MegaUpload Battle Continues

MegaUpload’s founder Kim Dotcom and his attorneys keep fighting back the criminal charges brought against them by the American authorities.

Dotcom’s attorneys have recently asked the Virginia Federal Court to drop the charges against the company founder and his colleagues, because the US violated MegaUpload’s 5th amendment right to due process when the country’s authorities shut down the file-sharing service. In case the court agrees to drop the case, this decision would bring one of the largest criminal copyright cases filed by the United States to an end.

In their desperate attempts to shut down Dotcom’s multi-billion dollar business, the authorities of the United States didn’t just seize the website’s domain names and servers, but also took away Kim’s personal belongings. Then, trying to extradite Dotcom and his colleagues, the US law enforcement had asked help from foreign authorities.

Since the moment of their arrest, Kim Dotcom and his colleagues have battled American authorities in order to escape extradition, and their efforts seem to be successful, at least partly.

In addition, Dotcom’s attorney, Ira Rothken, continues insisting that the file-sharing service can’t be served outside the jurisdiction of the United States. That’s why, if the Virginia Federal Court decides to drop the case of MegaUpload, it would clearly represent a deadly blow to the American government, which would eventually be sued itself.

MegaUpload hosting service was closed this past January, and since then the case has been holding the attention of the industry observers all over the world, who are now waiting for the court decision to see what’s going to happen.

Methods to Circumvent American 6-Strikes Law

1st of July 2012 is when the largest effort of the US to fight piracy – the six-strike regime – will start. The system represents the collaboration between the largest country’s Internet service providers and the entertainment industry, represented by the MPAA and RIAA.

The list of participating ISPs includes Time Warner Cable, Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision, and Verizon. The 6-strike system mainly focuses on copyrighted content located on BitTorrent networks.

However, there’s something that raises not just morality questions, but also the legal ones. The matter is that the entertainment industry in cooperation with ISPs is planning to be the judge of all digital material without letting anyone to check on them.

In addition, they believe that the BitTorrent network is facilitating the infringement of copyrighted content, which seems to be one of the most ridiculous ideas to many. However, instead of pinning every drawback of the graduated response regime, we may offer you four convenient ways to circumvent it.

1. VPN services. When the entertainment industry is scanning open P2P networks, your IP address is both vulnerable and easy to track. You can mask your IP address by subscribing to a VPN (Virtual Private Network) – this will hide your real IP from all public view. Moreover, VPNs don’t keep logs, so there won’t be any trail to track.
2. Proxy services. They are quite similar to VPNs, but they do not re-route online traffic through a number of remote servers, which simply hide specific programs and protocols.
3. Seedbox services. In case you want to be 100% secure, check out a seedbox, which provides anonymity by downloading torrent files to some remote machine not attached to your IP address. When the download is ready, the content will be transferred to the user’s PC without BitTorrent’s involvement. Such seedboxes offer fast connection speeds.
4. Private networks. As it was said above, the entertainment industry will scan open P2P networks, including servicers like The Pirate Bay. However, aside from open networks, you can also find private trackers staying under the radar and keeping you safe.

Other alternatives include obsolete utilities like the Internet relay chat (IRC), Usenet, Freenet Project, and digital storage lockers.