Before its now infamous shutdown, Megaupload was an impressive enterprise, at one point the 13th most visited site representing 4 percent of all worldwide Web traffic, according to government reports.
“Until recently Megaupload was one of a number of lucrative businesses known as cyberlockers, which are the latest generation of operations created in the image of the original Napster — the pioneering file-sharing service that launched in 1999 and was shut down by court order in 2001,” reports Fortune.
Cyberlockers make money on advertising and by selling subscriptions for storage space, where users can store and share their digital files, illegal or otherwise.
In January, Megaupload was taken down by criminal suits regarding copyright infringement. “At the time of the raid, 91 percent of Megaupload’s 66.6 million registered users had never stored anything there, according to the indictment; they just downloaded or streamed what other people stored,” notes the article.
Even though other sites like this have been shut down by the government in the past, cyberlockers “are the simplest, most colossal, most profitable piracy bazaars the world has ever known, and yet, under the letter of our current laws, they might be lawful,” adds Fortune.
The ongoing discourse revolving around this case will continue to impact Internet companies providing pirated content. But as time goes on, attitudes are shifting and it’s becoming less clear whether companies like this are actually violating the law as written, and if not, what the next steps for anti-piracy might be.
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