We like a program, we share it with our friends. People have been doing this since analogue technology made it possible for people to tape TV or films and give them to their friends, long before the internet made it as simple as copying a link.

However, the media industry has been fighting against this free exchange of their precious, expensive products, trying to make copyright laws ban people from producing their own copies to give or sell to others. Piracy, they called it.

What has this got to do with the Megaupload crash last week? As part of the campaign behind the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) the US government dropped a cyber bomb on the $175 million website, seizing the domain names, taking $50 million in assets and arresting four major employees, including the founder Kim Dotcom.

The SOPA bill is the last attack in a series of plays by the media companies in the world who wish to stop people from sharing free copies of their videos. The prosecutors of Megaupload are accusing them of hiding copyright breaches behind a veneer of legitimacy. They also say that the lack of a site-wide search engine and a false list of popular downloads is how Megaupload hides its illegal content, saying some of this content is seen by employees processing payments for the ‘uploader rewards’ program and not taken down.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are certain of Megaupload’s guilt, stating “By all estimates, Megaupload.com is the largest and most active criminally operated website targeting creative content in the world... This criminal case, more than two years in development, shows that law enforcement can take strong action to protect American intellectual property stolen through sites housed in the United States.”

The movement of SOPA has slowed after major websites like Wikipedia darkened their websites to protest the bill that would make a ‘World Without Free Knowledge’. Rep. Lamar Smith, who introduced SOPA, has said “I have heard from the critics, and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”