Fresh on the heels of a lawsuit brought against Kim Dotcom by the MPAA film industry lobby, the Megaupload founder is now being sued by the music industry in an action his lawyers are calling “meritless.”
Despite being forced to shut down in January 2012 after Dotcom
was hit with copyright infringement charges, Megaupload is now
confronting new lawsuits from the powerful music and film
industries.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of the Recording Industry Association
of America (RIAA) makes copyright accusations against Dotcom, his
colleagues Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, and investor
Vestor Limited.
The lawsuit claims they "willfully engaged in, actively
encouraged, and handsomely profited from massive copyright
infringement of music" on Megaupload.
The lawsuit follows one filed by the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA) on Monday.
The lawsuits from both the music and film industry use the same
figure from the US Department of Justice's prosecution of Dotcom
in January 2012, which alleged that Megaupload had pulled in more
than $175 million by trafficking in copyrighted content.
According to the RIAA’s filing, Megaupload Limited played an
active role in ensuring that it had the most popular content on
its servers, that the URL links to those infringing content files
were widely disseminated on the Internet, and that the links were
advertised and promoted by pirate-linking sites, so that the
maximum number of Megaupload users would access the infringing
content," claims the RIAA's filing.
"It further exercised active control over the process of
providing that content by regulating the volume and speed of
transmissions to users who had not yet purchased 'premium'
subscriptions.”
I should have just invaded a country based on lies, launched a global financial crisis & spied on all of you. Cloud storage was a bad idea.
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 11, 2014
The plaintiff’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of music giants
Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music
Entertainment and Capitol Records. On Monday, the MPAA's lawsuit
named Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Paramount Pictures,
Universal, Colombia Pictures and Warner Bros.
The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) in 2011 branded
Megaupload as a “notorious market” in an official
government report, alleging that the site allowed for “the
unauthorized distribution of protected content through
subscriptions and reward schemes to popular uploaders.”
"When Megaupload.com was shut down in 2012 by US law
enforcement, it was by all estimates the largest and most active
infringing website targeting creative content in the world,"
said the MPAA's senior executive vice president and global
general counsel Steven Fabrizio, in a statement.
Dotcom is presently living in New Zealand where he is fighting
extradition to the United States to face criminal charges.
Top @MPAA lawyer on radio: "I would like to see Kim Dotcom go to jail for 40-50 years". No death sentence for cloud storage providers yet?
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 11, 2014
Dotcom's attorney Ira Rothken has choice words for the civil
lawsuits. "Our first response is that the RIAA, the MPAA, and
the DOJ are like three blind mice following each other in the
pursuit of meritless copyright claims," said Rothken, as
quoted by Reuters.
Rothken has based the defense of his client on the argument that
Megaupload was a legal cloud storage service.
"We believe that the claims against Megaupload are really an
assault by Hollywood on cloud storage in general as Megaupload
used copyright neutral technology and whatever allegations they
can make against Megaupload they can make against YouTube,
Dropbox and others," he added.
The MPAA has rejected those claims.
"Megaupload wasn’t a cloud storage service at all, it was an
unlawful hub for mass distribution," Fabrizio said.
"To be clear, if a user uploaded his term paper to store it,
he got nothing – and, in fact, unless he was a paying subscriber,
Megaupload would delete the paper if it was not downloaded
frequently enough. But if that same user uploaded a stolen
full-length film that was repeatedly infringed, he was paid for
his efforts," he said.
Meanwhile, amid the legal onslaught against him, Dotcom has
jumped into politics, launching the Internet Party, which is a
"movement for the freedom of the internet and technology, for
privacy and political reform," he told reporters last month.