MegaVeep: Biden behind MegaUpload shutdown – Kim Dotcom

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom says that a “credible source” has indicated that US Vice President Joe Biden ordered the cloud-sharing website to be taken down in January.

“I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney Neil MacBride to take Mega down,” Kim Dotcom told weblog Torrentfreak. MacBride, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is the lead prosecutor in the case against Dotcom and his associates.Dotcom believes that the White House discussed the MegaUpload case with major studio bosses, as well as the CEO of the MPAA Chris Dodd, as early as last summer. “After we received information from an insider we scanned the White House visitor logs for all meetings of Chris Dodd and studio bosses with Joe Biden and Obama,” Dotcom stated. “It is interesting that a man by the name of Mike Ellis of MPA Asia, an extradition expert and former superintendent of the Hong Kong police, was also at a meeting with Dodd, all studio bosses and Joe Biden. The same Mike Ellis met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power in New Zealand.”These visitor logs are publicly available on the White House website.The names in the list include Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer, Paramount Pictures CEO Brad Grey, as well as Jeff Blake, the Vice President of Sony Pictures Entertainment.The MPAA, an abbreviation for the Motion Picture Association of America, is a trade association made up of six mammoth Hollywood studios – Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. Eager to curb what they claim is copyright infringement that costs them a hefty sum, the MPAA is known to target peer-to-peer file sharing websites, as well as hosting services such as MegaUpload. Biden’s close relationship with MPAA boss and former fellow Senator Chris Dodd, as well as his relentless stance against piracy may have played a role in his involvement in the MegaUpload case. The MPAA is also known to have spent $400,000 lobbying influential government departments, including the Office of the Vice President, who in 2010 stated that “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple.”Kim Dotcom, along with five of his associates, was arrested by police in New Zealand in January. The arrests followed an indictment of Dotcom on charges of criminal copyright infringement filed by the United States. MegaUpload was taken offline, and authorities raided its offices and Dotcom’s mansion, seizing hard drivers from computers as evidence. The United States later took hold of copies of that evidence, despite an agreement between the prosecution and the defense in New Zealand that the evidence was to remain in the country. The prosecution still needs to prove that Dotcom and his associates personally facilitated and profited from the piracy that took place on the website. Last week, the plaintiff received a major blow after New Zealand’s High Court ruled that the raid on Kim Dotcom’s house was illegal, along with the seizure of computer data that was later cloned and taken to the United States by the FBI.