Just three days after the Motion Picture Association of America brought a civil lawsuit against Megaupload, the Recording Industry Association of America has jumped in with its own case.
In addition to the existing criminal copyright infringement case being prosecuted by the Justice Department in the Eastern District of Virginia, the Thursday lawsuit now brings to three the number of lawsuits filed against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and his colleagues.
Dotcom and the others were initially arrested in a botched January 2012 raid on his mansion estate in New Zealand. He has since been fighting local authorities to prevent his extradition to the United States—that trial could be held as early as July.
“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. “We believe that the claims against Megaupload are really an assault by Hollywood on cloud storage in general as Megaupload used copyright neutral technology and whatever allegations they can make against Megaupload they can make against YouTube, Dropbox, and others. And 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.”
Coldplay, Nickelback, and Jay-Z
The allegations in the RIAA’s 30-page complaint are similar to previous accusations listed in the MPAA and criminal case. It alleges direct copyright infringement and inducement of copyright infringement, among other things.
As the RIAA suit states:
To ensure a vast and ever-growing supply of popular copyrighted content to which they could sell premium access, Defendants paid users to upload popular content to Megaupload’s servers. Defendants’ Uploader Rewards program promised premium subscribers cash and other financial incentives if they uploaded popular works, primarily copyrighted works, to Megaupload’s servers. The rewards program also encouraged users to publicly promote links to that content, so that the content would be widely downloaded.
Although the Uploader Rewards program’s financial incentives changed over the life of Megaupload, during the time period most relevant to this Complaint, Defendants offered one reward point each time that a user’s file was downloaded, and offered the user rewards ranging from free premium membership subscriptions all the way to cash awards of as much as $10,000.
The suit includes a long list of 87 songs the recording industry said were available on Megaupload, including titles by Kings of Leon, Pink, Shakira, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Nickelback, and Jay-Z, among others.