Senator tells Visa and MasterCard to stop serving “cyberlockers” | Ars Technica

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 NetNames report (PDF) 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 letter (PDF) 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 reports about online crime. Many of those reports are dedicated to blaming Google for all manner 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.

The report lists the 30 cyberlockers, with names like RapidGator, FreakShare, and Videoweed, saying they're part of a "shadowy" group that makes an estimated $96 million annually through distributing content. The cyberlockers don't have internal search engines, but the report describes how external "linking sites" point users to copyrighted content. The sites charge for premium download and access services, and it's typically those premium users who get asked for their MasterCard or Visa credit cards.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/senator-tells-visa-and-mastercard-to-stop-serving-cyberlockers/