From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. It has been a wild week in the world of online piracy.

On Thursday, the U.S. government carried out a multi-nation operation against the mega-popular file-sharing website, Mega Uplode,

arresting four people, including its founder, Kim.com.

Yeah, Kim.com, formerly Schmitz. In the, as it turns out, not so safe, safe room of his

New Zealand mansion, dot com stood helpless as authorities shuttered his site and seized a reported $50 million worth of assets,

including 18 internet domain names, guns, artwork, one pink Cadillac, and piles of cash.

Mega upload is, was what's called a locker service. It allows users to upload files and give a link to others to then download them.

The U.S. government claims that the website frequently and willfully facilitated piracy on an epic scale.

That, however, did not stop a host of entertainers, including Alicia Keys, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Chris Brown, and P. Diddy from recording a song, commissioned by dot com, about their love for mega upload.

Pee Upload.

Predictably, immediately after the mega upload arrests were announced, the e-vigilantes

known as anonymous went on an internet retaliation spree, taking down the websites of the FBI,

the Department of Justice, and the associations for the motion picture and recording industries.

As Fox News observed,

It is a kind of civil war that is happening right now on the Internet.

CNN was slightly more circumspect, linking the Mega Upload case

to the other ongoing anti-piracy story that had been dominating coverage for the previous four days.

Well, they said that yesterday the shutdown of of mega upload.com, was really the straw that broke

the camels back.

We've seen anonymous protesting anti-piracy legislation all week, legislation such as SOPA.

Ah, SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial House bill that would force advertisers to remove ads from websites deemed rogue by the Justice Department.

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