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23 January 2012
The peer to peer files sharing network, Megaupload.com was shut down by the Feds this past Thursday. Megaupload Limited and their sister company, Vestor Limited charged over $175M in criminal proceeds and caused over a half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners. Megaupload had over $50M in assets seized by the FBI. Megauploads attorney, Ira Rothken stated, 'We believe that the allegations are without merit and Megaupload is going to vigorously defend against the case'. The founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, faced a New Zealand court today and stated that Megaupload has "nothing to hide".
There is a bizare twist in the case and that is that Hip Hop DJ Mogul, Swizz Beats was the CEO of the company. I found it strange that a music artist was running a pirated site with pirated music. Not only that but there was a music video/commercial for Megaupload released which you can see at the bottom of this page, featuring Hip Hop stars, Diddy, Kanye West and Chris Brown singing about Megaupload. Apparently, they were asked to make the ad not really knowing what Megaupload was.
Unfortunately, users that used Megaupload for legal personal or business use have lost their files stored on the Megaupload servers. Twitter user, Nina Andrade wrote. "Megaupload was closed by the FBI ... was I the only ones who had it for work files? Just get me my files back!!!" Megaupload was used as a legit file sharing service by users like Nina Andrade, but the level of piracy and the flagrant publication of copyrighted material was higher than most other p2p websites and services.
Many people have never heard of Megaupload but at one point was in the top 20 websites in the world. I personally support peer to peer sharing and may or may not have used Megaupload regularly in the past but again, the reality is, that they were way too flagrant with copy written material and were bound to be prosecuted sooner or later.
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