Fearing Megaupload’s Fate, One Chinese File Storage Site Changes Track

Perhaps fearing reaching the same fate as Megaupload, whose founder is now facing deportation and a trial in the US over alleged piracy, the Chinese cloud storage site 115.com has suddenly shut down all its public file-hosting and sharing services. The official announcement from 115’s management begins by saying that “A notification from the relevant authorities […] and copyright disputes” have caused the move, but no particular cases were mentioned.

115.com is still online as it has new-ish cloud note syncing and social services on which it can fall back. It’s only its “cloud storage” offerings that are being shuttered. The company, which started in 2009, boasted of having 40 million registered users in May of this year, with a very small percentage of those being “VIP” customers paying for extra cloud storage and other features. Based in Guangdong province, southern China, 115.com secured RMB 100 million (US$15.8 million) in first round funding earlier this year.

The site has announced that VIP customers can still retrieve their files for a limited time, but non-paying users have lost access to anything they had uploaded. The partial shutdown is reminiscent of FileSonic suspending its public file uploads earlier this year, shortly after the FBI and New Zealand police went ballistic on Megaupload’s four founders.

It remains to be seen if other cloud storage providers will feel the heat too. The popular DLbank site in China was recently taken over by telecoms giant Huawei, and there are plenty more. In addition, major web companies like the country’s biggest search engine, Baidu, have Dropbox-like services of their own.

Most overseas file storage sites are blocked in China (Mediafire, DepositFiles, etc) – but not on grounds of preventing piracy, but for stopping the sharing of politically sensitive material.

[Source: 21CN – article in Chinese]