NL-I did a story talking about all the lawsuits against HotFile on Thursday. Yesterday HotFile sent out this notice-
Hotfile: Account Termination:
Your account has been terminated due to repeated copyright infringement violations.
The webmasters who were uploading illegal content and making money from it are all REALLY PISSED. Several webmaster boards ( not necc ADULT webmaster boards, just webmaster boards in general) are talking about how they lost money because they were owed by HotFile and since their account was closed, they will not be paid. Also all the files that had up-loaded were deleted.
I also understand that many of the infringers had purchased "premium" memberships to HotFiles. So they lost that money also. ($55 a year)
HotFiles says
Policy of Terminating Accounts – Update
2011-02-19
Hotfile.com has always maintained a policy of terminating the accounts of users found to have engaged in repeated copyright infringement.
Our Terms of Service, to which all users must agree, prohibit using Hotfile.com to share content to which users do not have intellectual property rights. Recently, we have become concerned that despite these policies, some users persist in attempting to use Hotfile.com to share materials to which they do not have the necessary rights. Therefore, we have implemented a more aggressive policy of terminating the accounts of users who are the subject of repeated complaints of infringement.
Please ensure that you have all necessary rights to any content that you share with others using Hotfile.com.
It was only a matter of time. Once all the entertainemnt companies (including porn) decided to go after the file sharing sites like hotfile instead of going after single users it was only a matter of time before one would do this. I expect all the others will be in the same boat as Hotfile. They managed to kill all the bit torrent sites recently as well. Places like Emporium and BTJunky are gone as well I hear.
I’ve always said now is the golden age of internet piracy. There’s just too much copyrighted material being stolen for the piracy to go on forever.
You are right pornster. One day we will tell our grandkids we were there when the internet started and people actually shared files between one another before all the law suits killed the sharing.