Last week, Megaupload was shut down by American law enforcement agencies, charging the owners with…

Conspiracy to commit racketeering.
Conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
Conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Criminal copyright infringement.

The people running Megaupload and its sister websites have had all their possessions confiscated, including more than 20 luxury cars and face jail sentences of up to 20 years. This comes around a month after Megaupload’s last controversy, their advert starring well known artists such as Kanye West and Lil Jon, which was pulled from YouTube due to a bogus copyright claim by Universal. The video has since been reuploaded numerous times by users and Megaupload has retaliated by launching a law suit against Universal.

This sudden move by American authorities to shut down a file hosting website (especially considering the state of the web concerning legislation such as PIPA and SOPA), has caused other well known file hosts to change their policies. Here is a summarised list of the changes carried out by file hosting websites since Megaupload was taken offline:

Turned off file sharing. You can only download what you have uploaded:
Filesonic
Fileserve
Filejungle
UploadStation
UploadBox
x7.to

Shut down:
Megaupload

Blocked US traffic:
Uploaded.to

As I’ve said before, it really is a tough time for the Internet. We need to fight against censorship of the web, otherwise we will be left with an Internet resembling nothing of today’s.

SOPA’s been in the news recently due to the 24 hour blackout of high profile websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing and more. I even took my site down (as my 2 readers may have noticed) and replaced it with this:

If you can manage to survive reading a wall of unformatted text, Jeff sums SOPA up pretty well:


Now it looks like the bill will be rejected when it comes time to vote. Members of Congress’ websites suffered from downtime from the sheer amount of people trying to contact their local representative. The owner of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch has been slated for his involvement with SOPA, more so now after he claimed Google was a piracy leader.

It isn’t over. SOPA needs to be stopped for good. Keep informed. Save the Internet.

This week, a bill that would create America’s first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass.

Watch the video to learn more about the bill and how it affects you. Even if you’re not in the US, you will still be affected; most of the websites you use every day are hosted in the US and will be subject to the new bill. For example, some of your favourite YouTube videos could be blocked if they have even a hint of copyright infringement (and in some cases, even if they don’t).


Update: Since GoDaddy showed their support for the bill, domain owners agreed to transfer all domains away from the country on December 29th. As of today, I, along with popular websites such as Imgur, the Cheezburger network and Wikipedia have moved our domains away from the company. The sheer amount of transfers has caused GoDaddy to completely reverse their stance on the bill (in less than 24 hours) and it appears, from the TV and web advertising, that GoDaddy aren’t happy in the least and want to assure people that they are now against SOPA. For many people, their stance reversal is too little, too late and the reputation of GoDaddy has been severely wounded.