MegaUpload Takedown Heralds New Age of Digital Paranoia

Today heralds a new information age, not one of expansion and freedom, but one of fear and contraction. MegaUpload was taken down today by the FBI.

Not only is MegaUpload not based on the United States ( It had only 2 servers in VA, allowing the US to claim jurisdiction over the whole site), but it was one of the top 10 to 15 websites visited daily in the world. Over 50 million people used MegaUpload daily.

It is generally known that MegaUpload is a haven for pirated content, as users are not restricted when they post. MegaUpload complies with DMCA noticed when asked, but probably not as much as it should have. I would like to say I do not support MegaUpload in any endeavors of piracy.

The problem is not the piracy, its the real users, and the message that was sent today.

Any data stored online, legal or illegal, can disappear in an instant without warning due to United States government ruling.

The first thing I thought when reading up on the situation about MegaUpload was: What about Dropbox? What about any of the sites that I store files in the cloud? What if some jerks want to store pirated movies in Dropbox and Dropbox gets shut down?

I should take my data off the cloud! It’s not secure!

That is the message they sent today!

MegaUpload didn’t just store infringing videos and music, it stored documents, user created movies and music, as well as other files that may even be critical to Business! Where did they go? What if they didn’t have a backup? What do they do now? What if most of their business surrounded non pirate use of Megaupload?

This is such a step backward, we were making so much progress moving further and further into the cloud, making things secure, connecting people and data in a wonderful weave of free flow information and now….this…this takedown sends us right back to where we were. Now we will have to hide our information on our own devices, keeping it off the cloud not for fear of theft but of legislation that threatens to cause unreliable service!

It’s bad enough that the ISP’s have enforced Bandwidth Caps, but now there is no point to store data in the cloud at all! You cant upload or download it all due to bandwidth caps and if you do manage to get it there a government takedown threatens to disintigrate your data in an instant.

If you keep taking down major websites at a whim, with no public notice, even after years of private investigation you are going to destroy the consumer trust in the cloud that has been painstakingly built over the past few years! Stop this! It has to stop now! Put MegaUpload back up!

We cannot innovate on the net if we cant rely on the connection to one another, if you keep destroying websites that matter to people, how will we know what websites will be there tomorrow? Which ones can we trust? Which ones can we invest in?

Any application that stores any information online is at risk! Because if content can be stored, then piracy is possible, not to say it is done, but possible.

So we are now saying that if a certain fantastical and made up number or % of the traffic or storage on a service is pirated and infringing copyright, (which would take YEARS to prove) we can shut down a service completely, without warning, and disregard any of the valid files that people might want to back up?!

The decisions for cloud products will no longer be based on price or quality, but based on who passes MPAA / RIAA inspection!

To imagine that SOPA and / or PIPA would expedite the process of taking down / blocking sites like what we just saw with MegaUpload, with even less notice to both users and the infringing site, not to mention not even needing much proof!

Can I get a MPAA / RIAA Seal of Authenticity or Badge to show on my website to ward off authorities? Throw us a bone!