Another cloud storage solutions provider has bit the dust. After negotiating an out-of-court settlement with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) amounting to a massive $80 million, Hotfile completely and almost immediately shut down its service, taking down all of its users’ files with it.
The shut down came as a surprise to many, as the cloud hosting provider had been scheduled to go on trial against the MPAA over…you guessed it, pirated content hosted by the company. The trial had not even begun before both parties decided to settle out of court. Even worse, all files hosted on Hotfile can no longer be accessed in any way whatsoever.
Now, users who access the Hotfile website will be greeted with a splash image with the following text:
“As a result of a United States Federal Court having found Hotfile.com to be in violation of copyright law the site has been permanently shut down. If you are looking for your favorite movies or TV-shows online, there are more ways than ever today to get high quality access to them on legal platforms.”
The shutting down of Hotfile is the second high-profile shutdown initiated by the MPAA, after popular BitTorrent site isoHunt was taken down in October – before a third party revived the forum a few weeks later. These also follow after Megaupload’s infamous shutting down and the series of events that transpired after, culminating in the introduction of Mega, a new cloud storage option that offered 50GB of free cloud storage.
(Source: TorrentFreak)
