The shutdown
of the massive file-sharing website Megaupload and the arrest of its
founder and three of its executives have some members of the cyberlocker
community looking over their shoulders, wondering who will be next.
Rather than waiting, some sites have started acting on their own to
avoid being put in the crosshairs of law enforcement authorities.
Uploaded.to, for example, has taken the simple approach of refusing
to accept traffic from the United States. When PCWorld attempted to
visit the site, a landing page appeared with the message: "Not
available. Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry
about that."
Uploaded.to file-sharing site refuses to accept traffic from the U.S.FileSonic, one of the top 10 sharing sites on the web with a billion page views a month, appears to be in panic mode. It has suspended all file sharing at its site, as well as its "affiliate" program.
That program pays cash rewards to
FileSonic members whose files are
often accessed by others. Since members can't access each other's files
any more, future rewards are a moot point. There's a question, however,
about what the service will do about rewards owed to members before the
suspension of file sharing at the site.
Why FileSonic Decided to Suspend Business
FileSonic
decided to make its drastic move despite the fact that the company had
recently announced it was hiring a service, Vobile, to fight piracy at
its site.
"FileSonic believes the timing is right to take an even more
proactive approach against copyright infringement, as the amount of
content on the Internet continues to grow, and as its products become
victim to abuse by copyright infringers," the company's communication
manager, Sara Parr, said when the Vobile deal was announced.
"Given the volume of data on our servers, we went looking for an
effective method of checking every media or compressed file uploaded and
chose Vobile's vCloud9 as the most effective solution to meet those
criteria," she added.
Apparently the Vobile solution isn't as effective as FileSonic
thought it would be, or the company fears the solution isn't as
effective as the FBI and Hollywood would like it to be.
Other "private" file-sharing services, like MediaFire, Box.net,
Dropbox, and YouSendIt, have expressed confidence that they won't be
targeted by law enforcement authorities. "We don’t have a business built
on copyright infringement," MediaFire CEO Derek Labain told VentureBeat. “Like many other cloud-based sharing services like Box.net and Dropbox, we’re a legitimate business targeting professionals."
According to MediaFire, employees at 86 percent of the Fortune 500 use its services.
Of course, someone can work at a Fortune 500 company and still pirate
intellectual property, as Palo Alto systems pointed out in a recently
released study."Entertainment" applications like Megaupload consume
twice as much traffic used by employees on corporate networks than do
Dropbox, Box.net, and YouSendIt combined, the firewall maker said.
Moreover, there is some evidence that "private" storage services like
MediaFire can be used by buccaneers to share files. For example, a
simple Google search of Beyonce and MediaFire will turn up a number of
songs by the singer that can be downloaded.
By John P. Mello Jr., PCWorld
By John P. Mello Jr., PCWorld
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