Details of the ‘Mega Conspiracy’ Behind Megaupload
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'Mega Conspiracy' label is the DOJ's own framing from the January 2012 indictment, and its details have been contested from day one: Techdirt flagged what the government counts as evidence of criminal behavior within days of the raid, while CNET reported the U.S. position that Megaupload's hosting service was no innocent bystander. This piece republishes the core of that theory just as the case's procedural footing looks shakier than ever.
Two threads define where the story stands as of December 2013: Judge O'Steen's April 2012 remark that the trial may never happen at all, and October's finding that the seizure destroyed far more than 10 million lawful files — material the defense uses to argue the government's evidence-gathering was itself reckless. Meanwhile Kim Dotcom has kept the brand alive, launching a new Mega timed to the raid's anniversary. Wide syndication across Wired, TorrentFreak, and The Verge shows how much attention the prosecution's paper trail still commands.
First-order effects
- Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants remain exposed to the full conspiracy charge even as the presiding judge has voiced doubt the trial will ever be held, keeping their legal costs running without a resolution date.
- The released indictment details hand the defense fresh material for its overbroad-prosecution argument, which already leans on the destruction of millions of legitimate users' files during the seizure.
Second-order effects
- Cloud storage rivals now compete against a relaunched Mega that markets itself on encryption and distance from user content, forcing competitors to spell out their own takedown and DMCA postures rather than rely on neutral-hosting assumptions.
- Hosting and CDN providers watching the case are repricing the risk that serving a popular customer exposes them as alleged co-conspirators, tightening onboarding scrutiny for high-bandwidth file services.
Third-order effects
- If the prosecution stalls or collapses, the DOJ's theory — that a business model itself can constitute criminal conspiracy — fails as precedent; if it proceeds, every cyberlocker-era operator faces a template for charging founders personally for platform design.
- The gap between seizure-day rhetoric and the destroyed-lawful-files record is pushing courts toward stricter evidentiary handling rules for mass digital takedowns, regardless of how this case ends.
The trend: Criminal copyright enforcement is colliding with the cloud-storage business model, and the Megaupload prosecution has become the test case for how far platform operators can be held personally liable for user conduct.