When the US government took Megaupload down for copyright infringement, a lot of users lost their source of file-sharing, owner Kim Dotcom lost a safe haven, but new reports have shown that users actually lost over 10,000,000 legal files in the raid too. The file-sharing website was pulled down by government authorities two years ago and it has now been reported by researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University, along with colleagues from France and Australia that at least 10 million legit files got obliterated during the exercise. Besides being a one-stop shop for all things current as far as movies and TV shows went, Megaupload was used as a genuine source of sharing personal files over the Internet. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of these files got wiped out alongside their copyright infringing counterparts.
Millions of legit files perished
The article posted by the researchers called “Holiday Pictures or Blockbuster Movies? Insights into Copyright Infringement in User Uploads to One-Click File Hosters” showed that a huge 31 percent of Megaupload’s content was clearly guilty of infringing copyrights but a significant 4.3 percent of these downloads were legitimate. TorrentFreak says that it means that of the 250 million files wiped out, at least 10.75 million of them were non-infringing. The researchers also found that FileFactory – with 14 percent of these uploads – had the most amount of non-infringing files. Wupload and Undeadlink with 0.1 percent of these files had the fewest uploads that were clearly legit but had 79 percent of matter that was infringing. They also went on to reveal that one-click file hosting services were the worst offenders when it came to uploading pirated content. Tobais Lauinger, one of the authors of the paper said, “What I find most interesting about our results is that they support what many people were already suspecting before: That Megaupload was partially being used for ‘illegal’ file sharing, but that there were also millions of perfectly legitimate files stored on Megaupload.”The only caveat that the research paper had offered was that the researchers were unable to determine the infringing status of a huge majority of the files and two-thirds of all these downloads remain in the grey. Kim Dotcom has claimed to TorrentFreak that the number of legitimate files on his service was far higher than being portrayed currently. While this may coax the authorities to try and look into the matter of letting legit file owners retrieve them, this will serve as a grim reminder to not rely on file-sharing websites alone to store your personal files.
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