RIAA Issues Statement About Megaupload
The Recording Industry Association of America issued a statement about Megaupload yesterday on their blog.
According to this statement, they believe that this raid will result in more traffic towards the legal services :
“According to the NPD Group, Limewire users left by the millions in the months after the shutdown… Digital music sales that had been flagging jumped in the month immediately after the Limewire shutdown, and have remained stronger ever since… When Billboard looked at the data after the Limewire shutdown it said “The spike in sales was immediate, noticeable and lasting.”
Unfortunately this raid has resulted in concerns about legitimate services being removed from the net because of the actions of the service’s users according to Threatpost.com security blogger Dennis Fisher.
Megaupload Gone
Megaupload, the Hong Kong based file sharing service, has had their Ashburn, Virginia servers shut down by Federal authorities in the United States. And four employees of this company have been arrested in New Zealand.
An indictment filed Thursday accuses the company of having cost copyright holders $500 Million in lost revenue for having facilitated the illegal distribution of music, film and other copyrighted content. But the company claimed these allegations were “grotesquely overblown” prior to the shut down, according to USA Today.
Unfortunately Megaupload also had legitimate users, whose files are inaccessible now. The site had 150 million registered users and had 50 million hits per day.
I had used the service years back to send my own videos to fellow Youtubers, which was more convenient than sending it by email. I have since found other services but it’s still a shame to loose such a resource.
About Face On SOPA for GoDaddy
GoDaddy has reversed their position in regards to the Stop Online Piracy Act according to an official statement issued today :
“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
The Stop Online Piracy Act was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 and would enable the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright owners in the states to impose American law on foreign sites by compelling American search engines to remove links to these foreign sites, by disallowing American advertising on those sites and by severing payments processed by American facilitators like Paypal.
Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and numerous other groups have voiced concerns about the ramifications of this legislation, including some Canadian groups who believe the United States could attempt to isolate countries whose copyright laws are not compatible with theirs.
Bell To End Throttling In March
Bell Canada has sent a letter to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission stating they will end their Internet Traffic Management Practices (ITMP) on March 1st, 2012.
In this letter the company claims P2P traffic has been diminishing in comparison to other traffic, some of which was misclassified as P2P traffic according to The Canadian Gamers Organization.
Parliament May Be On Break….
But your local Member of Parliament‘s office should still be available to receive letters and emails in regards to the digital locks provisions in Bill C-11 and Lawful Access until Parliament resumes in late January.
Over 80 thousand Canadians signed the OpenMedia.ca petition against Lawful Access, including yours truly.
Please consider signing this petition. Thank you.
Megaupload To Sue Universal Music ?
Billboard reports that the above commercial has sparked a lawsuit in-between Megaupload and Universal Music Group.
The file sharing service claims that Universal Music Group had filed a takedown notice with Youtube for copyright infringement to have this video removed.
“Let us be clear: Nothing in our song or the video belongs to Universal Music Group,” said MegaUpload CEO David Robb. “We have signed agreements with all artists endorsing MegaUpload.”
RIAA and the artists featured on the video could not be contacted for comment by Billboard by the printing of their article.