The Justice Department on Friday released more details about the operations of the now-defunct Megaupload.com, including the fact that 90 percent of those who used the site did so to download files rather than store items in the cloud.

The Justice Department on Friday released more details about the operations of the now-defunct Megaupload.com, including the fact that 90 percent of those who used the site did so to download files rather than store items in the cloud.

Megaupload executives were also charged with additional counts of copyright infringement and wire fraud.

The information was included in a superseding indictment that was returned yesterday in a Virginia district court.

According to the document, Megaupload claimed to have 180 million registered users, but records on the site's internal computer systems found 66.6 million registered users as of Jan. 19, 2012. Of that 66 million, however, only 5.86 million ever uploaded a file to Megaupload.com or Megavideo.com, "demonstrating that more than 90 percent of their registered users only used the defendants' systems to download," the DOJ said today.

The last month for massive copyright infringement, and arrested several of its executives, who face up to 50 years in prison. The site's founder, Kim Dotcom, is currently imprisoned in New Zealand, where he resided in a lavish mansion until his arrest last month. Some of the company's servers were located in Virginia, however, allowing U.S. intervention.

According to yesterday's indictment, the additional charges against Dotcom and other Megaupload execs stem from efforts to reproduce copyrighted material from third-party websites like YouTube and make them available on Megavideo.com. This created "the false impression that Megavideo.com hosted primarily user-generated content instead of copyright-infringing content," the DOJ said.

The new wire fraud charges, meanwhile, include accusations that Megaupload falsely told rightsholders that their content had been removed from Megaupload servers.

A particularly prolific Megaupload user who was uploading some of that content was known as VV. He was the recipient of various takedown emails since 2008, including 85 from one copyright holder alone. VV earned $3,400 in "rewards" payments from Megaupload in 2008 and 2009, which were funds the site handed out to people whose files were consistently downloaded by users. VV added copies of movies like Ocean's Thirteen, Ratatouille, and Evan Almighty to Megaupload, and "internal records reflect no deletions of any of VV's uploaded files," the DOJ said.

"The Mega Conspiracy created a computer system architecture which kept its most frequently downloaded files in memory (rather than in storage) on a number of dedicated high-end servers," the DOJ said. "Most of the files on these servers were infringing copies of copyrighted works."

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