Was MegaUpload Crushed to Stop MegaBox Launch? – U.S. Government: The Best Weapon Money Can Buy

An article by DSLReports

After the entertainment industry and their personal police force (aka the United States government) wiped MegaUpload off the map last week, questions were circling as to why the government would exert so much force on a company that was showing up in civil court, adhering to takedown requests, and likely could have been shuttered without all the fanfare. So why the rush? Apparently the entertainment industry was concerned about MegaUpload’s upcoming launch of a product called Megabox, which would have offered an entirely new, artist-friendly distribution model for music and video to the company’s existing 50 million users:

The kicker was Megabox would cater to unsigned artists and allow anyone to sell their creations while allowing the artist to retain 90% of the earnings. Or, artists could even giveaway their songs and would be paid through a service called Megakey. Yes that s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works, Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak in December. Megabox was planning on bypassing the labels, RIAA, and the entire music establishment.

Again, critics charge MegaUpload wasn’t simply crushed by the government for breaking the law. If the government truly cared about the law, they would have actually punished the financial industry for running a con so massive they caused global economies to collapse. If the government truly cared about the law, they wouldn’t work in concert with companies like AT&T to break surveillance and privacy law at every conceivable opportunity. The idea that this police action was solely about the “LAW” (TM) is a simplistic aerial view of the global police action taken last week in the shadows of SOPA protests.

As the article above suggests, it seems very likely that MegaUpload was crushed primarily for protectionist reasons. MegaUpload was dismantled not simply because they were ignoring copyright law, but because they were successfully building a system that bypassed the traditional entertainment industry — and crowing about it.
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