
With recent seizure of largest files sharing site, there is mass hysteria among fellow sharing sites on being knocked down.
Megaupload.com’s founder was ordered by a New Zealand judge to remain in jail, three days after the U.S. shut down the file-sharing website and police arrested him in his mansion, seizing luxury cars, guns and art.
Kim Dotcom, the website’s German founder who legally changed his name from Schmitz, was remanded to Jan. 25, when the judge is scheduled to rule on his bail request, a court official said by telephone. Dotcom and three other men appeared in court in Albany, a suburb of Auckland, on U.S. charges.
The impact of seizure and complete block out of megaupload.com has shown ripple effect on other sites. Sites like filesonic have stopped sharing (file downloads) with non-regiatered/non-owners of files. And upload.to has banned access to US people to dodge any copyright infringement enquiry. Infact fielsonic has posted this message on its home page
“All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.”
Some activists are voicing out this as an attack on internet freedom and calling it as a high alert alarm on the future of cloud computing.
One such forum Anonymous (their self description goes: One self-description is: We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us) released a statement on Pastebin.com accepting responsibility of the mass attacks on websites including those of RIAA, MPAA, BMI, FBI, and others.
Though there are mixed reactions from software developers, producers and movie fraternity on the sudden (but closely watched by anti-piracy detectives ) seizure of megaupload.com.
The stats of megaupload was pretty impressive that any webmaster would vye for:
- Registered Members: 180,000,000
- Unique visitors: 81,000,000
- Page Views (when existed): >1,000,000,000
- Visitors per day: 50,000,000
- Reach: 4% of overall internet
- Closest Competitors (may be present gainers): rapidshare, filesonic. mediafire
When live, megaupload was positioned as the 13th most visited site on the Internet. When this article was written at that time its position dropped to 72 at alexa.com, may be in few months it might not even feature in alexa.com top million list.
It might be just initial days of horror for file sharing sites that might not get prolonged. Internet is such huge (remember it supersedes any country in the world as the largest place for its citizens relevantly termed netizens) that its virtuality and sharing strength cannot be controlled by single government or even syndicates of several departments. Sharing is here to stay and survive since that’s what made human race gain knowledge and pass it on the next generation. Our success lies on it.
















