A few days ago, the founder of Megaupload Kim Dotcom and several executives within the company were arrested and accused of being a part of a worldwide conspiracy designed to pirate copyrighted materials. The expensive assets accumulated by Dotcom and others suggest the individuals made quite a bit of money from running one of the more »

The Department of Justice has closed down MegaUpload and arrested its founder Kim Dotcom. The DOJ is charging seven executives of MegaUpload with conspiracy, saying that the website is an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy.” The claims also state that the up loaders reward system on the service was more »

Russian BitTorrent tracker, Interfilm.ru, is being handed down a copyright infringement charge of $1.253 billion. The tracker, which is run by couple Ivan and Irina Podorozhnikovymi, was raided by the Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs Investigation Committee (maybe we’ll call them the RFMIAIC for short) on May 26th 2009. The investigation committee claimed that more »

Producers of the movie “Hurt Locker’ filed court documents demanding a judge issue a court order forcing ISPs to turn over the names connected with over 50,000 IP addresses they say are guilty of illegally downloading the movie. Voltage Pictures says they must have the names to proceed with their case. “This lawsuit cannot proceed more »

Remember Jammie Thomas? The single mother who fought against the RIAA when they sued her? She was originally told to pay $222,000 for copyright infringement. On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis declared a mistrial and ordered a retrial. The mistrial is ruled on the grounds that the RIAA had convinced him and the jury that it did not have to prove that files that were in Jammie Thomas’ Kazaa shared folder did not need to be downloaded. According to the judge, the RIAA downloading the files from the shared folder should prove enough, yet the instruction to the jury that no proof of the being able to download the files is needed was “erroneous.”

This is only a small step so far in the RIAA trials against piracy. Jammie Thomas was the first person to bring the claims into a court room while everyone else settled before reaching court. We’ll have to watch and see what a jury rules when under instruction that doesn’t so blatantly make the case essentially an automatic win for the RIAA.