Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Megaupload fallout

Server farms are turning into ghost towns

After last week’s multi-national take down of Megaupload, two other file-sharing sites, Upload.to and  Filesonic, have decided to shut down their servers. If you use Filesonic, you can still access files files you uploaded. So for now, the video of you stuffing cake into your spouse’s mouth at your wedding is safe, but be sure you have a back-up. From the Next Web: “Unlike Megaupload, which was open about its role sharing music without charge, Filesonic bills itself as a Dropbox-style ‘unlimited storage company’. While its primary function is to store files which can be accessed from another machine at a later date, it’s file sharing feature meant that it could be also allow users to share content between each other, as Megaupload did.”
Texas-based Mediafire, meanwhile, plans to go on with business as usual. On the surface it looks and acts a lot like Filesonic. Venturebeat reports, “the company’s free file-sharing solution can also be used easily for sharing copyrighted files, especially music, with friends, relatives or anyone on the web.” Mediafire, however, claims to work with the entertainment industry by complying with requests to remove any files deemed pirated. A little backwards looking, if you ask me, but just the latest in a story that’s getting bigger and more important every day.

Related Topics

Collections: