"I have instructed my departments... to immediately suspend the site www.me.ga," announced Communication Minister Blaise Louembe, saying he wanted to "protect intellectual property rights" and "fight cyber crime effectively".

"Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people," the minister said.

On information and belief, Plaintiffs have been investigating Hotfile for over a year in which time they were aware of particular URLs of files that they believed to be infringing and had decided to contend that Hotfile’s content protection policies were inadequate. Rather than diligently and promptly bringing suit, however, Plaintiffs and their content protection agents delayed in seeking any remedy. Not only did Plaintiffs inexplicably fail to bring suit or otherwise give Hotfile notice of their allegations during this period, to the contrary, they repeatedly complimented Hotfile’s content protection efforts, offered for Hotfile to become a business affiliate, and refrained from using their Special Rightsholder Accounts to takedown the files they believed were infringing. Plaintiffs thereby perpetuated the very infringement they now allege in this case. Plaintiffs’ unreasonable delay resulted in prejudice by causing Hotfile to leave up the files that are now alleged to infringe, inducing Hotfile to maintain the very content protection policies Plaintiffs now impugn, and causing potentially helpful evidence to be lost....

Warner has acted unscrupulously and dishonestly. Not only has Warner (along with four other major motion picture studios) filed this unfounded and contrived litigation against Hotfile employing overly aggressive tactics, Warner has made repeated, reckless and irresponsible misrepresentations to Hotfile falsely claiming to own copyrights in (or to have the owners’ authorization to delete) material from Hotfile.com. Worse, Warner continued to make these misrepresentations even after Hotfile explicitly brought this rampant abuse to Warner’s attention, ruling out any possibility that its wrongful actions were accidental or unknowing. Thus, Warner has knowingly made misrepresentations and it has engaged in DMCA abuse on an unprecedented scale by grossly misusing the powerful anti-piracy software tool that Hotfile specially created at Warner’s request.

"Nothing in the complaint alleges that Hotfile or Mr. Titov took direct, volitional steps to violate the plaintiffs' infringement. There are no allegations, say, that Hotfile uploaded copyrighted material. Therefore, under the great weight of authority, the plaintiffs have failed to allege direct copyright infringement."