Just a few facts about Megaupload...
- One of the world's largest file sharing sites.
- User base of at least a 150 million people around the world
- So widely used that profits earned founder Kim Dotcom 42 million dollars in 2011
- 82,764,913 unique visitors
- 1,000,000,000 page views throughout history
- 25 petabytes of storage
Case study
- Megaupload, a Hong-Kong based company, was a file sharing site founded by Kim Dotcom in 2005. Users could freely upload and download files from the site, but needed to pay a small sum to upgrade their access to "premium access" so as to have access to faster download speeds, no file limitations etc. However, the site was shut down on the 19 January 2012, after being accused of costing copyright holders of films, music and other content more than $500 million dollars in revenue by enabling millions of free downloads of these materials. Movie industry was complaining that the company was making money out of pirated material
- The shut-down of Megaupload sites led to a series of hacks on websites belonging to US government and copyright organisations (hackers named Anonymous)
- Frequent patrons as well as the general public were also unhappy with the shut-down of Megaupload
- Are theses methods of curbing internet piracy really effective? As can be seen, it created a lot of unhappiness in the society
Why It will not stop internet piracy?
- Let us take the movie industry for example. If people are ready to pay up to 175 millions in total for Megaupload's services in their premium account, which provides movies without any restrictions, they will be willing to pay potentially less for a lower quality system with DRMs (which is currently the only alternative offered by the Entertainment Industry for movies).
- Each movie costs approximately $1.75 on Megaupload while the movie industry expect consumers to pay $5 for each in the legal market. The Movie Industry is entirely disconnected from the actual market value of the products they sell. Although some people are ready to pay this amount for DRMed movies and such, but these people are not the people who were using Megaupload.
- The millions of daily users of Megaupload will not suddenly be ready to pay 3 times the previous price all of a sudden, so they will not magically migrate to legal offers, this is perfectly unrealistic. Thus, such draconian measures are only temporary victories, these small victories does not really affect the result of the real battle itself, which is that the general mindset of the society regarding Internet Piracy will remain the same.