MegaUpload case likely has no impact on enterprise cloud services

When cloud file-sharing service MegaUpload was shut down by the U.S. federal government last week, an article from PCMag Online pointed out that when the feds closed down the site, they took illegal and legal files with them--and left some unhappy users in their wake.

That had to leave some IT Pros wondering if that kind of take-down has any implications for their relationships with cloud services. While it's impossible to say with absolute certainty, chances are if your service is used mostly for business purposes, this type of situation is not likely to come up.

When I questioned Box.net Chief Executive Aaron Levie about this he said services focused on business were ultimately very different from MegaUpload. "On the spectrum of cloud sharing services, Box is at the opposite end compared to consumer publishing tools. We're focused on powering information management and collaboration for large enterprises, and consistent with that focus we see an infinitesimally small amount of content take-down requests," Levie said.

But it's certainly worthy of a discussion because most any online service with a storage component probably has some content which major content owners--as in big media companies--might object to. Most people use these services for both business and personal reasons and it's not out of the realm of possibility that across the spectrum of human behavior, some are storing content that they probably shouldn't.

As Levie pointed out, though, that's the user's responsibility. "Ultimately, users are responsible for being thoughtful about where they put their data, and providers are responsible for complying with DMCA [The Digital Millennium Copyright Act], and acting in accordance with that standard when copyright issues arise," he said

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with Levie that as long as you use enterprise-class services, you shouldn't run into the kinds of problems that users of MegaUpload encountered when they lost content.

Related Articles:
FBI shutters MegaUpload, Anonymous steps in
Copyright law has gone so wrong
Box beefs up security tools
Will e-books end up like Napster?