MegaUpload & The Fall Of Filehosting

Not much of the new year has passed and already a lot has happened. The victory against SOPA & PIPA was a great one, but it didn't last very long. The day after SOPA was indefinitely postponed (all thanks to CyberD's blackout, obviously ;) the FBI raided Kim Dotcom's house and shut down MegaUpload along with all other sites in the Mega series. The charges against Kim Dotcom and a few other employees was money laundering and copyright infringement on an incredibly large scale. I've spent a lot of time reading all about the charges so posting a few pages about it would be a piece of cake, but I won't. Here's a few links for those of you who haven't read the news lately.

The fact that the US government took down a website of this caliber shocked everybody. Did you know MegaUpload stood for over 4% of all Internet traffic? That it had around 150,000,000 hits every day? That's a heavy blow by the feds. Who are they going to take out next? Google?

People all over the globe are pissed off at the government. Not just because a great upload service disappeared, but because their personal files did so along with it. Apparently there's a lot of people out there with crucial documents, computer backups, etcetera - all hosted with MegaUpload. I had some files hosted there too. My GTA SA mods for one were all hosted with MU, I'll have to spend a few hours uploading them someplace else now. Fortunately I had a backup. Not everyone did.

What's going to happen to all those personal files, the ones that didn't infringe upon copyrights? Will people ever be getting them back? Not likely. Sure, a lot of people used the MegaUpload service to host illegal material, and the staff might have not done their best to stop it, but who are the criminals now? Who stole personal files and data from millions of people all over the world?

The US government! In attempting to stop online piracy they're committing the worst acts of it themselves. They're not stealing duplicate content from a multi-billion-dollar industry like the pirates they're trying to stop - they're stealing original content from innocent citizens!

It seems like big things will be going down this year. The first real Internet war? Who knows. With MegaUpload down to state an example; the owner(s) in jail, file hosts are shutting down on their own. They're falling down like flies. Filesharing sites are turning into regular backup sites, allowing you to download only content you've uploaded yourself. That kinda takes away the point of a 'filesharing' site, don't ya think? Maybe this is the end of an era. Maybe it's the start of a new.