Kim Dotcom, owner of MegaUpload, had a lot of money, he is a resident of New Zealand and a citizen of the European Union having been born in Germany. None of this protected him from police storming through his front door as a long investigation into MegaUpload culminated in a spectacular early morning raid that frightened Kim Dotcom so much that he scarpered off to a safe room in a state of sheer panic.
Rudy Corella, owner of UltraMegaBit, does not have a lot of money, he is a resident and citizen of the United States of America based in California.
Rudy Corella is currently engaged in the facilitation of copyright theft on a grand scale. His file hosting service, UltraMegaBit.com, sits in the back yard of Hollywood, the US Music Industry, the US Software Industry and an FBI field office within spitting distance.
An investigation by the Stop File Lockers project reveals commercial copyright theft of a grand scale occuring on the servers of UltraMegaBit. We have also posted two instalments on this new file host and we are somewhat surprised at how quickly this host has become a veritable nest of copyright infringement.
In the first two months of operation UltraMegaBit had already attracted the attention of the film studios and other content producers. The Google Transparency Report shows that several large rights holders have already noticed copyright infringement on the site.
From the very beginning of UltraMegaBit’s operation, large powerful rights holders were investigating copyright infringement taking place on the site.
A litany of mistakes and a premature launch of the site in an unfinished state led to portions of the site being left “open” allowing anyone investigating the site to learn much about the scale of infringement and form an understanding of the inner workings of this file locker.
In our investigation we found tens of thousands of copyright infringing files ranging from Blu Ray rips of Hollywood movies to the latest games from large video game publishers. We also found no shortage of pornography, some of it potentially illegal, being hosted on the site all under the direct control of Rudy Corella.
Newly released music features on UltraMegaBit, the album above being a current release, featured on RLSLOG which hosts links to huge amounts of infringing content. The latest software releases aren’t safe either, with UltraMegaBit selling access to lots of current version software releases.
Rudy Corella, known as “moogie” or “krylon” on web forums, has protested that he is an innocent victim of people misusing UltraMegaBit stating “I am not hiding anything that we are doing. We are a public cloud hosting provider, and sometimes our services are abused.”. However this flies in the face of the fact that UltraMegaBit pays people who upload this content rewarding them with up to $40 for every 1000 downloads this popular content receives.
Metalica is well known for their stance on music piracy, however apparently this is no concern for UltraMegaBit as many Metalica albums are available for high quality download on the site.
We like to compare Rudy Corella and Kim Dotcom because despite the bravado and bluster they couldn’t be more different. It is true both thought they were invincible, however where as Kim Dotcom was half a world away with buckets of money and the best lawyers at hand, Rudy Corella is not so wealthy (by a long shot), sitting within driving distance of US law enforcement and will probably end up with a public defender.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
woot woot.
i love you stopfilelockers.
What about RapidShare?!! Can’t you guys even shut down their paypal account? The biggest warez board in the web warez-bb.org is filled with rapidshare links.
how about, rather than tearing down paypal, and harming those of us who use rapidshare for the intended purpose (I use it to upload and share MY music/games (that I have created myself) with those I love and who want to use it), I pay for Premium because I can then take full use of my download speeds.
When you find something that is warez, you can bring it to the attention of someone and get it removed with a simple DMCA notice.
File Lockers aren’t illegal, but people abuse them, just like people abuse alcohol and their privilege to drive, or how people abuse guns
good post. eager to see what comes of this.
I wonder of this is the same petty crook Rudy Corella as seen here?
http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?id=19692
Hello sir,
I’d like to ask what a website like UMB would have todo in order to be deemed as ‘legal’ by you guys? If they disabled the affiliate programme would it then be fine in your books? If they disabled the affiliate programme I see no difference between UMB and Dropbox. Filestube has added Dropbox as a source and you can find lots of copyrighted content on Dropbox’s servers. However, you cannot hold the service provider liable for such a thing.
Mediafire is a good example of a file host which I thinks perfectly fine – yet the US deems is as a “rogue” website. It’s not even got an affiliate programme.
All in all, what would you recommend to cyberlockers/cloud storage providers which want to keep in the “good books” yet keep providing their service? (You cannot expect them to actively monitor files as I’m sure you know, it’s illegal to do so).
P.S. It’d be cool if you could make an article on your suggestions to file hosts.
Also, if they got rid of their PPD scheme but kept their PPS scheme would that be ok – since they don’t pay for downloads nor uploads but pay for a sale if they have ?affid={User id} in their URL?
Easy:
1. 3-strikes policy for repeat offenders.
2. 1-strike policy for piracy/warez sites uploaders.
3. Make it part of your TOS that your service cannot be used to “share” anything at piracy/warez sites. If you’re found posting links at such sites (found by any means, not necessary through DMCA take down notice – it could be a report from rights holders organizations such as Copycontrol too, or part of your own monitoring efforts), you’re banned and all of your files deleted.
That will stop copyright infringement cold, while not affecting other legitimate forms of usage of your service.
is that required by the law or you are speaking your own bull? Speak only the terms that are required by the law and these guys will implement it.
The law is silent on who has the right to have Visa and Mastercard payment processing on a web site. The law is silent about plenty of things. The law being silent on something does not preclude you from doing it to remain within the parameters set by third parties within certain relationships and business dealings.
If this site want to retain, at the very least, reliable payment processing into the future then it needs to become compliant.
Yes, that is the correct implementation of what is required by law of an ISP, when an ISP is a file hosting site.
Don’t listen to all this nonesense anti-sharing propaganda. There is no international law that says how a cyberlocker should be run. The way it is being done today is the way it will continue, just without the PPD program.
The whole “this is mine and you can’t have it” attitude that is being displayed on this blog needs to be eliminated.
OK go eliminate it freetard. The problem is, unless something that you want can be ripped and uploaded, you can’t have it, because you pirates are too dumb for anything else.
well, i personally report some illegal shares on hotfile.com to hotfile support, but they ask me to show proof as rights holder, while they know it well what i report is true Copyright Infringing Content!
hotfile only deletes files when they receive dmca take down notice.
so, what do you think of hotfile?
Let’s see in November when their trial will begin. I sure hope they’ll get their ass handed to them in court.
they ask for proof as a copyright holder, because only the copyright holder has the right to demand their work be taken down, as if they (the copyright holder) downloads the file(s) and it IS their material they aren’t breaking the law, where as if YOU download it and find it to be copyrighted material, even if you report it and delete it from your computer you are still guilty for downloading that file.
Hotfile is a great host, good speeds, my friend uses them (and other locker sites), to spread HIS music, and uses the affiliate program, to generate some revenue off HIS music since he’s a musician on the side to his regular career.
You guys aren’t hurting pirates, but the people who use this service the way it was intended, and ultimately you won’t stop piracy, it CANT be stopped unless we ignore peoples right to privacy…
also.. 1 download doesn’t equal a lost sale. If I downloaded a game that can ONLY be purchased in Japan, doesn’t ship outside of Japan, and won’t sell it as a download, did they truly lose a sale? nope, not at all
Here’s another example, my friend pirated about 30 PS3 games after the PS3 was hacked, prior to this he didn’t own a PS3, now those 30 games are PS3 exclusive, did those 30 games cause a loss of sales? nope, however, he DID then go and buy those games, because as a gamer he likes to show off his games, so actually those 30 pirated games, caused 30 REAL SALES.
” None of this protected him from police storming through his front door”
Not even the laws of New Zealand stopped them!
Kim Dotego ran a company that facilitated copyright infringement on a massive scale and his gains prompted a gazillion wannabes to do the same. He may be trying to promote himself as a ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘man of the people’ but he’s far from that. He’s an opportunist whose flagrant disregard for the law got him busted.
At the moment no one knows just how complicit he is in those illegal activities, but I suspect, given the noise he’s making trying to galvanise support and doing the predictable ‘freedom fighter’ routine, he’s acutely aware that what’ll be revealed in court will be damning and unequivocal evidence of his involvement.
Really hurt your feelings, didn’t he?
Want to talk about it?
This guy does not have a DMCA registration at the US copyright office. He is liable for $150,000 k for each file infringement. Somebody needs to sue his ass.
Wow.. so “stopfilelockers.com” is just a bunch of sad old people with a HATRED for people wanting to start out a business and become like one of the big corporates, you guys all talk about all this “his site has copyright files in lets take him down” but yet your too stupid to take down google?
Why Don’t you take down the BIGGEST copyright infringement company I mean heck they host to child porn, copyright on the biggest scale yet, everything you can imagine from killing someone to become a mass terrorist.
People that go “Oh this site/company has something illegal on there site we must sue them because its there fault they don’t violate the law and check there users files manually” are seriously sad just because some site has copyright material doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything to prevent it or helping it become one of the biggest copyright infringement sites like google.
This site is just sad why not make a site called “stopterroristsandmurder.com” that will ACTUALLY be doing good in this work by stopping world terror instead of being children taking down site owners because your too pathetic to understand there users upload this and not them.
After reading this article you reminded me that i have to go download the speech recognition software by Dragon. Thanks StopFileLockers for distributing proof that such files exist. Now I can get it for free!
All the porn, PC games, and software I want free! Thank you so much! I have no doubt that I’m going to save a ton of money as opposed to buying this stuff. Well I don’t have money anyway so what better way to get something than for free! Wooohoo!!.
@YoHoYoHo. Well at least you’re being honest and ‘fessing up to being a thief as opposed to trying to hang some kind of philosophy on your moronic behaviour. Good luck being a no-mark for the rest of your life
Except for the fact that the raid on kim dotcom was illegal and MEGA is now officially up