Fighting against the sharing of pirated and illegal content
UltraMegaBit.com is a criminal copyright infringement conspiracy designed to deprive rights holders of income by making copyright material available in an unlawful manner.
UltraMegaBit.com has been featured before on this site. The first time was last year when we labeled UltraMegaBit the new pirate cove. The second and third time were when we explored vast amounts of copyright infringement taking place on the site.
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Lumfile.com is a file locker that has been on our radar for many months. We have taken various mitigation actions against Lumfile over the past nine months. Unfortunately, the site remains a problem however it’s a problem we are determined to resolve.
Last year Lumfile lost it’s hosting in Canada due to the prevalence of illegal content on the site, then in November 2012 the site was one of many terminated by payment processor Avangate. Now the site uses alternative methods of payment processing and routinely ignores DMCA notices issued to it.
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Mega has only been live a few days, however it’s already becoming a go to place for pirates wanting to share copyright infringing content.
We have detected numerous instances of Mega being used to distribute copyright content including cracks (software to circumvent copyright protection), music, movies and software.
Given that Mega says that it encrypts every file uploaded to it, many pirates are seeing it as the perfect storage vehicle for content that they are wanting to share with other pirates or that they wish to store in safe keeping to hang on to should their other distribution methods come under attack by anti-piracy groups.
Let’s examine some of what we have found so far.
Movies are being shared on Mega from piracy websites. This 2008 movie “Defiance” is being shared from a piracy blog and hosted at Mega for download.
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Today Paypal took action to terminate it’s relationship with Hotfile.
Hotfile is one of the largest sites on the Internet. A site which has attracted criticism from numerous anti-piracy groups, rights holder associations and rights holders. Having been embroiled in litigation over allegations it encouraged and facilitated copyright infringement it should have expected this day to come.
Unfortunately it is too often the case that where we find a blatant disregard of copyrights we also find a blatant disregard of human rights.
Recently a young woman was raped in the presence of her partner on a bus in India, a crime which took the life of an innocent victim. The case sent shockwaves around the world as it was noted for it’s savagery and ferociousness. At the same time as the world condemned the mistreatment of women, Hotfile was busy allowing people to share content purporting to depict rape, torture, incest and bestiality.
While the MPAA was taking Hotfile to task for breaches of copyright, we took a holistic view of the systemic problems with the Hotfile service. After substantial examination and research we came up with one simple conclusion. Hotfile is a haven for the sharing of copyright and illegal content.
Paypal took the appropriate action against Hotfile and we would encourage any other payment processor considering doing business with this site to think twice before allowing Hotfile to continue.
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New Zealand company Digiweb is accepting payments for Kim Dotcom’s new venture Mega via credit card and Paypal.
Below is a screenshot from the DigiWeb shopping cart showing credit cards and Paypal as payment options.
DigiWeb, like all other resellers for Mega, is providing payment processing facilities to Kim Dotcom to circumvent the likelihood that nobody would process payments for Kim Dotcom’s company directly.
We will be working to shut down all payment processing options for the new Mega.
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Voucher Reseller is processing payments for Kim Dotcom’s new Mega operation using most credit cards and Paypal as payment methods.
UPDATE: 26th Jan 2013 – Voucher Reseller no longer accepts Paypal payments for Mega Memberships
At the bottom of the sales page is the following statement:
You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud.
“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” Article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Secure Online Collaboration
Share encrypted folders with coworkers or business partners and exchange confidential documents with transparent end-to-end encryption.
Powerful File Manager
View and manage your files in your web browser, with integrated accelerated batch up – and downloading.”
We think that rights holders have the right to be safe from unlawful copyright infringement and that this reseller arrangement will probably not last very long.
We shall be working hard to shut down all reseller arrangements for Kim Dotcom and Mega.
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After months of discussions and ongoing pressure , we saw Avangate finally remove payment processing from a large batch of file hosts. Avangate did this reluctantly and in the end it came down to the risk to Avangate of losing relationships important to it’s ongoing business. At the time of writing there are still a handful of file sharing sites using Avangate.
Avangate became a refuge of last resort for many file lockers, the largest of which were Freakshare and Bitshare who fled to Avangate after the loss of their Paypal relationships. Avangate took on the business of Freakshare and Bitshare knowing our objections to the illegal file sharing business. For too long, Avangate completely thumbed it’s nose at legitimate rights holders by processing payments for infringing websites.
We shall be keeping a close eye on Avangate over the weeks and months to come, prepared to lobby those who provide necessary services to Avangate for as long as Avangate continue to support IP infringing merchants.
The sites affected by the Avangate’s decision to remove some file sharing merchants are:
Bitshare.com
cepzo.com
Extabit.com
Filefolks.com
FileRio.in
Freakshare.net
Sharedbit.net
Novafile.com
Lumfile.com
Filefactory.com
Luckyshare.net
Upsto.re
Megaload.it
FileStay.com
oteupload.com
upfile.biz
prefiles.com
ryushare.com
Ultimately all third party payment processors accepting credit cards or Paypal rely on their relationships with those organisations. In cases where payment processors do not adopt a best practices approach to the mitigation of IP infringement it will be necessary to continue to apply pressure on their business relationships and to conduct a public campaign until such time as the payment processor decides to place IP rights above profit.
We will continue to monitor all of the sites listed above to ensure that there are no safe havens of payment processing available to them.
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