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Barely a day after Google, Wikipedia and dozens of other websites united in protest of two anti-piracy bills in Congress, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload a week ago in what the department called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought.
"This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court (sic)," reads a banner that appears at the site's Web address.
In a display of international cooperation, police in New Zealand arrested four people, including German millionaire and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz). They were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of copyright infringement and conspiracy of racketeering and money laundering, and could face up to 20 years in prison. A handful of other suspects remain at large.
Megaupload allowed users to anonymously upload and download information — similar to YouTube, but for any file.
It was one of the most popular online locker services, according to The New York Times, and claimed 50 million hits daily. For comparison, that's one-fourth the average daily traffic to Google.com, according to Quantcast, a company that measures Web-based audiences.
The crackdown had uncanny timing. Last Wednesday, Wikipedia went dark and Google plastered a black censor bar over its logo in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act in the U.S. Senate.
The bills essentially allow copyright holders to join the battle between law enforcement and online copyright infringement, which includes illegally downloaded music or movies.
Supporters say online piracy, especially through foreign servers, is running rampant. Opponents, including much of the tech industry, say the law would too easily stifle the Internet's signature freedom and choke original work in the crossfire.
The bills have been temporarily shelved in the face of last week's Internet protest.
Officials accuse Megaupload of cheating copyright holders of music, video and other content out of $500 million in earnings while taking in $175 million more from advertising and subscription fees. Megaupload was also hosted mainly on servers in Hong Kong, making the site a prime example of the bills' purported purpose and flaws.
"When you take down a site, you're taking down everything on there whether it violates [copyright law] or not," said Steve Goddard, chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Clearly there's something wrong, but that doesn't mean that's [the site's] only purpose."
Many Megaupload users uploaded their own original, perfectly legal content to the site to share. Musicians, for example, often make their work available for free online to drum up interest.
If they picked Megaupload as their springboard, that work is now gone.
"I just want people to hear it, I just want people to listen," said Melvin Hollingsworth, a senior communications major and a rap artist who uploads his work with the music group WeAreWeMajor to sites similar to Megaupload.
"I don't use Megaupload personally, but I know people that have," Hollingsworth said.
What the owners of that lost legal content can do now is one of many legal questions raised since the crackdown.
"In some ways, that's kind of uncharted water, but that will be an issue," said Matt Schaefer, a UNL law professor who specializes in international law and business. "The legal recourse is only going to happen down the road."
Other questions remain, including concerns with extending U.S. copyright law beyond the country's borders, or extraterritoriality. Schaefer pointed to servers in Virginia and purchases through PayPal, an American company, that were included in the federal indictment, adding a legal debate around the balance of online creativity and copyright is nothing new.
"You see that in a lot of cyber cases," he said. "That's really the balance that has to be struck, whether it's civil cases we're dealing with or criminal cases like Megaupload."
Rachel Salyers, a sophomore studying English and art history, said she hadn't used the site, but a friend had in order to access British television shows like "Doctor Who" and "Sherlock," which weren't easily available otherwise.
Salyers didn't seem particularly bothered by file-sharing, acknowledging the wealth of music industry executives. But she pointed out the others who stand to lose from piracy, such as the secretaries and janitors for those executives, not to mention the artists.
"There's way more of those than the CEOs," she said.
Others took a similarly moderate view. TeyAnjulee Leon, a sophomore fine arts major, said she'd "be pissed" if she were an artist or musician whose work was pirated online. But she also saw the other side.
"I've done it, I do it, because I'm poor," she said bluntly, despite thinking piracy is "wrong." "I think it should be more affordable."
Other students questioned the government's ability to tame the Internet beast.
"I think it's kind of stupid that they went through all that effort without shutting down BitTorrent or The Pirate Bay," said Philip Malchow, a junior psychology major. He doubted taking down Megaupload would make a lasting dent in online piracy, but also wasn't sure that it should.
"Congressmen didn't make the Internet," he said. "You shouldn't be able to control what people hear."
danholtmeyer@dailynebraskan.com