[Indio777]

I too wonder at the timing of this, coming right after the "SOPA blackout" by Wikipedia, etc.

While Megaupload did host legitimate files, there is no doubt that they also hosted files of copyrighted material, even if they did remove "some" of those files (I suspect it was a rather low percentage).

If Megaupload had not hosted any of the files on US-based servers, would the US have had a case?

What about all of the files on servers in China? Those appear to now be off limits as well.

What I find a bit troubling about this is that many other sites could also be taken down if they are hosting copyrighted files.

For example, DropBox. I have used it to share photographs (my own) with family and friends. But what if I ripped a bunch of my copyrighted CDs and put them up on DropBox and then set up a music blog with links to those files? Not that I have any intention of doing so! But I guess DropBox could technically be found guilty of hosting copyrighted materials and shut down?

This is all a game of "whackamole." People will just move their files to other sites, who will be more than willing to pick up the slack. Look what happened when the SuperNova torrent site was shut down several years ago; Pirate Bay stepped in. Okay, perhaps that is not the best example, since Pirate Bay glories in being, well, pirates. But I think something similar will happen in this case.

Piracy will always be with us. But it can be lessened if content providers offer consumers legitimate files to download. I think the average person would prefer to download easily accessible "clean" files (preferably with no DRM) at a reasonable price as opposed to spending time looking for files from questionable sites that are often of dubious quality and might contain unwanted "surprises" such as trojans and viruses.