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Why was Megaupload really shut down?

The accepted narrative of why Megaupload was taken down is that it was to be made an example of— that the US government wanted to show that it was going after file-sharing sites hard and it was going after one of the big ones in a big way.

But the developing theory is that Megaupload’s file sharing was an excuse to have the site taken down before they could launch Megabox, a cloud-based music store that would have offered better money for artists at cheaper prices to consumers, striking directly at the heart of Apple and Google:

In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core.

I present to you… MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

“UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

“We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,” Dotcom outlined. “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.”

Megaupload had been friends with the music industry for years, and it’s certainly likely they could have pulled this off, easily. But were Google and Apple behind the scenes, prodding the US government to take them down?

Read more about Megabox here

Via


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  1. zombelle0 reblogged this from iheartchaos
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  9. ambydsolis reblogged this from iheartchaos
  10. bloodyrainbows reblogged this from sakamichinoapollo and added:
    In other words, it was about to become an actual threat to the RIAA, and likely the MPAA, et al, soon after. The reason...
  11. happyotter666 reblogged this from iheartchaos
  12. intheirwreckage reblogged this from icebelow
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  15. i-fought-piranhas reblogged this from iheartchaos
  16. sirwillalot reblogged this from iheartchaos and added:
    Oh I love me some media conspiracies…
  17. isawgoddie reblogged this from theodorepython
  18. cjsilver reblogged this from sakamichinoapollo
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  20. i-hear-you-calling reblogged this from iheartchaos
  21. nifasaurus reblogged this from iheartchaos
  22. sakamichinoapollo reblogged this from iheartchaos and added:
    tl;dr for those not interested in reading this...releasing a new service, called MegaBox....
  23. vertderp reblogged this from iheartchaos
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  27. letlive reblogged this from iheartchaos
  28. bitchingaboutshit reblogged this from iheartchaos and added:
    It’s a conspiracy, man.
  29. icebelow reblogged this from iheartchaos
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