The relatively short history of the Internet is littered with cases that have marked a before and after. With the Internet, piracy did not arrive, since it was present much earlier in all cities through one or more people who offered complete lists of programs and games at much lower prices, obviously, than the official ones. As it evolved, all so-called hackers stopped being providers of software and games and users discovered everything for free on the internet.
As connection speeds increased, so did the range of options to download, not only programs and games, but also movies and music completely free of charge and, obviously, breaking copyright. Although it was not the only one, in the early 2000s, to share content of this type, Megaupload became a reference to be followed by other companies following the path of RapidShare, which we have also talked about in SoftZone.
The origin of Megaupload
If you’re not already combing gray hairs, chances are the name Megaupload sounds slightly familiar to you and you think it’s related to the MEGA storage platform. MEGA is the evolution of Megaupload, both created by the same person: Kim Schmitz, better known as Kim Dotcom in the company of 3 other partners.
Megaupload was launched for the first time in March 2005 in Hong Kong, despite the fact that the nationality of its founder was German. It is important to know where it was founded because of the way it was closed and by whom, which we will talk about in the next section.
Users could upload up to 2 GB of files to the platform, free of charge and without the need to register, content that was automatically removed from the servers if it was not downloaded by anyone for 20 days. This time was extended up to 90 days for registered users.
Unregistered users had to wait up to 45 seconds to access the download link, while registered users had to wait up to 25 seconds. In addition, the download speed was limited, making it practically mandatory to use applications such as JDownloader to perform the downloads. downloads at different times without having to start from the beginning. If we wanted downloads without any type of limit and at the maximum download speed, we had to contract a subscription plan that lasted 1, 3 or 12 months.
To download the content, it was also not necessary to register, although by not doing so, you could only download files larger than 1 GB, while registered users were limited to 100 GB. As the years went by, Megaupload launched other platforms to the market to take advantage of the growth of its platform, such as Megavideo and Megaporn, two platforms that allowed access to streaming content without having to download it.
end of an era
When it was about to complete 7 years of operation, in January 2012, the FBI, bypassing the Chinese government, when accused of violating the copyright of all the content that was available on its platform, accusing it of causing more than 500 millions of dollars in losses within the film industry.
The 4 founders of Megaupload faced sentences of up to 50 years of pressure. Being one of the most used platforms at that time to share content protected by copyright for free, millions of users expressed their discomfort on social networks and even hacker groups such as Anonymous, who hacked the websites of the FBI and the Department of Justice of the United States among others, in addition to publishing personal data of the director of the FBI at that time.
One year after the closure of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom announced the launch of MEGA, a cloud storage platform with up to 50 GB of storage completely free (now reduced to 20 GB) to share any type of content, a project that He left three years later, in 2016.
Alternatives
Nowadays, if we want to access content protected by copyright in any multimedia format, we will be forced to pay a monthly subscription, buy the content on digital platforms, resort to torrent pages to download the content, or go to the web. Cuevana, a website that has been in operation for many years and that has become the only alternative currently available to access content protected by copyright via streaming, without having to download it.
