On Thursday, January 19, the U.S. Justice Department shut down Megaupload, an extremely popular file-locker site that claimed 50 million users per day. Seven of its employees were charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering and criminal copyright infringement, and four were arrested in New Zealand, where the site’s flamboyant founder, Kim Dotcom (ne Schmitz), rented a mansion. File lockers tend to promote themselves as productivity tools that provide an easy way to circulate files too big for e-mail among groups of collaborators, but in reality they’re barely sub-rosa troves of copyrighted material—I’m sure more of their operators would get visits from the FBI if it were easier to hold them legally responsible for the piracy committed by their users.
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Megaupload allowed you to share material uploaded to its servers only with specific friends or coworkers, but you could also make it available to the entire Internet. At least until it was shut down, googling the title of an album, along with the word “rar” or “zip” (extensions commonly attached to compressed files), would likely yield several links to locker sites where someone had shared it illegally. After the bust, though, a number of other major file-locker sites dramatically curtailed users’ file-sharing ability—some went dark entirely, and some disabled the public-sharing options that allowed anyone to download the content. In both cases this retroactively broke established links to public files.
Kim Dotcom likes to play up his connections to the hip-hop world. Megaupload’s website listed rap producer Swizz Beatz as its CEO, though Beatz has no stake in the company; Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken now says he had yet to accept the position. And on December 9 the site posted a promotional video to YouTube built around an original track titled “Megaupload Mega Song,” featuring on-camera endorsements from Kanye West, Sean Combs, Lil Jon, and the Game. (According to his lawyer, Dotcom is working on an album with the song’s producer, Printz Board.)
Odds are the RIAA dodged the Megabox bullet by luck. How much damage that bullet could do is now a purely hypothetical matter, and depending on how things go for Dotcom at trial, it may stay that way forever. It probably would’ve been significant, though—after all, Dotcom earned the loyalty of a whole generation of hip-hop artists with a distribution model that didn’t even give them the option of getting paid. Imagine what he could do if he offered them money.
