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By  |  Friday, January 20, 2012 at 4:42 pm

Good piece by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson explaining how the U.S. government was able to take down Megaupload, a company theoretically headquartered in Hong Kong: Megaupload wasn’t just some Hong Kong enterprise that “happened” to be used by US residents. The site had leased more than 1,000 servers in North America alone; 525 were at Carpathia Hosting and were located in Virginia. Between 2007 and 2010, Carpathia received $13 million from Megaupload. (Cogent Communications in the US supplied a few additional US servers and bandwidth.)

 
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  1. jamie Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 6:57 pm

    The money [from subscribers] mainly routed through US-based PayPal, which is how Megaupload collected subscriptions from users looking for premium accounts. This wasn't chump change; the government claims that the Megaupload PayPal account has "received in excess of $110,000,000 from subscribers and other persons associated with Mega Conspiracy."

    Can we just abandon the posturing about how people who pirate wouldn't be willing to pay anyways? Megaupload was copying other people's stuff and making hundreds of millions of dollars off it. These services aren't about depriving eeeevil Big Corporate copyright holders of ill-gotten gain, they're about taking income from copyright holders and giving it to Big Corporate server owners, advertisers and aggregators.

  2. The_Heraclitus Says:
    January 21st, 2012 at 7:36 am

    Excellent treatment of the legal issue at hand.

  3. rent apartment Dubai Says:
    January 22nd, 2012 at 10:55 pm

    Youre truly well-informed. I cant believe how much of this I just wasnt aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. Im truly grateful and really impressed.