Dumb it down

Hugely popular file-sharing site MegaUpload.com was shut down yesterday evening in a quite substantial criminal copyright case. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

I’m not much of a webophile myself, so please explain to me exactly what MegaUpload.com is and what it does.

What it did, more to the point. Hong-Kong based MegaUpload.com was one of the biggest file-sharing sites on the interweb. You may well have heard of it, or its subsidiaries such as MegaVideo or, eh, SexUploader.

Users uploaded files, which could subsequently be downloaded for free by visitors to the site, not always legally.

If you wanted to download your favourite movies, TV shows, por...traits of attractive young women, this was one of the hottest places to go. Shortly before it was given the boot, it played host to approximately 50 million visitors a day.

So why was it shut down?

In what the US Department of Justice said was "among the largest criminal copyright cases" ever brought by the US government, the people behind MegaUpload were accused of cheating copyright holders out of a whopping $500m in revenue over five years, or picking the pockets of the Hollywood bigwigs and dining out on the profits.

It was claimed by prosecutors that founder Kim Schulz pocketed a cool $175 million from the enterprise and such accusations would seem to have more than element of truth given what police in New Zealand found when arresting Schulz and his cohorts in Auckland.

Like what?

Like guns, art, over £5 million in cash and £3 million worth of luxury cars, hardly the sort of stash you’d find if you stuck your hand in around the sides of the couch.

So that’s it, MegaUpload fought the law and the law won?

No, no. This case isn’t over yet. There were more than a few people a bit pissed off about what happened to MegaUpload, particularly ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous, who are a group of people you don’t want to mess with.

And what are they up to?

They responded to MegaUpload’s shutting down with what they say is “the single largest Internet attack in its history”. The group of online hackers took aim at several important US websites such as those for the White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Universal Music, the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America.

All of the sites were briefly disabled although the majority of them are back online and functioning at time of writing. They also released a fairly menacing statement which included the line: "The FBI didn't think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us."

So what happens now?

Well, MegaUpload have announced that they will return with a new website called megavideo.bz, although that is inaccessible at the time of writing.

There are also widespread reports that Anonymous are only getting started and are planning a massive attack on more US government sites and other European targets in an operation led by the Twitter hashtag #OpMegaUpload.

You mean ...

That's right, a potential World War of the Internet with potential consequences so devastating they can barely even be contemplated ... watching movies and TV shows on the Internet may be slightly more difficult in future.

Noooo!!!