Government Makes Strike Against Megaupload File-Sharing Network

Wednesday, the internet's many denizens sent their respective elected representatives a shot across the bow: pass overly broad anti-piracy bills against all testimony warning against them, and do so at your own job security's risk.

Thursday, the FBI effectively answered "Oh yeah? Watch this."

A press release announced that the Bureau has put a killshot in prolific file-sharing servers Megaupload and Megavideo - which the FBI gave the collective, comic-book awesome moniker "The Mega Conspiracy" - and slapped seven "conspirators" with various copyright infringement and conspiracy charges. An Eastern District of Virgina grand jury on Jan. 5 returned indictments on eight individuals and two corporations (Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited) charging co-conspirators with racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and criminal copyright infringement - all of them felonies.

The indictment names Kim Dotcom (AKA, Kim Schmitz) and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, a 37-year-old resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand, as leaders respectively of Megaupload and Vestor.

In addition, the indictment also names Chief Marketing Officer Finn Batato, 38, of Germany; graphic designer Julius Bencko, 35, of Slovakia; business development head Sven Echternach, 39, of Germany; Chief Technical Officer, co-founder and director Mathia Ortmann, 40, of Germany; software development head and programmer Andrus Nomm, 32, of Turkey and Estonia; and Dutch citizen Bram van der Kolk, 29, who oversaw programming and network structure.

The various counties carry penalties ranging from five to 20 years in prison and probably unspecified levels of fines.

The FBI alleges that Megaupload's traffic when it was shut down totalled more than one billion total visitors, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors and "four percent of the total traffic on the internet." Between advertising and premium membership revenue, the site reportedly profited to the tune of more than $175 million illegally through the trafficking of copyrighted music, books, software, television programs and movies frequently leaked before their theatrical or home-video releases.

The indictment alleges a complex business model that escalated site traffic. Conspirators offered financial rewards incentivizing linking to Megaupload sites and uploading popular content that helped drive traffic and generate downloads. Megaupload also allegedly promoted its most popular material by actively deleting personally stored media receiving little traffic.

Well. This would be a great time to start finding other means of catching up on "Game Of Thrones" and "Dexter."

Though the indictment apparently was actually returned well before the Jan. 18 protest of the U.S. House-proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate retarded step-brother by way of the mailman Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), the release's timing probably lends the bills' Congressional supporters comfort. Numerous websites - most notably, Wikipedia - engaged in day-long black-outs to demonstrate what have become understood as the severe potential consequences to legitimate websites of the bills' potential passages. Simply put, both bills attack copyright infringers by barring advertisers and pay facilitators from doing business with infringing sites, barring search engines from linking to infringers and requiring that Internet service providers block access to the sites.

Generally speaking, the biggest bones of contention have been that the bills' measures would cripple legitimate sites ranging from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to even eBay; and that there's no appeal process that can take place before the bills' consequences can be inflicted.

That being said, for now, the internet is off the endangered species list: votes in both houses on both bills were cancelled today,

"This was a whole new different game all of a sudden," MPAA Chairman and former Sen. Christopher Dodd said.to the New York Times. "[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk."