Mega.co.nz is a cloud-hosting service that, despite playing by all of the rules and taking care to respect copyright laws, was included in a report that painted the service as a sketchy file-sharing platform that makes millions by helping people share copyrighted content. The report caused all of the big name payments companies, such as Mastercard and PayPal, to pull the plug on Mega, thus crippling the perfectly legal service and prompting it to consult its legal team regarding the damages.
In September 2014, NetNames published a report titled Behind The Cyberlocker Door: A Report How Shadowy Cyberlockers Use Credit Card Companies to Make Millions. While the report was informative in many respects, NetNames made the questionable decision to include cloud-hosting service Mega.co.nz. Granted, Mega’s Kim Dotcom connections might paint the site in an unfavorable light in some eyes, but the fact remains that Mega.co.nz covers all the bases when it comes to copyright law. And let’s face it – the site has had no other choice. As the most scrutinized file-hosting startup in history, any breach (even of the overseas DMCA) would prove absolutely catastrophic. Nevertheless and largely thanks to the NetNames report, payment processors including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal recently pulled the plug on the company. Then this week, just eight months after the NetNames report, came another turn of the screw. Titled The Revenue Sources for Websites Making Available Copyright Content Without Consent in the EU, a new MPA-commissioned report published by Incopro examined the money-making techniques of more than 600 ‘unauthorized’ sites in the file-sharing space.
