Without condoning any illegal conduct of shutdown storage site MegaUpload, pirate parties are condemning its seizure and coordinating potential legal reprisals against the US.
Dramatic developments continue to surround the takedown of fallen online storage service MegaUpload, whose web site operations were shut down by US authorities last week amid ongoing illegal file-sharing allegations, with the latest reports revealing disgruntled locked-out users of the site are coordinating online to consider multinational legal actions against the FBI.
The Hong Kong-based MegaUpload and its associated web sites were taken offline by the FBI last week and a number of arrests were made, including a dramatic police siege in Auckland, New Zealand, where eccentric MegaUpload chief Kim Dotcom was reportedly captured holed up in his mansion's panic room, armed with a shotgun.
The shutdown and subsequent arrests created international headlines, making an overnight internet celebrity of Dotcom and resulting in a raft of movement in the online file locker sector, as a number of sites including Filesonic, Fileserve and FileJungle acted to amend their services' file-sharing functionality and/or restrict US users from gaining access in a bid to pre-empt similar legal closures.
Now, as reported on
TorrentFreak, pirate party organisations representing a number of nations have created an online platform enabling aggrieved legitimate users of MegaUpload (potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals who no longer have access to non-copyright-infringing personal data stored on the site's servers) to register their interest and/or donate funds in contemplation of planned legal actions against the US authorities.
According to the organisation's
site: "Millions of legitimate users have been crippled by the US authority's attempt to enforce their own law across the world... The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload... by closing the service they have impeded the access to millions of archives of both private individuals and organisations, potentially causing huge personal, economic and image damages to a vast number of people... Regardless of ideology, or opinions on the legality or morality of those running Megaupload, actions such as the closure of this service cause huge damage to lawful users of the sites and are unacceptable and disproportionate violations of their rights... For these reasons, we ask that everyone spread the call to join this initiative, as actions like this one cannot and should not be forgiven."
