censors the Internet on behalf of corporations.
He said that patents and copyrights already exist to protect creators' rights and that, if someone is stealing, then the owners should sue under existing laws. Rick Santorum said he doesn't like the law but added that the Internet is not somewhere 'where anyone can do anything they want.' And Ron Paul said the bill threatens freedom. According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the Internet. Current estimates by companies that monitor Web traffic place it in the top 100. The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing.
For instance, users received cash bonuses if they uploaded content popular enough to generate massive numbers of downloads, according to the indictment. Such content was almost always copyright protected, the indictment said. The DoJ said it was illegal for anyone to download pirated content, but their investigation focused on the leaders of the company, not end users who may have downloaded a few movies for personal viewing. Although Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, the size of its operation in the southern Chinese city was unclear. The administrative contact listed in its domain registration, Bonnie Lam, did not respond immediately for a request for comment sent to a fax number and email address listed. Regarding the retaliatory cyber-attacks, the DoJ told AP it was investigating the 'significant increase in activity' that disrupted its website yesterday. It said in a statement that it was working to 'investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause.'
A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement that the group's site also had been hacked. 'The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech,' the spokesman said. Applied Acoustics Chromaphone Keygen Free. 'We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals.'
In economics, physical capital or just capital is a factor of production (or input into the process of production), consisting of machinery, buildings, computers, and the like. The production function takes the general form Y=f(K, L), where Y is the amount of output produced, K is the amount of capital stock used and L is the amount of labor used. In economic theory, physical capital is one of the three primary factors of production, also known as inputs in the production function.
The others are natural resources (including land), and labor — the stock of competences embodied in the labor force. 'Physical' is used to distinguish physical capital from human capital (a result of investment in the human agent)), circulating capital, and financial capital.[1][2] 'Physical capital' is fixed capital, any kind of real physical asset that is not used up in the production of a product. Usually the value of land is not included in physical capital as it is not a reproducible product of human activity.