“What I hope to achieve is very simple. I want to tear apart the illegal file locker industry by removing its supply of funds and then ultimately removing its supply of network connectivity,” King explained.

Over the months that followed King kept up the pressure. With a team of people (he has never revealed its exact size or membership), King sought out infringing files on hosting sites and used their existence to build up a picture that sites were acting illegally.

Then, using contacts he had built in the payment processing sector, AdultKing (as King is known online) began to hit file-hosting sites in the pocket by reporting them to the likes of PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and a variety of intermediate processors. The aim: to cut sites off from their cash.

For some sites the results were extremely problematic. With no options to process payments, file-hosting sites were not only unable to accept money for user subscriptions, but also had problems sending money out, meaning that server bills went unpaid. Worse still, some who had problems with PayPal due to King’s work found their funds frozen for six months, a situation that proved terminal for some fringe players.

Some 90 days into the StopFileLockers campaign, King said he had played a part in 194 sites having their payments interrupted and the total shutdown of 54 others.

There can be little doubt that among King’s targets were sites designed from the ground up to profit from infringing content and for this he gained both moral and financial support from his industry peers. However, in January 2013 King began attacking the payment processing abilities of Kim Dotcom’s brand new Mega.co.nz, the most-scrutinized file-hosting startup in tech history.

There was no way that Mega would do anything to break the law, yet King was determined to harass the company. He failed, Mega continued to grow, and the moral high-ground of the StopFileLockers campaign had been damaged by going after a law-abiding company going about its 100% legitimate business.

In the months that followed King continued his work, although with less fanfare than in the early days. However, a lowered profile did nothing to improve his standing in file-sharing circles. King is almost certainly the most-hated man in the file-hosting business today, which some will attribute to his successes over the past 15 months.

King himself believes that his contribution has been significant, with the suggestion that the StopFileLockers campaign has played a part in the shutdown of hundreds of piracy-related sites and the closure of thousands of PayPal, Payza, Moneybookers and other payment processing options. No official stats or reports are available but it’s safe to say that the project has been a considerable nuisance to the file-hosting market.

However, it’s now clear that King’s work is on the brink. Despite initial enthusiasm and support (including hard cash from industry giant Manwin), interest in the project has waned considerably. In an update to adult industry platform GFY, King announced today that StopFileLockers has run out of money and resources and will shut down this week.

“Unfortunately at the end of September we finally ran out of funds and the resources just don’t exist to keep this effort going any longer. In fact, we now face a deficit in the vicinity of $15,000,” King said.

“Unless a source of funding is found, all operational aspects of the Stop File Lockers project and Copy Control will cease at midnight on Friday 4th October (AEST). I would like to thank every person, company and organization that has provided support (financial and otherwise) to the project.”

So what now for AdultKing? More anti-piracy work, or an unlikely change of sides perhaps?

“Overnight one of the largest remaining file lockers offered me $XXX,XXX a year to come on board as a consultant and help them become compliant and get their PayPal account back,” King revealed in September.

“I told them to get fucked.”

In the absence of any figures to show success or failure it is very difficult to assess the real-world achievements of the campaign, at least as far as it may or may not have boosted sales of official content. However, King’s legacy may lie in a more significant area – adding momentum to the shifting of payment processor attitudes towards the file-sharing space.

“We have recast the way in which file lockers are viewed by many organizations,” King concludes.

Few will argue with that.

Update:

“More than one file locker operator has offered either incentive or threat to help them, or desist from working to mitigate their business model. There is no price at which a piracy outfit can obtain my services,” King informs TorrentFreak.

“At the conclusion of the Stop File Lockers project I shall be concentrating my efforts on my mainstream business interests which are not associated with either anti-piracy or the adult industry.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The launch press conference in front of 200+ guests and a worldwide audience of millions was a loud and at times bizarre affair, but a couple of serious messages were underlined time and again. User privacy via encryption is paramount at Mega but that will not be at the expense of rightsholders.

To that end, Mega says it has had a team of lawyers working to ensure that Mega meets its legal obligations in every respect and the claim that it is the most closely scrutinized start up in Internet history seems like a reasonable one. But already the hawks are circling, one in particular.

Robert King is the lead figure behind StopFileLockers (SFL), an anti-piracy group dedicated to bringing file-hosting services to their knees by strangling their finances. Last year King claimed his group had a hand in disrupting the cash flow to hundreds of sites and actually shutting down dozens more. Now he has a very big scalp on his mind.

King, an Australian and adult industry player, says that StopFileLockers have just begun a “campaign to have the payment processing of all Mega resellers terminated.”

“Mega itself does not process payments because nobody would process payments for it. A couple of Mega resellers have PayPal and they are being terminated,” he says.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, King says Mega can’t meet the standards required by PayPal.

“It has been widely reported that Paypal requires certain conditions to be met to become an approved file sharing merchant, on the face of it many of these conditions cannot be met by Mega,” he said.

A look at Mega’s premium account signup page reveals a selection of resellers, all apparently reputable companies. They include domain name registrar Instra, whose founder Tony Lentino is the new Mega CEO, and other domain companies including EuroDNS and Digiweb. If these companies did indeed find their PayPal accounts closed or frozen, it could potentially disrupt their core businesses to the tune of millions of dollars.

King seems unconcerned and despite Mega’s stance that it is a legitimate business that abides by all relevant laws, he justifies his actions by describing Mega as an operation hiding behind a “thinly veiled appearance of a legitimate cloud hosting service.”

“We haven’t and wont go after legitimate services like Dropbox – however from its inception the new Mega was never intended to be a legitimate cloud storage service as it has all the fundamental qualities of an infringing file locker service, the only thing missing at this stage is an affiliate program,” King adds.

Of course, there will be Mega users who upload copyright-infringing material, just as people upload unauthorized content to YouTube every single minute of every day. However, while YouTube is also a file-locker of sorts, in King’s eyes there is no comparison, despite Mega only being online for a couple of days with no time to prove itself.

“At this stage there is no mechanism by which rights holders can gain access to remove files, there appears to be no plans to institute arrangements whereby files can be matched against MD5 or other fingerprinting technology for automated copyright removal and the detection of harmful content, and the site has not shown any wish to comply with the policies of the payment processors with whom it seeks to do business,” King says.

“Given the site lacks many of these safety features, we believe that Mega is no different to various other file locker services which have had various payment services canceled or suspended.”

But of course Mega is very different technically to most other mainstream file-hosting sites. While it does have a very clear policy on the takedown of illicit content, King suggests that only proactive filtering will be enough to qualify Mega for taking payments via PayPal and other processors. However, due to the site’s encryption mechanisms, hash checking and matching simply won’t work.

In the meantime, StopFileLockers say they are watching how Mega is being used.

“We have already detected a significant amount of illegal and copyright infringing material being shared by the new Mega. There are sites already sharing links to hundreds of copyright infringing titles on Mega,” King says.

TorrentFreak asked King for evidence of the apparently illegal and copyright-infringing material but he declined and said that data would be released in due course. (Note: King’s use of the word ‘illegal’ in the past has been used to describe illegal pornography.)

We sent Robert King’s comments to Kim Dotcom and will update this article when we receive them.

(By the way, Happy Birthday Kim)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.