Megaupload was not just a file sharing site.
It was a massive entity for storing and distributing pirated content.
Their business model was built around pirated content.
They plain out siphoned videos from youtube. They wanted to have a one-to-one video library with youtube.
Their server costs per year were into the millions....
Of course they had millions of subscribers.... because they were the netflix of pirated content.
If you take an ORIGINAL item from somebody else, that is stealing, and a crime. If you distribute a digital copy outside the wishes of the originator, it is NOT clear that digital copy is really 'owned" by somebody else in the first place, thus it is NOT clear it has been "stolen." Just because Big Corporate will CLAIM every single digital copy and every single form of transmission of digital copies is owned into perpetuity, does not establish that it is in FACT owned. Indeed, this only establishes that the business model of Big Corp is based on relentless
presumption of ownership and perpetual exclusive distribution, and its employment of Big Brother to criminalize dissenters.
Piracy used to mean kidnapping, murder, and theft of
concrete, original items on the high seas. "Piracy" as it is now used is a legal word of art to color any outside distribution of any copy in criminal terms. This theory is an invention of corporations, who think the government subsidy providing protection of every copy or distribution of works should be unlimited, international and perpetual in scope. Historically, copyright/IP was only intended to be a TEMPORARY and limited subsidy to grant publishers/exhibitors exclusive distribution, long enough to turn a profit. It was never intended to be ENDLESS and boundless license for companies to engage in one way capitalism, where they, and only they, get to 'own' or commercially control all the digital copies forever, and across all jurisdictions.
Megaupload has arguably done nothing wrong, in other words, and is not guilty of 'piracy' (at the very least, I haven't seen a jury conviction for such). Sharing files, or even commercially distributing copies in a foreign jurisdiction where there may not even be laws defining the activity as a crime, is NOT the same thing as kidnapping and murder on the high seas. It is simply not. Please stop it with the 'piracy' word games, the presumption of guilt on sites shut down without due process, the disregard for lack of jurisdiction, all of it. This and other related episodes show that at the rate we're going, the only way to pursue the omni-regulation of mythical perpetual distribution rights is to turn the entire planet into a closed state, where nobody has freedom because it might interfere with some corporation's bottom line.