You might have heard that on Thursday, the website Megaupload was shut down. The website was one of the biggest file sharing websites on the online world. The ones who operated the website, risk spending more than 20 years in jail.
However, Megaupload wasn’t the only site of this kind. There are numerous other similar website which host files in an illegal manner. RapidShare, Dropbox, YouSendIt, and just some of these websites which operate in the same manner as Megaupload did. They all use the cloud based services, in the same fashion as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon do.
Opinions About Megaupload Incidents (Source: blogiseverything.com)
These websites consider themselves a legitimate way of storing online content. They just store files, but in the majority of the cases, the files break the copyright laws. In the majority of the cases, these websites do not verify the files which were uploaded. They remove the files if they receive a complaint, but until they receive the complaint, the files are there.
The Megaupload shutdown is a reminder of the way in which copyright material is handled online. It is possible for all the similar websites to be shut down, just like Megaupload was. It is also a reminder of the popularity of piracy, and of the difficulty of getting rid of it. These sites are used by people to send or store files. Other people download from them, regardless of the fact that it is illegal to do so.
Megaupload was accused of the fact that it encouraged people to host illegal files, and that it made money from subscriptions, from ad placement, and so on. It seems that the website was asked on numerous occasions to remove certain files, but it didn’t. It removed a version of the file, while keeping copies.
Opinions About Megaupload Incidents (Source: firstsearchblue.com)
Thus it caused damage worth of $500 million and it made a profit of more than $170 million.
