After law enforcement authorities shut down Megaupload, a popular file sharing service, for violating copyright laws, Internet users took to Twitter and online forums in protest, calling it a form of censorship.
For many users, the shutdown had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the fact that their backups and data were now gone.
The Department of Justice executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and in eight other countries to seize servers and domains belonging to Megaupload, according to a 72-page federal indictment unsealed Jan. 19. Megaupload is an online “locker” service in which users can anonymously upload large files to the company servers and share the content via a unique URL.
While users may have used Megaupload to illegally share music, TV shows, movies and software, as the indictment claimed, there were plenty of people who used the service to store personal and private files, including work documents, videos and photographs. After the shutdown, these users complained on Twitter that they had been using the service to store their own content.