MSN
It looks like a war is brewing online. In response to a US government raid on Megaupload that saw $50 million in assets being seized, Megaupload CEO Kim Dotcom being arrested, and the domain name being seized, hacktivist collective Anonymous have gone on their biggest operation yet, shutting down several major US government sites and movie and music industry sites, including the Department of Justice, The White House, the FBI, and Universal Music Group.
Megaupload, a popular cyberlocker site, has reportedly earned more than $175 million, mostly due to the copyright infringement that occurs on the site, although the site has claimed cooperation with the law, and has proceeded to remove the offending content when reported. The operation that took down Megaupload was an international one, and an exceedingly huge operation at that, that involved US, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Philippines cooperating together, and exposed internal emails between the sites' workers, who knew of the copyright infringement happening on their site, acknowledging their role and sharing the files with each other. The internal knowledge of such, however, disqualifies Megaupload from the 'safe harbor' protection Youtube enjoyed during the $1 billion lawsuit by Viacom, as Megaupload did not actively work to remove the content (the 'abuse' button mere removes the website link to the file hosted).
The takedown is sure to gain more fire from hacktivists worldwide in the coming days, with even more operations planned to protest the SOPA bill underway. -msn tech
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