The United States Justice Department charged Megaupload with over $1
billion in damages—which sites that house and distribute
copyright-infringing content will be next?
On January 19th, the United States Department
of Justice put the hammer down on file sharing site Megaupload, by
charging its owners with online copyright infringement. Seven people and
two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by
a New York grand jury and charged with a variety of crimes. If
convicted on all possible charges, those involved face up to 50 years of
jail time.
In the wake of this news, several file-sharing sites changed their
operation methods. Filejungle and FileSonic eliminated third-party
downloads, while Uploaded.to blocked American users from accessing the
site. These three file-sharing sites worked preemptively to prevent
similar fates, which raises an important question: what are the fates of
file-sharing sites as a whole?
It's hard to know which websites, if any, will next taste the swift
fist of justice, but there are a handful of choice suspects that are
prime candidates for speculation. For example, the MPAA considers three
online destinations as "rogue sites" for linking to copyrighted movie
and television content: 1Channel.ch, Movie2k.to, and SolarMovie.eu. The
reason for the MPAA's concern is obvious; all three sites act as
pointers to sites that feature movie downloads for films that are
currently in theaters (such as Underworld: Awakening).
Legitimate services that allow users to store files in the cloud
without advocating copyright infringement—Dropbox, Box, Mozy, and
others—were not mentioned. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those
services—or those services' users—are exempt.
"I cannot say who they will go after, but they will get more
aggressive," said Much Hakhinian, CISSP, head security architect and
leader of application practices at Intralinks, a NYC-based company that
provides secure collaboration service to 800 of the Fortune 1000. "If
you go to a site that offers [to pay you] 10 bucks to upload a recent
movie, there's a risk."
That said, there are plenty of file-sharing and hosting sites similar
to the Megaupload (as well as torrent and "pointer" sites that direct
you to pirated content) that may be the next to appear in the Justice
Department's scope. Are they the next to go down? Here are the websites
that may be at risk. And remember, digital piracy encompasses more than just movies, TV shows, and music—it involves software, too.
4shared
4shared lets you share entire files or entire folders. If you install the 4Sync software, you can keep files on your PC and in your Web account in step. 4shared free, basic accounts store 10GB of data, and lets users upload files no larger than 2GB. Premium accounts (starting at $4.55 per month) up the overall storage capacity to 100GB, increases the maximum file size to 5GB, removes advertisements, and boosts download speeds.
4shared lets you share entire files or entire folders. If you install the 4Sync software, you can keep files on your PC and in your Web account in step. 4shared free, basic accounts store 10GB of data, and lets users upload files no larger than 2GB. Premium accounts (starting at $4.55 per month) up the overall storage capacity to 100GB, increases the maximum file size to 5GB, removes advertisements, and boosts download speeds.
Potential Danger: A quick search for "The Lion King"
using the site's built-in search engine revealed tracks from the film
soundtrack that could be streamed or downloaded.
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