Mega May Be Pirate-Free, but Only Because It Takes Down Any Suspicious File, Legal or Not

Mega has been taking big steps to ensure that the site doesn't become a haven for piracy, especially as all the world was watching for any weakness.

It seems to be working, Dotcom boasted that the site only gets 50 takedown notices per day, that's for nearly 50 million files uploaded in total.

Mega doesn't allow search engines to index files, so even if they are public, they are only visible to those that have the link.

Still, it may be more than that, there was a worry that Mega may be especially aggressive in removing any suspicious file and it seems that we were right to worry.

As soon as Mega launched, so did a number of sites offering a way to search through files hosted on the site. Since links can't be indexed, they are only able to do so for files submitted by users.

Mega Search is one such site, launched shortly after Mega itself did. Since links have to be submitted manually, it doesn't have a huge number of them.

But even among those, many are already dead. As TorrentFreak found out, either Mega or someone else keeps an eye on Mega Search and presumably other sites like it and removes any file shared on it, legal or not.

TorrentFreak uploaded some obviously legal files to Mega and then added the links to Mega Search. Within minutes, the files were removed and Mega sent a notification that it had received takedown notices for all of them.

The big question is whether a copyright holder has set up an automated process to get all of these links removed or whether Mega is doing it itself.

Mega's desire to keep copyrighted material out is understandable, but being overly-aggressive is only going to drive away people who upload perfectly legal files only to have them removed. It may end up with happy copyright holders and no users.