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.

That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.

The back story of how the government continually failed to prove cause in its case against Dajaz1 is certainly creepy enough to feed into the web's long-standing paranoia regarding federal efforts to control sharing content online. Los Angeles-based federal prosecutors were able to keep the site shuttered so long by obtaining extended time on three separate occasions--and they did it in secret.

Dajaz1's attorney termed these actions equal to "seizing the printing press of the New York Times" because the Times referred readers to concerts given by promoters who didn't pay A.S.C.A.P. fees for performances.

Attorney Bridges's remarks end with a direct statement regarding recent government efforts to make new laws supposedly aimed at piracy:

This entire episode shows that neither the government nor the recording industry deserves any additional powers with new so-called “antipiracy” legislation, especially in the context where copyright law has been expanded and new anti-piracy remedies have been crafted ***16 times*** since 1982. This episode shows that the copyright establishment and the government are very much the “rogues” that deserve to be reined in.

Critics of S.O.P.A. and its successor, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (C.I.S.P.A.)--one a failed attempt at shoring up digital piracy laws, the other a similar attempt that could well succeed--might consider a statement like that a rallying cry.

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?

Megaupload/Megavideo was shut down by the Federal Government last week! It was sad. Also—coincidentally, or not—right around the time SOPA and PIPA, the anti-piracy legislation meant to prevent sites like Megaupload from ever doing business, died their own lame legislative deaths.

A week later, the Recording Industry Association of America has issued a press release basically dancing over the grave of the cloud-upload site.

Via Billboard, RIAA's VP of something called "Strategic Data Analysis" (or "Why We Hate The Internet, In Numbers), one Joshua P. Friedlander wrote a blog posts about how great it is that Megaupload is dead. The post bears the not-at-all-subtle title of "Why Closing Megaupload Matters." In your face, everyone who isn't the RIAA:

The shutdown of illegal sites helps create a thriving and diverse digital marketplace. It encourages users to go to legitimate sites, and enables great new services to be launched - like Spotify, which launched in the US last year and quickly signed up millions of new users. It's always reassuring when the data we see in the market reflects what we thought was just common sense.

What most other people think is common sense is not paying for something they can get for free. Like music. On Megaupload. Granted, this is also known as "stealing," but they're probably going to split hairs on this one nonetheless. Also, goes without saying, but the RIAA is probably not helping their odds of coming under another hacker attack with this one.

Pitchfork Media points out two other interesting facets of this story:

1. Other sites making sure their dead corpses don't end up like Megaupload's. This is probably going to make Filestube a whole lot less fun.

2. Megaupload's founder, the absurdly-named and not-surprisingly-obese Kim Dotcom, will be making an album. Which nobody will likely pay for whether he charges them for it or not.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

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.

Unfortunately for musicians, many of whom are literally poor, the record companies are going to get the lions share.

One week into a federal grand jury trial, Michael Gorton, LimeWire’s founder, agreed to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $105 million. Gorton was already found guilty of copyright infringement, so the trial was about how much LimeWire would have to pay up, not if.

Having to pay $105 million is actually a good deal for LimeWire, since the RIAA was asking for a total of $1.4 billion.

But this is not a good deal for artists. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that any money awarded from piracy-related lawsuits will go towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns.

If this is indeed how the money will be spent, it doesn’t bode well for the RIAA’s faith in the effectiveness of the existing anti-piracy campaign.

Which is exactly what LimeWire’s lawyers argued – that music piracy was not invented by LimeWire and will keep happening even after people just remember LimeWire in a vague, Napster-y way.

During the trial, Gorton’s attorney told jurors that when a file-sharing service goes offline, users “just funnel into the next-best service.”

“The next best thing” is kind of a catchy name for a new file sharing service. Some savvy pirates should snap that up while the domain is still available.

But a new wave of free music start-ups is gaining momentum as the peer-to-peer services die off: ExFM, Hype Machine and Grooveshark, streaming music start-ups that are niggling around the system by keeping files in the cloud, are just a few either based in or with significant presence in New York. Viva la résistance.