McLEAN, Va. (AP) â One of the worldâs largest file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, federal prosecutors said.An indictment accuses Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart online piracy.Read More on Time.com or via Google News
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
yeah! hope they keep moving onto the rest of them
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
This is indeed great news. MegaUpload has always been one of the largest and most blatant offenders, and I’m sure this will send out a big message to others that piracy does not pay.
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
Have to agree with this, they are one of the worst for it. I still don’t think it’ll stop it though.
Funny how they can suddenly do all of this without SOPA/PIPA and yet some are still supporting those ridiculous pieces of legislation! 
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
[QUOTE=conran;108815]Have to agree with this, they are one of the worst for it. I still don’t think it’ll stop it though.
Funny how they can suddenly do all of this without SOPA/PIPA and yet some are still supporting those ridiculous pieces of legislation! :D[/QUOTE]
It wasn’t that “suddenly”. It took 2 years of investigation and the FBI was assisted by the authorities in New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and the Philippines.
With SOPA/PIPA, it would have been easier to block access to MegaUpload - but they would still need to do an extensive investigation to be able to arrest people for organized criminal activities, money laundering, possession of weapons (like they did now).
I hope more illegal file sharing sites will be taken down and I also hope this action has scared people, but I doubt it.
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
I have a simple solution, one that I think would really help educate the world on this issue.
These guys think everything should be free. Okay, sobeit, let’s go there:
- Let’s publish the addresses of the two guys who were arrested.
- Let’s publish the addresses of the 10 biggest uploaders of copyrighted content
- Now, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, let’s all show up at their houses, crash through the doors, and hundreds or thousands of us will just take everything they own, everything they’ve worked their whole lives to attain, then we’ll all move on to the next guy
Is this essentially what we’re talking about?
Oh yeah, and someone has to film the whole thing so that we can play the tape for these guys and let them sit their and watch everyone taking everything that they own. Then we’ll see just how “free” they think everything should be.
It should all be free, right? Everyone should have free access to everything, right? No one should have to pay for anything, right?
I guess we’re only talking about big companies who make “too” much money. We’re not talking about walking into Chan’s Fruit Market and walking out with whatever fruit we want, no that’s stealing. We’re not talking about walking into Joe’s Brickworks and helping ourselves to whatever bricks we need to build our house, no that would be stealing.
If everything is supposed to be free, then let it all be free. Now, how does that work?
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
What’s most interesting here is how OTHER filehosts are reacting. upload.to is now blocking US ip addresses and other filehosts are removing their referral programs.
Megaupload was not the worst offender when it comes to filehosts. (If you are our client, look at your trending stats and you will see the filehosts that have been growing over the last year).
The question I have is this: if the payout systems go away, pirates aren’t going to make any money anymore. Some will stop because that’s why they were doing it. Others will go back to torrents and FTP, even though there is no money in those. Or, piracy will evolve in a different way, and we will need to figure out the best way to combat.
Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. File hosting sites are fairly controllable, as opposed to some other forms of piracy. So, if this is really the harbinger of demise for filehosts, I hope that the next phase of piracy will come in a form that we can take control over. Piracy won’t go away, but it will either recede underground again or emerge in an entirely different way.
Meanwhile, it is my hope that customers will begin to realize it’s much easier just to buy scenes properly than scavenge for them. AS the micropayment models gains traction in porn, we will begin to see this, much the way iTunes converted pirated to paid customers due to high quality, ease of use and low cost of entry…
Re: Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website
[QUOTE=desslock;108923]Nicely said, Dominic!
Steve[/QUOTE]
Agreed!