The government said the site, which generated millions in user fees and advertising, facilitated copyright infringement of movies "often before their theatrical release, music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale." The government said Megaupload's "estimated harm" to copyright holders was "well in excess of $500 million."

The superseding indictment in the Eastern District of Virginia also claims that Megaupload paid one of its registered users $3,400 between 2008 and 2009 for uploading 16,960 files that generated 34 million views. The files included motion pictures Ocean's Thirteen, Ratatouille and Evan Almighty, the government said.

As you recall, last month's SOPA/PIPA protests were followed the very next day by the US government shutting down Megaupload.

It creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty, where services with perfectly legitimate intent can be accused of criminal activities based on very questionable claims. Perhaps the most ridiculous is the catch-22 situation in which Megaupload got blamed for trying to hide the infringing activity on its site. If it had left it up, it would have been accused of facilitating or inducing infringement, but by making it hard to find, it's accused of conspiracy to hide the activity.

What's amazing is that no one in the US government (or at GoDaddy) seems to be willing to explain what happened. When GoDaddy completely shut down JotForm.com with no notice, the folks at JotForm had to inquire as to what the hell happened to their entire website. They were merely told to contact a Secret Service agent.

Almost everything about this sets off alarm bells about over aggressive (and potentially illegal) censorship by the US government of protected free speech.

The Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, formerly called the Lawful Access Act, would require ISPs to install monitoring equipment giving the police and other government authorities access to internet user’s online history and communications, as well as their physical and email addresses, IP information, and other identifiers.

His remarks, and the Conservative government’s intransigence over the issue, led to accusations that Toews was hiding behind the abuse of children to justify a bill that is massively unpopular.

If the now 25-year-old had indeed removed his torrents as he had claimed then things might have turned out differently, but he didn’t and the court found him guilty of the willful copyright infringement of 60 movies between February 2010 and December 2010.

The court, however, did not consider the offenses to be serious enough to warrant a prison sentence so instead imposed a fine of 6000 kronor – approximately $900.

Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad expressed his deep displeasure at the decision saying that the offenses were tantamount to “going into a store every week for a year and shoplifting” and should not have been considered as a single act.

The motion, Mueller says, is based on four patents: a "data tapping" patent, a patent involving Siri and unified search, a new slide-to-unlock patent, and a word-completion patent for touch-screen entry of text.

The "data tapping" feature, which, for example, lets users tap on a phone number in an e-mail to automatically make a phone call, got Android-handset maker HTC into hot water last year.

Slide-to-unlock is currently at play in an Apple legal action against the Galaxy Nexus in Germany, where a resolution of some sort is expected in March.

Google is at daggers end with a law firm it's been using since 2008, after discovering that lawyers in the law firm, named Pepper Hamilton LLP, were representing a patent licensing business that sued Google's Android partners last month.

It is now apparent that with so much patent litigation among technology companies there is bound to be some overlap, among lawyers.

What drew the most ire recently was the release of Zynga’s Dream Heights, a clone of Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower, which also happened to be last year’s iPhone Game of the Year.

Pincus once famously said “I don’t f***ing want innovation. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

There’s no “inspiration” here, only thievery. Yes, they change the code and draw up new artwork to avoid any legal trouble (after getting in hot water for not doing that when they stole Farmville), but it’s the bare minimum to avoid legal retribution.

All the photos, video and files stored on file-sharing site Megaupload could be permanently deleted from its servers sometime this week, according to federal prosecutors.

Megaupload's bank accounts have been frozen by federal authorities, preventing the company from paying its hosting bills, Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken told the Associated Press.

"It is important to note that Mega clearly warned users to keep copies of any files they uploaded," the DOJ said.

The shutdown reflects the "increasing crackdown" on intellectual property violations online and it won't be a "big surprise" if similar sites are affected, Lipson said.

The Pirate Party of Catalonia is organizing the equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the FBI in a Spanish court, claiming damages to legitimate users of the file-sharing site Megaupload.

Stating that the FBI has "impeded the access to millions of archives of both private individuals and organizations, potentially causing huge personal, economic and image damages," the Pirate Party also suggests that private data might have been misappropriated by the FBI and other authorities in the course of the investigation, violating privacy rights.