Senator tells Visa and MasterCard to stop serving “cyberlockers”
3 replies, posted
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The head of the Senate Judiciary Committee has sent letters to the two leading credit card companies, asking them to stop serving 30 Web storage services, including Kim Dotcom's Mega, that were called out in an earlier report attacking Internet "cyberlockers."
"The cyberlockers listed in the [URL="http://www2.itif.org/2014-netnames-profitability.pdf"]NetNames report (PDF)[/URL] bear clear red flags of having no legitimate purpose or activity," wrote Sen. Patrick Leahy in letters addressed to the CEOs of MasterCard and Visa. 29 of the 30 sites accept Visa and MasterCard, and some of them bear the credit companies' logos, which "lends the sites a harmful imprimatur of legitimacy," stated Leahy.
"I ask MasterCard to swiftly review complaints against those cyberlockers and to ensure that payment processing services offered by MasterCard to those sites, or any others dedicated to infringing activity, cease," the senator wrote in the [URL="http://www.leahy.senate.gov/download/binder1"]letter (PDF)[/URL] to MasterCard. The wording in the letter to Visa is nearly identical.
The report Leahy references was published in September and funded by Digital Citizens Alliance, a group that produces [URL="http://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/cac/alliance/resources.aspx"]reports about online crime[/URL]. Many of those reports are [URL="http://stevenimmons.org/2014/03/digital-citizens-alliance-report-strongly-critical-google/"]dedicated to blaming Google[/URL]for [URL="http://media.digitalcitizensactionalliance.org/314A5A5A9ABBBBC5E3BD824CF47C46EF4B9D3A76/7e5715e4-cbd0-4a98-9222-98f5337521f5.pdf"]all manner[/URL] of Internet wrongs.
In this report, the group is focused on pressuring Visa and Mastercard, and Leahy seems to have taken up their challenge.
Leahy, who will lose his committee chairmanship when the new Congress is seated in January, differentiates the 30 named services from "lawful cloud storage services" without much detail as to what makes them different. The cyberlockers "exist to unlawfully store and disseminate infringing files around the world," he writes.
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[url]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/senator-tells-visa-and-mastercard-to-stop-serving-cyberlockers/[/url]
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/cKrI4I4.png[/IMG]
there's a tiny little bit of sense in fighting these sites, since with affordable cloud hosting from big names being an option now, they're mostly breeding grounds for malware and awfully pirated media, but this is the wrong approach
They'll just switch to PaySafeCards and Bitcoin if this happens. It may have worked 5 years ago but it's so easy to send money online without credit cards these days. Hell, there are Bitcoin-based payment processors that would still let you use your bank account or credit card to anonymously send them Bitcoins, which then automatically get converted back into real money.
[QUOTE=latin_geek;46596804]
there's a tiny little bit of sense in fighting these sites, since with affordable cloud hosting from big names being an option now, they're mostly breeding grounds for malware and awfully pirated media, but this is the wrong approach[/QUOTE]
So if you're not a 'big name' you're not allowed to run a file hosting site?
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