20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal, Columbia and Warner sue Megaupload
Half a dozen of Hollywood’s top film studios have joined forces to launch a joint action against the file sharing website Megaupload and its larger than life founder Kim Dotcom for paying users to upload popular content.Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros allege that the site has accrued illicit financial gain by facilitating and encouraging the dissemination of copyrighted material before it was shut down by US regulators in 2012.Steven Fabrizio, global general counsel of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), said: "When Megaupload.com was shut down in 2012 by US law enforcement, it was by all estimates the largest and most active infringing website targeting creative content in the world.""Megaupload was built on an incentive system that rewarded users for uploading the most popular content to the site, which was almost always stolen movies, TV shows and other commercial entertainment content," said Mr Fabrizio."It paid users based on how many times the content was downloaded by others - and didn't pay at all until that infringing content was downloaded 10,000 times."Megaupload wasn't a cloud storage service at all, it was an unlawful hub for mass distribution,"Copyright holders say that before this action was taken Megaupload’s actions had caused them to lose a cumulative £320m in lost revenue but Dotcom asserts that his site was a simple storage medium and that no rewards were doled out for files greater than 100MB in size.
20th Century Fox, Disney, Warner, Universal, Columbia, Paramount, I'm canceling movie night tonight ;-)
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 8, 2014