Filesharing Lockers 101 and Why It’s Important

Stories are going to be coming up that will be benefited by an understanding of how sites like Megaupload and Filesonic worked and what they changed.

Basically they were file storage units, for 10-15 dollars a month you could upload anything you wanted to your account and keep a copy of it there.  You could also download all you wanted.  This included hollywood movies, dvd rips, website rips, porn, whatever.  On the surface that doesn't seem so bad...BUT they also let you "share" these files with anyone you wanted, and pay you for doing so.

once you uploaded a file the system would create a link to that file, think of it as a pointer to the file you uploaded.  That pointer was unique to you so it provided a way for the filesharing site to track your downloads.  These sites typically paid $40.00 per 1000 downloads.  Smart uploaders would rip a dvd, split the rip into 3 or 4 parts that way a download of the dvd would equal 3 or 4 downloads thus increasing the money they made.

They would post these links along with boxcover photos to piracy sites like hornywhores or pornbb.  Most DVDs on a big piracy board would get 2000-3000 downloads.  As you can see posting 100 DVDs a month could be fairly lucrative.

Now if you understand the DMCA you know that a copyright holder can request that the material be removed and the fileshare site had to do so promptly.   But they werent removing the files.....only the file POINTERS, what this meant was that the original uploader could go in and in a few seconds generate a new pointer, update his posts and the files are back available for download in a matter of minutes.

Fileshare sites that specialized in porn even facilitated purchases made from sites like hotmovies and clips4sale, you could buy a movie and move it to the fileshare site without ever having downloaded it, the filesharing site would do it for you and auto post it.  This led to clips4sale and others blocking numerous IP addresses from being able to download.

Now when the Department of Justice shut down megaupload it was things like the affiliate program (paying uploaders for downloads) and deleting the links to the content instead of the content is largely what got them nailed.

Filesonic, Oron and other sites that were primarily porn took note and either cut off downloads by anyone other than the original uploader or terminated the affiliate programs, or both.  Needless to say if this holds, these guys are out of business, and so are the uploaders and piracy boards that made a living as affiliates.

Recent information has surfaced accusing Manwin of owning at least one of these large filesharing sites, Filesonic, more on that is coming, including a statement from Manwin denying any such ownership and why it is falling on deaf ears.