File-sharing site Megaupload was busted by the government yesterday for profiting from the distribution of massive amounts of pirated music, movies, and software. It's part of a thriving industry of file-sharing sites including celebrated apps like Dropbox, and it has nothing to do with peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent. Here's what you need to know about Mega and its kin.
What does Megaupload do? Megaupload was a one-click hosting service. You could upload a file to it—any file—and Megaupload would give you a unique link so anyone else could download the file for free.
What are the legit uses for these sites? Many people use them to send or share files too large for email. PCMag used Mediafire to send CES photo galleries to our production team, for instance. Shareware and freeware developers use these sites to distribute software, because the devs wouldn't be able to afford the bandwidth costs themselves. Independent musicians host their songs on one-click sites, once again because they can't pay for the bandwidth themselves.
What are the non-legit uses? Anything pirated. Movies, music, porn, software, you name it.
How do you download from one of these sites? The sites generally make files available to the general public with a unique URL, so downloads can go viral anonymously. For the legit stuff, musicians and other content creators generally share out the links through social media or their own Web sites. For pirated material, the hosting sites don't maintain their own public indexes of files, but third-party search engines have popped up to help look for specific content.
What are other popular one-click hosting services? Mediafire, Dropbox, YouSendIt, Rapidshare, Depositfiles, Hotfile, FileSonic, FileServe … there are a whole bunch of them.
If bandwidth is so expensive, how do these guys make money? Most of them sell premium services. Free users have their downloads capped or throttled, or get relatively limited file storage space. Dropbox, for instance, offers 2GB for free, but 50GB for $9.99/month. Several also surround their download pages with banner ads.
It wasn't just the technology, right? According to Ars Technica, the government discovered employees knew about how much pirated material the site handled, and appeared to revel in it. Megaupload's executive team also appeared to like to play gangster. The CEO, Kim Schmitz, aka "Kim Dotcom" or "Kim Tim Jim Vestor" is an ex-con previously convicted of insider trading and embezzlement in Germany. According to Ars, Mega's executive team had custom license plates including "POLICE," "MAFIA" and "GUILTY." So they won't look like choirboys in court.
YouTube has pirated stuff! Why aren't the Feds busting them? Hosting sites are protected if they can show they didn't know they had pirated content, or that they aggressively work to remove it. YouTube is famously responsive to complaints about piracy—some would say they're too responsive. The emails quoted by Ars show that Megaupload was less enthusiastic about removing pirated files.
Is Megaupload a "torrent site?" No. BitTorrent, another common way to distribute pirated media, is a completely different beast. BitTorrent is peer-to-peer: each downloader gets bits of a file from many different locations. Sites like Pirate Bay don't actually store any music or video, just bits of code that tell a BitTorrent client how to ask around for friends who might also have the file. MegaUpload and its kin store the files themselves.