14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few days after the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued Megaupload and Kim Dotcom, the predictable happened – the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed a lawsuit as well.
The RIAA is accusing the site and its founders of copyright infringement, saying that the defendants have intentionally encouraged their users to upload content to the site for the purpose of distributing the copies to millions of others with no license or permission to copy or access them.
Quite notably, the two cases filed by the RIAA and the MPAA are incredibly similar. There are some 87 songs listed in the file, coming from artists such as Pink, Shakira, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Jay-Z.
“Our first response is that the RIAA, the MPAA, and the DOJ are like three blind mice following each other in the pursuit of meritless copyright claims,” said Ira Rothken, Dotcom's California-based attorney, reports ArsTechnica.
He says that this is all an assault by Hollywood on cloud storage in general because the claims they bring against Megaupload can also be brought against sites such as YouTube, Dropbox and others. “We believe that at the end of the day that the court will find their claims to be without merit and that the court will find that Megaupload and the others will prevail,” said Rothken.
Megaupload has proclaimed its innocence time and time again, saying that nothing that the US officials were saying was true. While they claimed that the site attracted and paid off users who uploaded infringing content, Dotcom says that files above 100MB did not earn rewards on the platform.
The bottom line is that Dotcom and his associates don’t want to be made to pay for what users of the platform did. After all, that’s the nature of the Internet – companies provide a tool and the way it is used depends from one individual to the next.
“Megaupload had in place a robust notice and takedown system,” said Ira Rothken, explaining just how the site dealt with copyright infringement.
For this reason, Dotcom and his lawyer expect that the MPAA and the RIAA actions will be stayed because the evidence needed to prosecute and defend the cases is stuck on servers that are under lockdown in Virginia. Therefore, the logistical issues are stopping Megaupload from making a proper case for itself.