Why was Megaupload shut down?
Ali Alkhatib: Ars Technica (as usual) has an excellent analysis of what’s going on (and why) here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-poli…
The reason seems to boil down to one issue, which is that they gave up the protection of “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Safe Harbor
The DMCA is the main tool used by the MPAA, RIAA, and others to enforce copyright law, but it has a set of guidelines which outline what’s called a “safe harbor” for websites. Namely (in this case at least), a site is given some level of immunity if they’re not actually aware of the alleged copyright infringement on their site. If they’re aware of it and do nothing, they lose the protection of this provision in the DMCA. Ars points out that Youtube successfully used this defense in a $1b suit against Viacom.
The article indicates that Megaupload admins were not only aware of copyright content on the site, but complicit.
… the government asserts that … employees knew full well that the site’s main use was to distribute infringing content. Indeed, the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other.
There’s more to the story (specifically regarding how the indictments are made murkier by some vague and seemingly meaningless charges), but I won’t regurgitate the whole article here. The article itself covers everything pretty well.
Why was Megaupload shut down?
