It has taken more than a SWAT raid on the mansion of the corpulent founder of Megaupload to stop him, and now he is back in cyberspace.
What is at stake is file-sharing. Many companies offer commercial sites to store data, such as computer backups. The US government claimed Dotcom was allowing file sharers to swap copyrighted movies and music.
It’s bad news for the Hollywood and other publishing trolls, who if they had their way, wouldn’t let me people repeat jokes they heard on Saturday Night Live.
For example, on Weekend Update, it was disclosed that Lance Armstrong had admitted being a dwarf: dopey. This is what is called fair and reasonable use.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against alleged pirates, many bringing in thousands of dollars and just as many dismissed.
TorrentFreak and other file-sharing sites dispute that downloading has led to a decline in revenue. In fact, with sites like iTunes, Netflix and Redbox offering cheap overnight rentals the entire situation has changed.
During the weekend Kim Dotcom, it is not the German-born entrepreneur’s birth name, launched a new file storage site. It was so popular that even with a field of servers it was overwhelmed initially.
“This should not be seen as the mocking of any government or Hollywood,” Dotcom, 39, said Sunday at a news conference at the Auckland mansion. “This is us being innovators and executing our right to run a business,” The New York Times reported.
He told Mashable that deals might be made before movie production to sell streaming rights, helping to pay the costs before they are in theaters.
“The much anticipated rebirth of Megaupload took place in the last few hours with interest living up to expectations. In less than one hour the site picked up 100,000 new registrations, going on to 500,000 and beyond just a few hours later,” TorrentFreak said.
A year ago, acting on a US warrant, New Zealand police raided Dotcom’s mansion and seized his computer and data. That left millions of legitimate computer users unable to get their data back.
Dotcom’s money was frozen, although in later court hearings in which judges said the seizure was extrajudicial, he got much of it back.
In the meantime, TorrentFreak has tracked the successes and failures of Hollywood. Some major providers have refused to cooperate with studios because they say there is too much data to police, and even if a copyright file is downloaded on a computer they do not know for sure who did it. It is like getting a photo radar ticket, except that the ticket will have a photo of the driver. If the photo does not show the owner of the car then the ticket is dismissed. Computer uses obviously would not use their cams to film themselves stealing movies.
In addition to losing in many court cases, more and more big players are making it possible to download films, even Google Chrome has a downloading extension. VPNS and encryption services make it nearly impossible to monitor people using sites like Piratebay.
The copyright trolls also have found themselves lumped in with governments who seek to censor the web.
The new site is easy to find on the web, though it is not provided here. There are some sites that attempt to mislead users into thinking the site remains down.www.robertwellercyberflaneur.blogspot.com
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