Major Cyberlocker Filesonic Goes Offline After Traffic Plummets

Posted: 2012/08/31 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Illegal File Sharing, Public Policy, Stats / reports

Filesonic, previously listed among the top 10 largest file-sharing sites in the world, was badly affected by the Megaupload shutdown and lost huge amounts of traffic in 2012. During the last 48 hours it simply ceased to function.

In the wake of the January shutdown of Megaupload, many of the Internet’s leading cyberlocker services changed their business models in the hope they could avoid a similar fate.

One such site, Hong Kong-based Filesonic, took the drastic measures of discontinuing both their rewards program and all third-party sharing. In the file-hosting world their decisions were a pretty big deal. At the time Filesonic was one of the top 10 file-sharing sites on the Internet, with a quarter billion page views a month.

Despite the efforts of Filesonic to stay out of the copyright infringement spotlight (in December 2011 the company had partnered with anti-piracy company Vobile), in February 2012 the International Intellectual Property Alliance reported Filesonic to the USTR. IIPA, who count the MPAA and RIAA as members, described Filesonic as an “infringing distribution hub.”

But today, six months on, it appears something is seriously amiss with this former giant of the file-sharing world. For two days Filesonic has been completely unreachable via its .com domain after changes were made to its DNS settings.

The disappearance of both Oron and now Filesonic raises plenty of questions, but perhaps what is most unusual is the complete lack of communication with their customers. A simple message on the sites’ homepages would suffice, but neither filehost has obliged. Exactly why is anyone’s guess.

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/major-cyberlocker-filesonic-goes-offline-after-traffic-plummets-120831/

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