In 2005 the FBI shuttered EliteTorrents, a popular ‘private’ BitTorrent community that came to a sticky end after making available a pre-release ‘workprint’ copy of Star Wars Episode III. By 2010 the agency was focusing its resources on Operation in Our Sites, an initiative which closed down several domains including the notorious NinjaVideo. Then two years ago the FBI played a key role in the closure of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload.

While few would doubt the gravity of the cases highlighted above, it may come as a surprise that in addition to commercial scale infringement, the FBI also views unauthorized personal copying as a serious offense. While it may not actively pursue individual pirates, it doesn’t want them in-house.

Monday this week Sacramento State‘s Career Center welcomed the FBI for a visit concerning recruitment of students for its paid internship program. One of the topics discussed were historical actions that could exclude applicants from the program.

In addition to drug use, criminal activity and even defaulting on a student loan, students were informed that if they had illegally downloaded content in the past, that could rule them out of a position at the FBI. It appears that to the agency, downloading is tantamount to stealing.

While some students might be tempted to tell a white lie or two about their piracy experiences during their initial interviews, that appears to be a dangerous course of action. All responses are recorded and sent to a polygraph technician and if the student fails the lie detector test they are excluded from the FBI forever, even if they tried to cover up the smallest thing.

But what if applicants have a bit of personal piracy to hide, but choose to tell the truth? Information is limited, but a 2012 posting on 911JobForums by a rejected applicant reveals that while honesty might be the best policy, it can be enough to rule someone out of a job.

“My reason for posting this is to help give fair warning to those who don’t think pirating copyrighted information from the internet will trip them up later on. While I sometimes ask myself what might have been, I can honestly say I gave it my best shot,” the poster explains.

“I had downloaded songs while at college 10 years prior (300+) and a few recently (<20). I had an illegal copy of Windows XP in my possession and 10 years ago had watched fewer than 8 pirated full-length movies which I had downloaded then promptly deleted. I had copied a Redbox DVD to my iPod I wasn't able to watch before returning but then promptly deleted the movie after watching once."

According to the student-run newspaper The State Hornet, the FBI are interested in the amount of illegal content applicants have downloaded, so it’s possible that people downloading very small amounts might be shown leniency.

Those interested in how the polygraph procedure itself works can find details of the equivalent CIA test here. Interestingly the writer has a tip for former pirate students.

“[The CIA] were concerned mostly about crime, drugs, and misuse of technology systems. Downloading music, though it is illegal, does not disqualify you. Most people especially college students did this, just pretend you didn’t know that it was illegal,” he notes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

From the pro-SOPA lobby in the United States through the iiNet case in Australia and the Megaupload shutdown, the MPAA has worked hard to target piracy around the globe. Perhaps related to these increased anti-piracy efforts, the six major movie studios backing the MPAA nearly increased their investment in the group by 50% over a two year period.

This conclusion comes from the latest tax filing submitted to the IRS by the MPAA a week ago, covering the fiscal year ending December 31st 2012. The paperwork reveals that the movie studios increased their membership dues from $41.5 million in 2010 to $59.7 million two years later.

Total revenue increased from $48.6 million to $66.8 million in the same period. Interestingly and despite the sizable increase in funds, the MPAA cut nearly 20% of its employees to 200 in 2012, down from 247 two years earlier.

The latest tax papers picked up by Variety reveal that MPAA boss and former senator Chris Dodd is handsomely compensated with an income of $3.3 million a year.

MPAA’s Global General Counsel, Henry Hoberman, is the second best paid executive (+$700,000), followed by MPAA’s Senior Vice President Michael O’Leary (+$600,000). Robert Pisano, who stepped down as MPAA president in 2011, also received a severance payment of $1 million.

The paperwork further reveals that the Copyright Alert System cost the MPAA $475,000 in 2012, which is roughly a quarter of the total budget the new anti-piracy system was awarded that year.

Looking at some of the other expenses we see that the MPAA’s lobbying outlays remained relatively stable at $4.8 million. Legal costs were $10.3 million, and didn’t change much compared to the previous year.

Every year the MPAA also hands out several grants and in 2012 this included $127,150 to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). The purpose of the grant is to “promote the film industry,” and perhaps in an effort to do so, IPI president Tom Giovanetti recently attacked our news reporting.

Another grant that’s not without controversy is the $100,000 Carnegie Mellon University received to start its “Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics.” A recent study from these researchers found that the Megaupload shutdown boosted movie industry revenues, a finding that aids the MPAA in its lobbying efforts.

While the MPAA’s budget increase over the past two years is notable, the $59.7 million paid by the Hollywood studios is still significantly lower than the $84.7 million they paid in 2007.

However, if the MPAA continues to book successes such as the recent isoHunt shutdown, the IMAGiNE bust, and the convictions of several streaming site operators, its budget may fully recover to that level in the years to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As part of Operation in Our Sites the U.S. Government were watching NinjaVideo and had approached Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload to retain evidence that Ninja staff had uploaded copyrighted videos to his now-defunct file-hosting service. Megaupload cooperated with the investigation, something which would later come back to bite them.

At the end of June 2010 the authorities carried out a raid on Ninja and eight other domains. Five people connected to NinjaVideo were arrested and in September 2011 they were indicted by a federal grand jury.

One of those indicted was site co-founder Hana Beshara. Known online by her pseudonym Phara and referred to by NinjaVideo members as their “Queen”, Beshara pleaded guilty and was subsequently sentenced to 22 months in prison.

This week TorrentFreak received a message from Candeelion, one of Phara’s closest friends. Phara is free once again and for those familiar with her previously outspoken and extroverted character, be assured that very little has changed. Being crammed into a prison with 250 other women “overflowing with estrogen” hasn’t calmed her in the slightest.

“WORD, I AM OUT OF PRISON! Oh man, I’m smiling like a fool here on this computer,” Phara begins. “You cannot possibly imagine how good it feels to be online again.”

Phara has also revealed a few details about her life in prison. Her new life was understandably not as stimulating as running NinjaVideo and her early days in confinement were marked by depression. However, Phara eventually got a job. For the first few months she peeled potatoes but at 12 cents an hour was never going to get rich.

Looking to do something more positive and avoid the manual labor, Phara successfully applied to do college classes. She appears to have found it amusing that the “small business” classes were a step down from running the Ninja operation she was used to.

A subsequent suggestion to other inmates that they begin studying current affairs apparently didn’t go down particularly well but she did end up leading a couple of jewelery-making classes. She also picked up a few skills herself, such as learning to knit and crochet. She can now also make cheesecake.

Phara is currently at a halfway house in Newark where she’ll remain until mid-June when she reports to house arrest.

“The house arrest will continue until the 22 months of the sentence are completed which I believe is in September. Then she must start her two years of supervised release,” Candee told TorrentFreak.

“This puts her fate into the hands of the Parole officer that she’s assigned to because if she
does not do the court mandated counseling and community service she could go back to prison for an undetermined amount of time.”

Phara must also get clearance to speak with the other defendants in the NinjaVideo case, although has made it clear that she’s only interested in speaking with two of them. She says that herself aside, Joshua Evans (known online as Wadswerth) and Jeremy Andrew (known online as htrdfrk) were the only defendants who refused to cooperate with the authorities.

As she gets her life in order, Phara also has to find a way to clear a huge debt. The Ninja founder owes the MPAA almost $210,000 in damages, but doesn’t want to pay them directly.

“Phara plans on petitioning the courts to allow her to pay back the film creators instead of the MPAA but is still waiting to speak with counsel on that move,” Candee explains.

But of course, Phara still needs to raise the money. Candee says that numerous options are being mulled, including appearing on the reality show The Amazing Race. MTV’s True Life have already approached Phara and she’s currently waiting to hear if they are interested in doing a “halfway house” edition of the show.

Finally, Phara is grateful to everyone who took the time to support her during her ordeal.

“Thank you to everyone that wrote and emailed and even put money on my books while I was locked up. You guys are wonderful,” she says. “I’m on home detention as of late June and out of Bureau of Prison custody in early September. Then two years of Supervised Release, which seems like some new-fangled way of saying Parole. Gotta stay out of trouble.”

Is this the last we’ll hear of Phara? Somehow we doubt it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite years of high-profile crackdowns on sites and their users, very few inroads have been made into reducing the amount of content being shared via the famous protocol. In fact, one might argue that in the past few years things have only become worse.

Among the technologically literate youth, mechanisms for obtaining unauthorized media are now common knowledge and BitTorrent is on the way to becoming a household name.

With this in mind the studios and their music industry counterparts are now embarking on a new educational drive. Wrapped up in projects such as “six strikes” in the United States, these initiatives aim to inform people that obtaining copyright material online without permission is illegal.

But education cuts both ways, and increasingly people are learning that it is the sharing or “uploading” of content that is what puts people in trouble. Uploading is built into BitTorrent so aside from a user employing IP masking techniques, little can be done about that. However, there are other ways of viewing movies and TV shows online, methods that are virtually 100% safe.

These days the “YouTube experience” is something familiar to most Internet users. Do a search, call up a page, press play and a video appears in the browser. But while YouTube specializes in general content there are dozens of sites that offer all the latest TV shows and movies in the same format and just as easily.

Fire up a site like Movie2K or TubePlus and not only are the perceived complexities of BitTorrent instantly removed, but also pretty much all of the risk too. No wonder they’re becoming so popular.

However, the rise of streaming sites isn’t going unnoticed. The industry-backed SOPA legislation would have allowed for harsh criminal penalties to be attached to streaming, had it not been defeated by a massive Internet revolt of course. But months on and the issue is now being raised again, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

According to U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante, the legislative gap between downloading and streaming needs to be addressed.

“There is a gap in the law,” Pallante told a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet yesterday.

“Law enforcement can go after the reproduction or the distribution [of copyright material], and they can go after them in a meaningful way because they are felonies, not misdemeanors. Streaming, whether it’s a football game or music, is a misdemeanor,” she said.

“If there is illegal streaming happening, especially in an egregious, willful, profit-driven kind of way, how do you get at that activity if the best that you can do is go after them for a misdemeanor?” Pallante added.

Although there is indeed a theoretical weakness in the law, one could be forgiven for thinking that wasn’t the case. The operators of streaming video portal NinjaVideo were all severely punished for their role in the site. Megavideo, a streaming service that needs no introduction, is currently the subject of the biggest copyright battle of all time.

On the flipside, other streaming and linking cases have been dealt with relatively amicably recently, including the conclusion of the U.S. case against UK resident Richard O’Dwyer and the amnesty given to operator of ChannelSurfing.

Of course the problem isn’t isolated in the United States. Over in Sweden, the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay, an interesting trend is developing.

Previously known as Antipiratbyran, Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance) is well know for its anti-piracy activities. Just recently it scooped dozens of headlines with its demand that The Pirate Bay must get out of Sweden, but largely out of the public eye it also takes action against smaller sites.

But with their successes comes a flipside – as they continue to target file-sharing services, there is an increase in visitors to streaming sites.

“We can see that about 60 million movies were downloaded last year,” Henrik Pontén of Rights Alliance told SVT. “The latest figure we have on streaming is almost a year old, but then it was 20 million movies. It has increased since and we will soon get new statistics.”

Chasing down BitTorrent users in Sweden has its problems but the law is able to deal with those uploading copyrighted material, even if the punishments aren’t particularly harsh for an isolated user. However, those who watch streaming movies can do so with impunity. Not only can they not be monitored by anti-piracy outfits, but it’s possible that they aren’t even breaking the law either.

“Streaming is a growing problem,” says Pontén. “From the creators’ point of view, it’s irrelevant what technology is used, they lose sales and legislators have to deal with that.”

In any event, it seems that streaming is here to stay. Most of the sites providing the streams are outside the U.S. and Sweden and although they don’t say much in public, their operators don’t seem overly concerned about what the authorities think. Expect the activity to continue growing as more and more “strikes” warnings go out.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The MPAA’s latest tax filing to the IRS was published this week, covering the fiscal year 2011. Despite the long reporting delay, the figures show some interesting trends.

After the group’s revenue was cut in half to $49.6 million during the previous three years, it started growing again in 2011. The filing lists total revenue at $60.8 million, which is a direct result of an increase in membership dues from the movie studios.

Despite the extra income, the MPAA reduced its number of employees from 247 to 205 in a year. However, the group didn’t cut back on total employee compensation which rose from $21.7 to $24.5 in the same time frame, with 10% going to MPAA boss Chris Dodd.

When former senator Dodd was appointed early 2011 the New York Times estimated his salary at $1.5 million, but this figure turned out to be $900,000 light. During his first year Dodd received a little over $2.4 million in compensation.

Robert Pisano, who stepped down as MPAA president in 2011, is placed second with an income of $1.3 million, followed by MPAA’s Senior Vice President Michael O’Leary with $530,000.

Looking at some of the other expenses we see that MPAA’s lobbying budget remained stable at $4.7 million. Legal costs on the other hand nearly doubled from $5.6 to $10.1 million.

More than two million of these legal expenses was paid to the Australian law firm Gilbert Tobin, who represented the movie studios in their case against Internet provider iiNet. The MPAA’s aim in this case was to hold the ISP responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers, an effort that ultimately failed in April last year.

Every year the MPAA also hands out several grants and in 2011 this included $150,000 to both the democratic and the republican governors associations. The purpose of the grants was to “promote the film industry” and indeed, in the same year the governors came out as strong supporters of SOPA and PIPA.

Despite the iiNet loss and the SOPA / PIPA debacle, the MPAA also booked quite a few successes on the legal front. The group played an important role in several movie streaming domain seizures and arrests, as well was the conviction of Anton Vickerman in the UK and the NinjaVideo admins in the US.

All in all it’s safe to conclude that the MPAA is still a force to be reckoned with.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

One of the affected domains was Channelsurfing.net, a website where links to external sports streams were listed. The site itself did not host any streams, but linked to those offered by third-party sites.

In addition to seizing its domain name, ICE and HSI classified the site as a criminal operation and a month later they arrested the alleged owner, the then 32-year old Brian McCarthy from Texas.

The ChannelSurfing operator was charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement for his involvement with the site. The indictment stated that McCarthy “did willfully infringe a copyright for purposes of financial gain.”

In the two years that followed there wasn’t much progress in the case. As it turns out now, the U.S. Government and McCarthy were working on an agreement not to prosecute, which was finalized earlier this month.

The agreement, obtained by TorrentFreak, gives little detail on why prosecution is deferred, but it states that this is in the best interest of both parties.

“…after a thorough investigation, it has been determined that the interest of the United States and your own interest will best be served by deferring prosecution in this District. Prosecution will be deferred during the term of your good behavior and satisfactory compliance with the terms of this agreement…”

The deal means that McCarthy will receive amnesty. During the months to come he will have to demonstrate good behavior by not violating any laws, seeking a job, and complying with several other conditions.

While the former Channelsurfing.net owner avoids prison, he is required to pay back the $351,033.54 he earned through the website.

The decision to grant amnesty in this case is remarkable, considering the strong language the Justice Department used after the arrest and in the indictment.

“This arrest sends a clear message that this office, working with its partners at HSI, will vigorously protect valuable intellectual property rights through arrests and domain name seizures,” U.S. attorney Preet Bhara said at the time.

The deal McCarthy struck is, however, similar to that of Richard O’Dwyer, the UK student who operated the streaming site TV-shack. O’Dwyer was facing extradition to the United States but also signed a deferred prosecution agreement last November.

Both sites merely linked to streams and neither operator was actively involved in the infringing broadcasts.

Whether this was one of the reasons why the U.S. decided not to prosecute these cases is unknown. However, this is one of the main distinctions with the operators of the seized video streaming site NinjaVideo who were all convicted last year, some to hefty jail time.

All in all it’s safe to say that the U.S. Government campaign against streaming piracy has mixed results. Aside from the above, the U.S. also had to return domain names to the operators of two other sites.

Over the past year the authorities continued to seize domain names under the flag of Operation in Our sites. Perhaps tellingly, none of these domains were involved in video streaming.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When the U.S. Government applied for the search warrants against Megaupload last year it told the court that they had warned Megaupload in 2010 that it was hosting infringing files.

Through its hosting company Megaupload was informed about a criminal search warrant in an unrelated case where the Government requested information on 39 infringing files stored by the file-hosting service.

At the time Megaupload cooperated with this request and handed over details on the uploaders. The files were kept online as Megaupload believed it was not to touch any of the evidence. However, a year later this inaction is being used by the U.S. Government to claim that Megaupload was negligent, leaving out much of the context.

According to Megaupload this course of action was misleading and the company now wants to address the matter through a so-called Frank’s hearing.

However, in a new filing yesterday the U.S. Government asks the court to deny Megaupload’s request. According to United States Attorney Neil MacBride it would allow Megaupload to circumvent the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

The United States Attorney further refutes Megaupload’s “planted evidence” allegations, saying that they’re an unfounded conspiracy theory, and certainly not enough to grant a hearing.

“Megaupload has supplied nothing but a conspiracy theory; this is not enough,” the U.S. writes.

“Because Megaupload’s claims are insufficient as a matter of law to authorize its intervention in this matter, Megaupload has wrapped them in layers of sensationalist rhetoric. However, Megaupload’s claims regarding government misconduct are unfounded.”

The Government argues that it never asked Megaupload to preserve any of files that were under investigation in the NinjaVideo case.

“The government made no preservation request, and the government is not aware that the service of a search warrant creates an obligation on the part of the recipient of a search warrant to preserve infringing content on a computer in a way that continues to make it available for illegal download.”

Megaupload’s argument that they didn’t want to disable access to the files, because this could alert the targets of the investigation, is also weak according to the U.S. – especially when Megaupload regularly disabled access to infringing links.

“If this [removing links] practice was common, it would not necessarily be alerting. Megaupload also, when removing infringing content, did not as a practice inform customers that their content had been removed. It is also unlikely that any Court would interpret a sealing order to require the continued distribution of infringing content,” the U.S. writes.

The U.S. basically says they did not specifically request that the files should remain intact, or be removed.

Dotcom’s lawyers may not contest this specific language, but find it misleading that the Government did not mention Megaupload’s full cooperation in the indictment or the search warrants. Instead, the U.S. uses the fact that the files were not deleted as an example of criminal behavior.

The U.S., however, believes that is was not necessary to provide the complete context.

“Megaupload’s theory that the government misled the Court by omitting a discussion of the June 24, 2010 search warrant misstates the relevant law. An affiant does not need to include every potentially relevant fact in a seizure warrant affidavit,” the U.S. writes.

The above, leads the Government to conclude that Megaupload should be denied a hearing on the matter.

However, United States Attorney Neil MacBride does not object to a Megaupload representative being heard as a witness in the hearing that’s scheduled for Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin, the reporter who is trying to gain access to his lost files.

“Though Megaupload’s claims are false, nothing prevents Kyle Goodwin from asserting them. If Mr. Goodwin wants to develop a factual basis for his claim, and the Court allows the live testimony, Mr. Goodwin could call a representative from Megaupload as a witness.”

The court now has to decide what action is appropriate here.

This upcoming decision may become crucial for the ongoing criminal proceedings. If the hearing is granted and the warrants are declared unlawful, as happened earlier in New Zealand, then Kim Dotcom and his fellow defendants will be at a significant advantage.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Eventually both bills were defeated.

Then there was the Megaupload raid and the indictment against the “Mega Conspiracy” which dominated the news the entire year and disrupted the file-hosting business.

There were also winners in 2012, such as the ACTA protesters, Rojadirecta and thousands of alleged BitTorrent users who had their cases dismissed.

And there were those who “lost” or received bad news, such as Gottfrid Svartholm, the Ninjavideo team, the IMAGiNE release group, Demonoid, BTjunkie, NZBMatrix and others.

The Pirate Bay made dozens of headlines as well, some good and some bad. The infamous BitTorrent site ditched torrents and moved to the cloud to escape getting raided, and enjoyed a huge increase in traffic despite increased censorship worldwide.

At TorrentFreak we carefully select the stories we write, and all these articles are important to us. But, to make some kind of an objective ranking of the top stories we compiled a list of the Top 12 most-read and the most-commented upon news articles.

Of course we would love to hear which stories and events were most important to our readers so feel free to join the discussion.

And a Happy New Year to all of you all! We really appreciate your ongoing support and encouragement.

—

Here are the most read news articles, each with hundreds of thousands of page views.

1. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop

2. Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB

3. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

4. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government

5. Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

6. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online

7. Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips

8. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested

9. The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record

10. The Pirate Bay Moves to .SE Domain To Prevent Domain Seizure

11. Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay

12. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid

Here are the most commented articles, each with their respective comment count.

1. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested (1202)

2. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government (1087)

3. Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action (842)

4. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid (816)

5. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop (692)

6. BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good (662)

7. Book Publishers ‘Shut Down’ Library.nu and iFile-it (662)

8. Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests (625)

9. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online (609)

10. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof (601)

11. Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy (594)

12. ISPs To Begin Punishing BitTorrent Pirates This Summer (576)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As long as a government agent – often with the help of a rightsholder – can convince a judge of wrongdoing, it’s game on.

Up until last month all the scare stories concerned U.S. domains, but then Homeland Security’s ICE unit announced Project Transatlantic which targeted top-level domains such as .eu, .be, .dk, .fr, .ro and .uk.

Then last Friday we learned that the .EU domains of torrent sites Torrentz, Fenopy and RealTorrentz, DDL linking sites Sceper.eu and Downextra.eu, plus streaming links sites WatchSeries.eu and ChannelCut.eu, had all been put “on hold” by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names, pending legal action.

There has been no official EURid announcement and the domain registry has not responded to our request for comment. However, we have discovered that EURid is also refusing to supply the official documentation that effectively authorized the “on holds” to representatives of the sites in question.

Nevertheless, what we have learned during the past 24 hours is certainly of great interest. According to a source familiar with the situation, EURid put the domains on hold after a complaint against the sites was filed with the prosecutor at the heart of the EU in Brussels.

Only adding to the mystery, EURid are refusing to say who filed the complaints or what they contain. Although that information might prove difficult to keep quiet for long, it’s still a concern that even the owners of the affected domains are currently being kept in the dark.

After all, these things can go wrong when site operators are excluded from proceedings.

The U.S. seizure of the Dajaz1 hip-hop blog domain had to be reversed when it was found to have been wrongfully taken, as did the domain of streaming links site Rojadirecta. Furthermore, doubt over the legitimacy of the evidence used to justify the Megaupload domain seizures was also raised recently.

In the meantime, life for the sites with .EU domains continues, with many taking precautions should things turn out for the worst.

Fenopy has switched from .EU to .SE and RealTorrentz has switched back to .COM. DDL links site Sceper has dumped .EU and migrated to .WS and DownExtra is now operating from ShareNewz.com. WatchSeries.eu is now accessible from a .LI domain and ChannelCut, like Demonoid before it, appears to consider a .ME domain a safer option.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As outlined in our discussions this week, Dotcom says that some of the allegations are misleading, particularly one claiming that Megaupload failed to delete infringing video files from its servers.

“A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators [in 2010] that he located the named files using internal searches of the Mega Conspiracy’s systems,” the DoJ wrote.

“As of November, 18 2011, thirty-six or the thirty-nine infringing copies of the copyrighted motion pictures were still being stored on servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy.”

Out of context the claim, that Megaupload ignores the DMCA, looks bad. However, when the full picture is put forward – that Megaupload found these files because a criminal search warrant from the FBI required them to do so – things start to look quite different.

And the plot thickens. Wired has discovered that the infringing files were put on Megaupload’s servers by individuals connected to the now-defunct streaming video site NinjaVideo.

The FBI were conducting a criminal investigation into NinjaVideo (which later resulted in several of its operators going to jail) and required Megaupload’s cooperation after serving the company with a search warrant in June 2010, just days before NinjaVideo was raided.

“Megaupload complied with the warrant and cooperated with the government’s request,” Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken confirms.

According to Kim Dotcom, the FBI made it clear that the warrant should be kept quiet so as not to jeopardize the NinjaVideo inquiry.

“The agent was concerned that the target could be warned and that this needs to be handled confidentially,” Dotcom informs TorrentFreak.

The Megaupload founder says that this warning was taken seriously and that since the files were clearly evidence in the case none of them were interfered with.

“Obviously when the FBI contacted us they made this clear to us and therefore we did not touch the accounts or the files,” he says.

“We even emailed back to Carpathia [Megaupload's US server host] to ask the FBI (and the FBI had our emails before asking for the Mega domain seizure) if we should do anything about those files. We never got a response.”

But the criminal investigation against NinjaVideo and evidential issues in that respect were pushed aside when it came to building a case against Megaupload and seizing its domain.

“To use this against us and to tell a Judge that the Megaupload domain seizure is justified because we have not removed those 39 files is totally unethical and misleading,” Dotcom concludes.

The fact that the infringing files remained on Mega’s leased servers led the U.S. government to claim that Megaupload infringed copyright, despite the company having been served the original NinjaVideo search warrant as the site’s service provider, one that presumably should have received safe-harbor protection under the DMCA.

As previously reported, NinjaVideo founder Hana Beshara was eventually sentenced to 22 months in jail and ordered to repay almost $210,000.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.