"We're just like YouTube," Megaupload lawyer tells Ars
Megaupload's US attorney, Ira Rothken, has a succinct description of the US government case against his client: "wrong on the facts and wrong on the law."
The week has been a busy one for Rothken, a San Francisco Internet law attorney who has previously represented sites like isoHunt and video game studios like Pandemic. When I call, he's eating crab cakes and waiting for yet another meeting to start, but he has plenty of time to attack the government's handling of the Megaupload case.
In Rothken's words, the government is acting like a "copyright extremist" by taking down one of the world's largest cloud storage services "without any notice or chance for Megaupload to be heard in a court of law." The result is both "offensive to the rights of Megaupload but also to the rights of millions of consumers worldwide" who stored personal data with the service. The best way to look at Megaupload, he says, is through the lens of Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube—an ongoing civil case which Viacom lost at trial. (It is being appealed.)
