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Labels sue MegaUpload
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 11 April 2014
Not wishing to be left out of the MegaUpload litigation party – because you wouldn’t want to be, would you – the US record industry filed a lawsuit against the long defunct file-transfer platform yesterday.
As previously reported, earlier this week six Hollywood studios, coordinated by the Motion Picture Association Of America, sued the defunct digital company and its founders over claims of copyright infringement. MegaUpload, of course, was shut down by the US authorities in 2012, but its assets were frozen at the time, and it’s presumably those that the film firms want to go after.
The criminal case against MegaUpload has been much delayed due to complications in the American Department Of Justice’s efforts to extradite the men who ran the file-transfer firm, not least its overlord Kim Dotcom. It remains to be seen if that means civil action against Dotcom et al reaches court before the criminal proceedings.
Either way, the Mega team can now add a lawsuit from the major record companies to the pile, with Universal, Sony and Warner Music filing their lawsuit yesterday.
According to Billboard, the legal papers say: “Beginning in late 2005 and continuing at least to January 2012 when defendants were indicted, MegaUpload amassed the millions of popular content files that it hosted on its servers and offered to the public for download by openly encouraging users to upload these files. Until mid-2011, MegaUpload went so far as to actually pay its users to do this”.
The legal rep for Dotcom, Ira Rothken, responded to the news of the latest litigation against his client thus: “The RIAA, MPAA and DOJ are like three blind mice following each other in the pursuit of meritless copyright claims. These cases are an assault on cloud storage technology, as cloud storage is a neutral technology that can be used for both good and bad purposes. MegaUpload strongly believes it’s going to prevail”.
