Lotsa ants. (Photo: flickr.com/pinkmoose)

The MPAA and the RIAA aren't raking in as much cash as they used to. [TechDirt]

This breed of ants works a little like the Internet. [PC World]

Time Warner is expanding its fiber network in New York City, hopefully preventing any more techies from tearing their hair out over problems getting high-speed Internet. [Wall Street Journal]

IAC has purchased About.com for $300 million, because of synergy. [The Hollywood Reporter]

America's V.P. gets no Facebook love. [Buzzfeed]

Getting your Gmail hacked is going to look like a walk in the park once hackers can rifle through your innermost thoughts. [ZDNet]

Someone called the cops. (Screencap)

No wonder Kim Dotcom spends so much time taunting the authorities from his Twitter account. A New Zealand news outfit has released the first footage of the January raid on the Megaupload mogul's mansion, and sounds like Mr. Dotcom's dealings with the authorities have been aggravating, to say the least.

The video opens with a helicopter landing and the deployment of the officers participating in the raid. The disgorging of black-clad SWAT-type officers and unfriendly-looking police dogs is pretty much the extent of the spectacle, and there's no footage from the goings-on inside the house. However, the video also includes radio communications exchanged during the raid, and Channel 3 has spliced that with testimony from Mr. Dotcom himself to create a pretty good play-by-play:

http://youtu.be/pMas0tWc0sg

Frankly, we'd suspected that the colorful Mr. Dotcom might've been exaggerating just a tad for effect, but the video attests that the raid was just as Hollywood-blockbuster as he makes it sound.

For starters, Mr. Dotcom didn't suspect anything from just the chopper noise—as his guests often arrived early—but when he began hearing mysterious "pinging" sounds, he pressed a button to alert the entire household (via SMS) that something was up. From there he ducked to the "red room," how he apparently refers to the supposed "panic room" where the authorities found him. The door wasn't locked, he claims. "I thought, you know, I'd better wait for them to come to me," he told the court, "rather than me popping out of that secret door and maybe, you know, scaring someone who might shoot me."

That's probably the most commonsense thing Mr. Dotcom has ever said.

The room itself is a tad disappointing, though—just a chamber tucked behind a secret door in a hall closet. We were hoping for something a little more high-tech, not just an enormous empty room with tacky red carpeting. If you're going to bother with a hidden room, at least put some bookshelves and a liquor cabinet in there, you know?

Mr. Dotcom also reports that he got a little roughed up: "I had a punch to the face, I had boots kicking me down to the floor, I had a knee into the ribs."

One also gets the sense that the tide of opinion in New Zealand might be drifting to Mr. Dotcom. The anchor's voice-over drolly notes that, "If it all seems slightly ... American ... the FBI were there on the day and during the planning period leading up to it."

Subtext: Leave it to a bunch of Americans to turn the arrest of a suspected copyright violator into Live Free or Die Even Harder.

(Photo: TorrentFreak)

Earlier this week, Kim Dotcom offered TorrentFreak some "insider information," about why U.S. authorities were so aggressive in going after his file-sharing company, Megaupload, pointing the finger at none other than Vice President Joe Biden.

“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,” Mr. Dotcom told TorrentFreak. As evidence, he offered up scans of the White House visitor log, which shows visits from Mr. Dodd, and the CEOs of Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures, as well as the chairman of Walt Disney Studios and the president of Universal Studios all coinciding on July 27, 2011.

White House records, which are public, also show Mike Ellis, former superintendent of the Hong Kong police and currently an exec with MPAA's Asia division, showing up on the same date. Mr. Dotcom claims that Mr. Ellis is also an "extradition expert." Add in the fact that the MPAA has invested in lobbying Mr. Biden's office and--voila!--you have the makings of a high-level conspiracy theory.

But today CNET reports that the film industry is "laughing" at those allegations. The MPAA doesn't deny that those players were present, but tells CNET the purpose of that meeting was to help Mr. Biden prepare for a trip to China. The MPAA also "flatly denied," claims that Mr. Ellis was an extradition expert.

"The purpose of this meeting with the Vice President was to discuss his upcoming trip to China last August and the importance of reaching a settlement with the Chinese government of the United States World Trade Organization complaint against China, which would increase the number of foreign films permitted into that country and provide a better share of box office revenues," the MPAA said in a statement to CNET.

We're not what to make of the MPAA's decision to respond. If the theory was so outrageous, why even entertain it? That might have something to do with Mr. Dotcom's facility with generating headlines, a skill he recently promised to tone down.

I agree @brianedwardsmed - I need to take a step back & chill. But I'm no PR guru. This is just raw, unfiltered, transparent & honest me.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 4, 2012

Contrite claims of truth-telling wrapped up in a #humblebrag--a PR pro couldn't have written it any better.

Ask this guy what happens when you cross the MPAA.

It’s going to take more than the Megaupload takedown to satisfy the copyright Rottweilers at the MPAA. Now they’re determined to convince the legal world that not just hosting, but embedding protected content is a form of direct infringement, says Ars Technica.

At issue: An internet pornography company, Flava Works, discovered its adult wares being shared on the video bookmarking site MyVidster. MyVidster wasn’t hosting the videos; they were merely embedded. Previous precedent suggests that, at worst, this would fall under the harder-to-enforce rules regarding secondary infringement, which carries lighter penalties. But last July, Judge John F. Grady ruled that MyVidster was engaging in a form of direct infringement. Google and Facebook and the Electronic Frontier Foundation quickly filed amicus briefs, calling for an overturn.

That’s where the MPAA jumped in with its own brief supporting the decision and asking that the court draw no distinction between the two acts. The organization, while magnanimously acknowledging that "there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links," points outs that "this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites." The brief continues:

Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.

Such a precedent would likely make sites think twice about even allowing embedding. Because who wants to be dragged out of a panic room in the middle of the night?

Mr. Dotcom and his "Guilty" Mercedes. (buzzfeed.com)

First he came for the U.S. government, but now it looks like the entertainment industry is next on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's revenge list. The notorious copyright outlaw took a break from lounging in bubble baths today to leak some compelling details of his U.S. indictment, a few of which shed a damning light on some entertainment industry bigwigs.

Mr. Dotcom shared five emails from companies like Disney, Warner Brothers and Fox with TorrentFreak. The emails reveal that just weeks before a federal investigation into Megaupload was launched, entertainment industry officials were interested in partnering with the company.

The emails indicate that the entertainment industry sought advertising and hosting opportunities on Megaupload. One email from a counsel at Walt Disney shows that, while the company wanted to work to distribute content via Megaupload, they were "uncomfortable with a couple of the provisions of your Terms of Use that we feel may jeopardize our rights in our content."

These new details, along with the claims that U.S. government officials were big Mega fans, muddy an already bizarre case. Mr. Dotcom is still on house arrest awaiting potential extradition from his sprawling Auckland mansion. The New Zealand courts are forcing poor Mr. Dotcom to live on less than $9,000 a week, like some kind of quarantined mid-century pauper.

Mr. Dotcom also claims he is being indicted for hosting a 50 Cent song on Megaupload, which is pretty much the exact kind of music we picture him listening to while lowriding in a Mercedes with a "Guilty" license plate. Get rich or die tryin', indeed.

Hello, my name is Kim Dotcom. You killed my website. Prepare to die.

Now that Kim Dotcom is in custody, details about the FBI's two year investigation into Megaupload are surfacing. According to CNET, the grunt work can be traced back to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Record labels and software and videogame companies all accused Megaupload of copyright violations, but it was Hollywood that presented the FBI with  "significant evidence."

Although reports have said pressure came from managers of the four major record labels, it was the MPAA that "first referred MegaUpload and DotCom to law enforcement." In their minds, it was the TV shows and movies that contributed to MegaUpload's estimated $500 million in lost revenues.

It's as though the record industry was blazay blah about the alleged piracy, however, they were just too busy trying to get LimeWire shut down:

"The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group for the four largest record labels, also spoke to the FBI about MegaUpload but provided little information outside of listing the pirated songs available on the site. At the time, the RIAA was much more focused on its court fight with file-sharing service LimeWire, which it eventually won. LimeWire was forced to shut down operations in 2010."

The Justice Department wouldn't elaborate about the lead up to the bust, but Neil MacBride, the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who filed the indictment, did tell CNET:

"In general, it is clear that the U.S. government receives referrals from all sorts of sources in criminal cases, including victims of crime. We will investigate any referral containing significant and concrete evidence of criminal conduct. Intellectual property enforcement is no different."

So does that mean we can report Congress to the DOJ for crimes against the Internet?

You mess with the Internet, you get Anonymous.

Well now we know why we haven't been able to access at the Department of Justice's press release about its raid on Megaupload for the past few hours!

The websites for the U.S. Justice Department, the Recording Industry Association of America, Motion Picture Association of America, and Universal Music Group have all been down this afternoon. As TPMIdeaLab reports, hackers who associate themselves with Anonymous are taking credit. Twitter accounts like @YourAnonNews and @AnonOps claim the attacks are in retaliation for today's shutdown and arrests related to the file sharing site Megaupload.

ONE HOUR! Tango down! universalmusic.com & justice.gov #Megaupload

— AnonOps (@anonops) January 19, 2012

Anonymous/Megaupload backlash update: RIAA.ORG is now Tango Down | #OpPayback #OpMegaupload #SOPA #PIPA

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 19, 2012

The government takes down #Megaupload? 15 minutes later #Anonymous takes down government & record label sites. #ExpectUs

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 19, 2012

Betabeat has not been able to access the DOJ's site since at least 3.30pm EST and as of publishing, we can't access the RIAA, or UMG websites either, although the MPAA site has started loading. Hello there, Matt Damon! You bought a zoo!

The same DOJ press release we've been trying to click on was posted on Pastebin, a popular hangout for Anon hackers. As IdeaLab points out, "But going after the Justice Department’s website probably isn’t the brightest idea, given that the feds believe that DDoS attacks are a crime and have charged members of the group Anonymous for such efforts in the past."

However, between the blackouts in response to SOPA and Israeli hackers retaliating against Arab hackers, it seems digital tit for tat is the new mode of political discourse. In the case of Megaupload founder Kim Schmidt (aka Kim Dotcom), Anonymous might find itself once again in the Julian Assange spot of backing a man of questionable intentions in the name of the free flow of information. Not that they care, necessarily.