First MegaUpload – Who’s Next?

As we posted yesterday, popular file-sharing website MegaUpload was taken down by US authorities for a number of different reasons. A big one was that the company behind the site was accused of taking in $175 million in “criminal proceeds”, while at the same time causing loses of $500 million to the affected companies. One thing I didn’t catch in the story is that there are numerous other charges laid on the site’s founder and his staff – all of which by itself could put them behind bars for a long time.

Over at TechCrunch, a good editorial was posted earlier that sums things up quite nicely about these events. The ultimate question is, “where does it end?”. The US authorities managed to have the site’s owner, Kim Dotcom, arrested in an entirely different country (New Zealand), along with some of his team. This, all before SOPA/PIPA is written into law.

There’s little doubt that owners of competing services are a little timid with these events. Sites like RapidShare and MediaFire offer the exact same service as MegaUpload. To their benefit, however, neither seem to promote the sharing of illegal content as MegaUpload once did.

Still, in another story relayed here, the owner of another site, TVShack, is also facing jail-time for simply running a website that links to those that host the content. This is an important distinction, because while MegaUpload actually hosted the copywritten material, TVShack merely linked to it. This is much in the same way torrent sites are run, however, where files are not hosted on the site, only the files to that allow you to access the content from elsewhere.

The rulings from these court cases could prove disastrous for sites like MegaUpload and also those that even allow you to create your own personal pool of data that can be shared (a la Dropbox). The future is not looking fun for the Internet.