Megaupload website and all its related website has just been taken down by the FBI. Megaupload is sued for copyright infringement, they are also considered by the US government as an « international organized criminal enterprise ».

The FBI website states that megaupload.com  is generating an amount of 175million dollars, and that they cause more than half a billion dollar harm to multiple companies and copyright owners.  Some of the servers of megaupload were located in the state of Virginia, it was thus easy for the FBI to take down all the servers.

 

Seven individuals have been charged, the boss (kim dotcom)  and his associates.

  • Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
  • Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
  • Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
  • Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
  • Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
  • Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

 

Kim, Finn, Mathias and Bram have been arrested today by New Zealand authorities, while the others are still on the run.

 

At the moment I just imagine all the people that uploaded something which is not infringing copyrights and how they feel.  As a student i used to use megaupload to store some  data or file when I didn’t had my USB key … or some other crap,  and it was easy … I imagine also all the people who had paid accounts … etc.

 

Anyway, I believe that megaupload will not come back soon and that multiple other companies which are offering the same services will have many new customers in the next couple of hours !