Following last week’s announcement that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was suing MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom for allegedly profiting from copyright infringement, the group’s record industry equivalent, the RIAA, has announced that they too are suing Dotcom.
In a statement posted to their official website, the Recording Industry Association of America states that Dotcom and the three other targets of the suit “wilfully engaged in, actively encouraged, and handsomely profited from massive copyright infringement of music on the Megaupload service.”
Both the RIAA and MPAA’s suits quote numbers from a 2012 US Justice Department indictment that saw the popular file-hosting site shut down. The Department’s numbers indicate Megaupload took in $175 million during its operation, while costing copyright owners more than $500 million.
“Megaupload Limited played an active role in ensuring that it had the most popular content on its servers, that the URL links to those infringing content files were widely disseminated on the Internet, and that the links were advertised and promoted by pirate linking sites, so that the maximum number of Megaupload users would access the infringing content,” the RIAA contend in their filing.
Also taken to task in the RIAA’s suit is the site’s ‘premium’ subscriptions, alleging that they allowed Megaupload’s operators to “further [exercise] active control over the process of providing [illegal] content by regulating the volume and speed of transmissions” to the site’s non-premium users.
Filing on behalf of Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Capitol Records, the group also named Megaupload co-founder and chief technical oficer Matthias Ortmann, lead shareholder Vestor Limited, and head programmer Bram van der Kolk as plaintiffs.
