On Friday, January 20 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced that consideration of PIPA and SOPA would be suspended until further notice. District Court.” Dozens of servers located in the State of Virginia hosting files placed by Megaupload users came under the possession and scrutiny of the FBI. The website was seized and operationally shuttered, its landing page replaced with a notice stating “This domain name associated with the website has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. Seven individuals were charged with conspiracy, money laundering, and direct infringement and face up to 20 years imprisonment each. On Thursday, January 19 the largest criminal copyright indictment ever leveled against an online provider was brought against the cyberlocker service. On Tuesday, January 18, an unprecedented voluntary blackout of thousands of Internet websites was staged in protest of PIPA and SOPA, and Congressional offices were deluged with protesting e-mails and phone calls. The statement was interpreted as indicating that current versions of the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) were not acceptable to the President-although no explicit veto threat was made. law, have strong due process protections, be targeted at criminal activity, and not inhibit innovation. intellectual property by foreign websites, it outlined that to be acceptable to the Obama Administration any such legislation must guard against online censorship, be narrowly targeted at websites currently beyond the reach of U.S.
While supporting efforts to curb infringement of U.S. On Saturday, January 14th the White House issued a policy statement in response to an online petition against pending anti-piracy legislation signed by more than 100,000 individuals. One thing is for sure though, many of MegaUpload’s former users haven’t given up downloading and sharing just yet.Mid-January 2012 marked a major inflection point for digital copyright policy in the United States: With many sites still in a state of shock, it might take a few weeks to see what the precise effect of the MegaUpload shutdown is. “This case has a great negative impact on file storage services and the Internet overall,” a spokesman said, adding that “4shared has some of the most strict house rules among all other file storage services and there’s no need for any changes.” Needless to say, 4Shared is deeply concerned about the recent developments, but the company also told TorrentFreak that they have nothing to worry about themselves. With an estimated 2.5 billion page views, 4Shared is more than twice the size of MegaUpload before it was shut down. Whether the newcomers will remain on board has yet to be seen, but it is clear that millions of former MegaUpload users are migrating to other sites.Īs the cyberlocker landscape stands now, remains by far the largest site on the Internet. The example above is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many other sites that experienced a surge in traffic including Filepost, Hulkshare, Netload.in, Uploading, and many others. Based on data from various traffic measurement sites, Depositfiles, Uploaded.to, Hotfile and Rapidshare welcomed hundreds of thousands of extra visitors. The graph below shows a sharp increase in traffic for four popular MegaUpload ‘replacements’ since last week. A look at the traffic of some of the MegaUpload alternatives shows that millions have simply migrated to other file-hosting sites. The RIAA hopes that the people who used MegaUpload to share copyrighted music are turning to iTunes, but this is not the case for everyone. The big question is, where do these millions of people go now? The site’s former users, meanwhile, are left without their files and forced to find a new place to share. Last week the feds shut down the popular site accusing its founder and six others of money-laundering and several copyright related crimes. With a self-proclaimed 50 million users a day, MegaUpload was one of the largest file-hosting sites on the Internet.
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