ReadWriteWeb

We're not even two weeks into the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown, but the saga seems to unfold with a new angle or detail everyday. From Kim Dotcom's colorful personal life to questions about the fate of non-infringing data uploaded by former Megaupload users, this story is far from over.

However, if the company's lawyers don't manage to mount a convincing defense, Megaupload itself could disappear forever. It's too soon to tell, but in the meantime, we thought we'd take a look at some key dates and data points in the history of Megaupload.

Founded in 2005, Megaupload grew to be a massive and incredibly controversial site over the years. Estimates vary as to its actual traffic and user base, but suffice it to say that the service was huge. The controversy didn't start on January 19, 2012 when New Zealand police raided Kim Dotcom's mansion and arrested several Megaupload executives. Prior to that, the company had faced copyright lawsuits, a Google AdSense blockade and country-wide bans outside the U.S.

If you think the RIAA and MPPA were mad about Megaupload, you should meet one of the site's users now that it's been shut down. I don't just mean one of the many, many people who were using Megaupload and its sister sites to snag unauthorized, copyrighted content. While those people must be irked, they'll have no trouble moving on to another service.

The users who are really upset are the ones who, wisely or not, used the serve to send important, non-infringing personal and work-related files to themselves, friends and colleagues. Immediately after the shutdown of Megaupload, we saw a surge of angry tweets from people who were using the service for personal purposes and can no longer access their files. Now, there's talk of those users suing the FBI in response.

The fallout from last week's FBI raid and shutdown of MegaUpload isn't limited to founder Kim Dotcom and his associates. As intriguing as that story will be to follow, some of the more immediate side effects are being felt among other file-hosting services.

Some companies that are perceived, correctly or not, of having a similar model to MegaUpload's are now scrambling to prevent their own demise now that that the legitimacy of that model has been very publicly - and dramatically - challenged.

After yesterday's dramatic, international sting operation, the people behind Megaupload are in custody, their Web empire and fancy cars having been seized by authorities. Founder Kim Dotcom and his associates are charged with piracy on a massive scale, among other things.

As for Megaupload.com, the site is inaccessible, perhaps indefinitely. That's a bummer for the millions of people who used it to share copyrighted albums, movies and software. It's an even bigger let down for users who used the service to store personal files, sometimes without a backup.

Just as SOPA opponents in the United States prepare for round two in their battle against far-reaching anti-piracy legislation, it appears that their Spanish counterparts just lost theirs. On Friday, the Spanish government approved the Sustainable Economy Law, (SEL) which enables rights holders to have infringing websites shut down within 10 days after a complaint is filed.

Once a complaint is made, a judge can order ISPs to block access to sites that host copyrighted material or have them shut down entirely. The law, which was officially passed early last year but never implemented, was approved by Spain's new, more conservative government last week and will now be enacted as planned, much to the delight of the film and music industries, as well as other media companies.

It appears as though a recent court decision forcing LimeWire to halt its P2P services is having a ripple effect to other parts of the company, as All Things Digital reports the site is closing its online music store at the end of the year and is abandoning its plans for a legal music download service.

The news wasn't good for LimeWire back in October when a U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction, forcing the P2P filesharing site to close down both the website and its client. And arguably, things went from bad to worse when a figure named MetaPirate took advantage of the open-source code for the client and recreated a Pirate Edition of LimeWire, causing both the RIAA as well as LimeWire to scramble to track him down. Those meddling kids.

The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.

We have profiled Twitter-based file sharing services in the past, but in some cases the shared files were read-only and the UI design left much to be desired, or the service merely redirected the user to a third-party file sharing service.

Spain-based Ideateca has conquered these drawbacks with FileSocial, a sleek multi-platform file sharing service for Twitter. After authenticating their Twitter account, users can upload any filetype up to 50MB, add a message of 110 characters or less, and FileSocial will post the tweet on Twitter with a link to the file.

Virgin Media, one of the UK's leading providers of television / broadband / mobile / phone services, has announced plans to use deep packet inspection technology to track illegal file-sharing activity among around 40 percent of its UK network. Users whose activities are being monitored will not be informed of this fact.

The tech comes from Detica, a company better known for working with government data and intelligence agencies than media files and P2P networks. Their CView product is designed to help put an end to illegal filesharing, and with ISPs showing interest, it's unlikely that Virgin's deal will be the last we hear about.

The blogosphere is abuzz with news of doubleTwist music community's latest iTunes-esque music store release. While many continue to weigh in on the merits of the Amazon MP3-powered store, we shouldn't lose sight of what this actually represents. The Amazon partnership legitimizes and monetizes a startup company that is still arguably a darknet file sharing service.