The legal team representing Megaupload (founder Kim Dotcom and others associated with the file-sharing and storage site) has submitted a response to the U.S. government’s argument that Megaupload should face prosecution in the U.S. despite not having a physical address in the country. They are accusing the Department of Justice of trying to make up their own rules to keep the criminal case alive when the case should be dismissed. Earlier this month lawyers for Megaupload asked the court to do just that because U.S.

The New Zealand judge overseeing the extradition of Kim Dotcom (the founder of file-sharing site Megaupload) has removed himself from the case after comments about the U.S. government being "the enemy" caught up to him. Last week at the NetHui conference in Auckland, Judge Harvey said that New Zealand had "met the enemy, and he is the US." The reference was related to how the U.S. handles copyright cases.

Porn publisher Liberty Media is trying out a new tactic in fighting against illegal downloads of its adult films: suing Wi-Fi network owners with negligence. The tactic, which it tested in the Southern District Court of New York (LIBERTY MEDIA HOLDINGS, LLC, v. CARY TABORA and SCHUYLER WHETSTONE) failed miserably.

Megaupload founder Kim DotCom was probably delighted to learn this week in a New Zealand court that his extradition hearing had been pushed to March of 2013. This gives him and his co-defendants a lot more time to fight the U.S. government's plans to extradite them to America to face a number of charges related to the popular file-sharing and hosting site allegedly used to share copyrighted materials. The U.S. government and New Zealand authorities took the site offline in January of this year and arrested DotCom and his colleagues for the aforementioned crimes.

Megaupload found Kim DotCom won't have to worry about the prospect of being shipped off to the United States to faces various charges related to the U.S. government's takedown of the popular file sharing and storage site. A New Zealand judge has pushed DotCom's extradition hearing to March of 2013. Naturally this will give DotCom more time to prepare for whatever lawyers for the U.S. government can throw at him.

The European Parliament has officially rejected the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The Parliament voted 478 to 39 to reject the ACTA, which means that it will never be implemented in any member country of the European Parliament. The news is not surprising, given that five committees voted against the treaty leading up to the showdown on the floor of the European Parliament this week. It also didn't help that ACTA was negotiated in secret and citizens in various member countries protested against it because of its loose and murky language.

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom seem to be having a change of heart about two key parts of an anti-piracy law. Lawmakers said at the end of last week that they plan to abandon legislative plans to block websites allegedly involved in distributing or sharing copyrighted materials.

A New Zealand Judge has handed a partial victory to Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom today, ruling that part of the search and seizure that resulted in the shutdown and destruction of MegaUpload’s business and the arrest of Dotcom was illegal. The judge said that police went too far when they secured and then copied the contents of hard drives from some 135 computers under a "general warrant."

Individuals claiming to be a part of the hacktivist group Anonymous have claimed responsibility for a series of cyber attacks on Japanese government websites. The websites for Japan's Finance Ministry, Supreme Court, and the DPJ and LDP political parties were taken down temporarily by attacks. The sites are now back online.

Ofcom, the regulations body in charge of media in the UK, has released details of a proposed plan that forces British ISPs to send warning letters to subscribers accused of copyright infringement by video game, music, film and other media companies. Under these proposed guidelines, individuals who receive three letters in a 12-month period would have their personal data, downloading and filesharing history handed over to the copyright owners to help them prepare for a lawsuit.

Denmark's government has decided that the best way to deal with illegal filesharing and piracy isn't by using letter-writing campaigns or punishing downloaders. After a long debate on the topic, the country has decided that the best course of action moving forward is to focus on the development and creation of better legal offerings for end users and education.

According to a Wired report, Japanese politicians are pushing hard for a new law that would make it a crime to download or make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. The new law would also make it illegal to use copyright circumvention devices. Those breaking the law could face up to two years in prison and a two million yen ($25,400) fine. We assume the devices being referred to are like the R4 used to copy DS games...

According to New Zealand publication Stuff, the FBI is on the defense after being accused in court by lawyers representing file sharing site Megaupload that it illegally exported data it seized from the company and its founder Kim Dotcom.

Whatever side of the issue you are on, it is never a good thing when a company that is seen as a major rights holder rails against piracy and file-sharing and then gets called out for ... piracy and file-sharing. Using the site YouHaveDownloaded.com, TorrentFreak has once again caught the employees of a major corporation engaging in the very thing that it publicly rails against and pays millions of dollars to fight.

Movie industry trade organization the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has hired a former Nintendo lawyer to head up its efforts to combat piracy. The group is also responsible for movie ratings. The MPAA announced on Monday that it hired Marc Miller to take control of its international anti-piracy enforcement operations.

He will serve as the senior vice president of Internet content protection and will work closely with the group’s army of lawyers to develop a refined civil and criminal litigation strategy to fight against copyright infringement.

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Poland says that BitTorrent’s uTP protocol is under serious attack from unknown forces in Russia, Canada, China, Australia and the USA. The group, which monitors cyber attacks around the world, says that attacks on the BitTorrent protocol are up substantially from 2011.

The attacks work by sending fake data packages that appear to be legitimate, but use IP-addresses that are forged. CERT also notes that these attacks seem to be targeting specific BitTorrent swarms that are sharing Russian movie releases.

Microsoft is reportedly backing a Russian-based start-up called "Pirate Pay" that claims to track and shut down BitTorrents that share copyrighted materials.

Emboldened by The Court of The Hauge’s January ruling that two of the Netherlands’s largest ISPs must implement a DNS and IP block of The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy group BREIN went ahead and sued a few more Dutch ISPs to censor the site.

Well, chalk up another success for BREIN because the Court has ruled that UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort must also block The Pirate Bay.  The blocking order covers 20 specific domains such as ThePirateBay.org, ThePirateBay.se, ThePirateBay.com, DePiraatBaii.be and TheMusicBay.net.

Last week's presidential election saw Socialist Francois Hollande rise to the highest political post in France. While this election may have serious repercussions all over the world, one side effect of it might be the end of the supposed "three-strikes" copyright infringement law better known by French citizens as "HADOPI." When we say end, we mean that HADOPI might not be enforced against internet users even though it might still take aim at large websites that traffic in copyrighted materials.

Last week the High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that the country’s leading ISPs must block their subscribers from The Pirate Bay. The ruling was supposed to kill the massive amounts of traffic that went to the popular BitTorrent site, but in the short-term it had the opposite effect - according to TorrentFreak.

You may recall that Crytek director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard said last week that a next-generation console that was capable of blocking the use of used games would be "awesome." This week the studio is backing away from that statement after fans gave them a piece of their mind. Hojengaard said the following when asked about such a console last week during the conclusion of this C&VG interview:

The highest court in the European Union has ruled that internet service providers can be compelled by courts to turn over private information of subscribers suspected of engaging in piracy or copyright infringement. Shortly after Sweden's anti-piracy legislation, IPRED, became law in 2009, five book publishers asked a local court to force ISP ePhone to hand over personal details on a subscriber who they allege stored more than 2000 audio books on his server. They claim that 27 of those audio books infringed on their copyrighted works.

On Monday Greek Police raided multiple locations in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki to arrest the operators of the popular BitTorrent site, GreekDDL. The popular file-sharing site has over 500,000 members according to authorities. While law enforcement initiated several raids, only one person was arrested: a 40-year-old woman who is allegedly one of the operators of the site. Police are looking to detain two other site admins, one of whom is reportedly being tracked with the help of Swedish authorities and Interpol. 

The Center for Copyright Information, an organization that was created to oversee a new anti-piracy regime negotiated by content providers and internet service providers last summer, has begun to take shape and some of its key leaders are surprising. The organization announced on Monday that the names of its executive director and several members of its advisory board. At face value, the choices to serve as the architects of the "Copyright Alert" system could strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and the rights of users.

A New Zealand Court has lightened some of the restrictions on Megaupload founders Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato. Noting the four had "behaved commendably" since their release from jail, North Shore District Court Judge David Harvey granted Dotcom access to the Internet, limited access to a swimming pool near his home (that he owns) and two trips each week to Roundhead Studios in Auckland to finish an album. Yes, Dotcom is making a music album. Dotcom was released from jail in March, but had a number of heavy restrictions put on him.

A new message posted on Pastebin and attributed to the hacking group Anonymous promises to shut down the entire internet on March 31. The group says that it will target the 13 root DNS servers that make up the bulk of the servers that give URL names to most of the Internet.

As to why they would want to do this, they say the following:

Clearwater, Florida-based ValCom issued a press release today announcing that it has retained legal counsel and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Megaupload to get a taste of the millions of dollars seized by the government. While ValCom claims in its releases that it "owns content that was pirated on the Megaupload.com group of sites," the company does not offer a specific list of titles.

An interesting article on TorrentFreak points out something we should have suspected all along: that everyday Megaupload users are not the only ones that have lost access to legal data - the U.S. government has also had some of its data locked down. According to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, the Department of Justice and members of the U.S. Senate have stored data on the site, which, ironically, they don't have access to because the U.S. government shut the site down.

Starbreeze hid an interesting easter egg within the disc for the PC version of Syndicate: a piracy style text file called "Syndicate-SBZ.nfo." The file, stylized after the calling cards pirates leave in cracked versions of software, offers some silly instructions on how to crack the game, followed by a more serious appeal to those pirating and cracking games: "Come work for us."

Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom says that when all of the court room drama is over, his company will win the fight against the U.S. government. Speaking to TorrentFreak over the phone (because he is not allowed to use the Internet), Dotcom said that he was doing fine now that he is out on bail and catching up. Dotcom was released on bail February 22. During the interview he recalled the chaos of January 19 when New Zealand law enforcement invaded his home to arrest him.