Federal Government Shuts Down File-Sharing Web-Site

Tis the season for sites pirating content, or at the very least sites that COULD be accused of pirating content, to be on high alert (in other words every site on the internet).

For those of you residing outside of the file sharing community, MegaUpload.com is one of the largest media file sharing sites on the net, and is now being accused of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.

According to the AP, MegaUpload posted this statement denying many of the allegations that it facilitated breaching copyright laws:

“The fact is that the vast majority of Mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch.”

You can read that two ways:

1) Either join us or try taking us down (in court)

2) We know we’re kind of doing some sketchy stuff, but we’re wildly popular, so we’d listen to offers to buy us out and put us on the level.

Despite the fact that megaupload has an indictment from the Feds going against them, it still has support of several celebrities in its favor. Before the website was taken down, it had endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others — Keyes happens to be married to the CEO of the company, Swizz Beatz (who moonlights as a professor at NYU).

The case is controversial in that it shows the FED can take action without SOPA/PIPA support, but also that cyberlockers that have plenty of users participating in file transfers NOT involving copyrighted content, can still be a taken down…for copyright infringement.

The indictment claims that megaupload President Kim Dotcom (not making that name up) made over $42 million from the company in 2010, much of which resulted in copyrighted material.

If megaupload.com were taken down, who could potentially be next? YouSendIt? MediaFire? Dropbox?

Now might be a good time to back up your files “in the cloud” onto a physical hard-drive…

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