Anonymous Takes Down DOJ, RIAA, MPA and Universal Music

First time accepted submitter EW87 writes "Shortly after a federal raid today brought down the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers aligned with the online collective Anonymous have shut down sites for the Department of Justice, Universal Music Group and the RIAA. 'It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,' Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon."

*slow clap*

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done idiotic reactionaries, you've played right into the puppetmasters trap.

Yesterday people took notice of a real issue that had both politicians and Big Media scrambling for damage control.

Big Media responds with a very calculated move to bring down a notorious hive of actual crime, it's like setting the bait for the trap.

Guess what will be talked about in the media for days now?

Guess how your CongressButts will vote when they sense danger?

GREAT JORB

Re:wow

[John Courtland]

If there's a constant in this whole shitstorm mess it's that the clear winners are the lawyers.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

MegaUpload has a few legitimate uses, but from what I can see the piracy on the site far outweighs any legitimate uploads. Any legitimate uses seem like a way of pointing and saying, "See! Not everything on our site is pirated."

If they respond in a reasonable time frame to take down requests, and ban users, and maybe even the IPs of the users who continually upload infringing material, then it probably shouldn't matter, they're complying with a reasonable set of laws.

If they're slow about taking down infringing content, and don't bother banning users who continually upload said content, then it's probably legitimate that the site got taken down. Further, it seems like rather than a DNS block and cutting off their money, the FBI worked with the judicial system of the country MegaUpload resides in.

I'm not privy to the details of the case - like how quickly they responded to take down notices - but it at least seems like this is going through legitimate channels to track down 'rogue' sites.

Re:Not Anonymous..

[Shikaku]

Link warning: opening this will max your internet connection to load certain websites from the title, so don't open it unless that is your intention.

Re:wow

[Dan541]

and still Anonymous achieves nothing for their effort.

Re:That'll showem

[Mad Leper]

".. They were compliant with the DMCA, from what I understand.."

Apparently not, try ars technica for what these scum were really up to

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

Re:That'll showem

[fishbowl]

"What law was MegaUpload breaking?"

The indictment is quite specific, and not a difficult read. I wonder how many of the people who are already in full protest mode have read it?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204616504577171180266957116.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories [wsj.com]

Re:wow

[Culture20]

no-one chose to pay the MPAA for their services.

Sony did.

Re:Wow. They did dare!

[AngryDeuce]

Yup. The Kids For Cash Scandal. [wikipedia.org] You want to read about something fucking disgusting, read about that. If a judge can be corrupted like that, how could our legislature not be corrupt? They're getting millions of dollars a year from people like that...

The facts in this case have been misreported

[pauldmartin]

While I'm no fan of wide-scale takedowns like these, and I really hate to take a stance against megaupload since I was on their side just an hour ago, the facts in this case have been rather egregiously misreported. If you read the complaints, past the initial section you see several situations in which the staff of megaupload clearly acted in an illegal manner. The report cites several directly quoted examples of internal knowledge of criminal infringement going on, pirated links being swapped around amongst employees and friends, and other willful infringement. Megaupload also intentionally constructed its top 100 list with only non-infringing downloads when it had direct knowledge that the top 100 files were actually mostly links to pirated content. Perhaps most damningly though, the DMCA takedown report page actually only took down the reported link, NOT the content itself or any other links to the content. In addition, the megaupload site operators had databases of hashes for known child pornography and terrorist training videos. If an uploaded video hashed to the same value as anything on this list, the site rejected it. It had no equivalent database for known or reported copyrighted works. I know I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I do think the facts of this case should be reported accurately, anything but the truth is intellectually dishonest. Here is a link to a gizmodo article with the legal complaint directly embedded for your perusal. Note that the information in this report came as a result of searchs performed with a warrant over the past two years. On the flip-side, this case is an excellent example of why SOPA and PIPA are totally unnecessary--obviously the laws weren't (and aren't) needed to prosecute copyright infringement.