Immediately following the Jan. 18 protests against SOPA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice shut down the popular files sharing site Megaupload.

This has caused what can only be described as pandemonium throughout the Internet. Many will recognize Megaupload and its associated video service known as MegaVideo, the site that allows users to watch television shows and movies with a 72-minute time limit.

While the world mourns the loss of their Dexter or Modern Family marathons, there exists a larger picture here.

The issue at hand is copyright infringement, a hot-button topic that has been ever-present in the digital age.While some may see the fall of Megaupload as a serious injustice, people should look at why the site was taken down.

Sites like Megaupload operate within a legal “safe harbor.” This harbor means copyrighted content can be hosted on the website, so long as the company is not aware of it and complies with requests for the removal of said content.

While hard to believe the employees at Megaupload were ignorant of the illegal distribution occurring, one of the major reasons the file-sharing website was removed was because they failed to comply with the aforementioned requests to remove the content.

 Additionally, those running the site were not only refusing to remove files, but turned a significant profit. Ethically, this feels ambiguous. Yes, they generated and maintained the site, but it still acted as an extremely viable means to violate copyright law and for their employees to profit from others’ work.

In addition to Megaupload, other file-sharing sites throughout the world have started worrying about their future in the wake of the Jan. 19 indictment. FileSonic, a similar website, disabled its file-sharing capabilities as a sort of pre-emptive measure against a similar fate to Megaupload. Even further, groups like Anonymous have started retaliation efforts in response to the Internet crisis.

Using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the group has taken down, at various points over the last few weeks, the websites of the DOJ, the FBI, the White House, the Motion Picture Association of America, CBS and Universal Music.

While I understand their frustration, I am unsure whether or not this message has landed. Rather than some power play by either side of this Internet war, the take down of Megaupload seems to be, to me, a nonfactor.

Megaupload refused to follow the rules that gave them safety and so they were shutdown. However, just because the file-sharing site has been removed does not mean piracy will be at all affected.

Millions of people will still take to the high seas for their media fix and the presence or not of Megaupload will have little to do with their online seafaring ways.