I have no idea what the ratio was, and probably it would be impossible to figure that out with any certainty, but let's stipulate that it was a very large percentage of illegal activity, and only a very tiny percentage of the users were there for anything other than downloading content that they didn't buy. Some number of those files were personal files owned by the people sending them. People used MegaUpload to send large files around. Here are the issues that, for me, make this complicated.Īlong with all the illegal stuff happening on MegaUpload was some amount of completely legal stuff. Essentially, they did bad things and they got in trouble for it. That's certainly illegal, and it doesn't exactly give them the moral high ground either. Probably they were making a lot of money that way. Obviously none of us knows the complete truth, but I'm guessing that the people who ran MegaUpload were knowingly profiting from the unauthorized download of other people's intellectual property (including mine). I recognize these things are complicated. Second, this was a tweet, so it was <=140 characters of ha ha, and not designed to be a thorough discussion of all the issues. I did not see an uptick in sales because one piracy site got shut down, nor do I expect to.

There are many comments and questions out there already with more to come, and rather than have a bunch of separate discussions on a bunch of different social media platforms, I thought I would put some of my thoughts here.įirst of all, I was being sarcastic. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet.

Sam smith lay me down beastshare