MegaUpload Shut Down, Anonymous Strikes Back

Everyone in the IT industry is wondering where the cloud services will be heading to after the issues on the strike hit recently.

The American media industry and the FBI had been very open with their attack to MegaUpload, which was culminated with the arrest of Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz in New Zealand. The attacks led to the close down or upload restriction from other file sharing sites such as FileServe, FileSonic, UploadBox, FileJungle, VideoBB and UploadStation, X7.to.

The entire cloud storage community must be outraged with the latest development because if sites are required to examine copyright issues like MegaUpload, then there is no reason why Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft should be excused. If this is not settled soon the cloud storage community will have to deal with serious business losses.

The attack against MegaUpload may have caused a brief respite, but is not an assurance that other sites will stop running. Last time that a poll was made many file sharing sites were still found in operation. This included WUpload, Hotfile, Zshare and UploadKing. There were also Russian sites that never stopped operation such as Oron and DepositFiles.

BitTorrent, which is among the most globally used file sharing site, was not a bit affected by the attack. This continued attack looks very bad for the Web, but BitTorrent uses an abusive protocol that may just increase usage from net users. Other cyberlocker sites use a single stream to download one file in minutes. BitTorrent, however, can duplicate this action as it is able to download and open various streams at the same time.

The situation may be very difficult to track because the sites simply block users from the US and Europe where the copyright issues are strictly implemented. This, in fact, has encouraged a number of users to upload copyright materials for they are sure to get more money from it.

The MegaBox operation seems to be affected as well by the action against MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom even placed a post in TorrentFreak last December saying that musicians are given a very handsome deal of 90% earnings if they agree to distribute their music for free. This is a deal so hard to resist for it is a lot better than what the music industry offers. MegaBox already has unconfirmed partner’s Amazon MP3, Rovi, 7digital and Gracenote.

Some analysts are saying that MegaBox was the real trigger for the attack on MegaUpload, but others believe this is very unlikely. Whether this is true or not, the music industry will have a hard time to stop the file sharing, which was also the case with other attempts to stop The Pirate Bay, Napster, Grokster, KaZaA and Limewire.

Even with the success of Amazon’s MP3 store, Spotify and Apple’s iTunes store from Hulu and NetFix it is still hard to prove that it is better than giving consumers a quick and easy way to get what they need at a very handsome price package.

The FBI records showed that MegaUplosad earned $175 million from the free service since 2005. Although there is no way to validate this figure the success of cyberlocker proved that there is money from free downloads.