Many students across the country are cord-cutting.

While about 93 percent of the United States has cable television, many college students are cutting out the service because of the cost, according to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

One way college students are cutting costs while still catching up on their favorite series is by illegal streaming and downloading.

Currently, there is a plethora of websites that allow users to log in on their laptops and gain access to network, cable and premium channel series for free. One of these sites is Mega, which went live Jan. 20 – almost exactly a year after the FBI shut down Kim Dotcom’s previous venture, Megaupload.

Mega makes an attempt to distance itself from any legal wrongdoing of its users by explicitly outlining that uploading illegal content is forbidden, according to a Jan. 20 article published by The New York Times.

But Courtney Barclay, an assistant professor of media studies, said that might not save the new website.

“Encryption alone will not be enough to distinguish the troubles from the previous website,” she said.

While Mega employs new privacy policies for the hosting website, this does not mean its practices are legal, she said.

“You can still be held accountable for copyright infringement even if you don’t know about the specific instances,” Barclay said.

Technically, Mega competes in the same cloud storage arena as Dropbox, Box.com and Google Drive, but the primary difference is that once a file is uploaded, it is immediately encrypted. This technology, which Dotcom is employing, has only been made possible by new parts of the HTML 5 website programming language, according to the Times article.

The New Zealand Intelligence Agency is freezing Dotcom’s funds while it continues its investigation of Megaupload. Therefore, the seed money for the venture was raised through third parties, according to the article.

The FBI, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice, forced Megaupload, an online hosting website commonly used for storing copyrighted material, to close last January. The website’s domain was revoked and the company was shut down, according to a Jan. 19 article published by The Wall Street Journal.

Dotcom founded Megaupload and its affiliated sites in Hong Kong in 2005 with the purpose of being a secure hosting website for personal content. The popularity of Megaupload ballooned because of its ability to deliver users with fast bandwidth and download speeds of hosted content, according to an indictment form from a district court filing in Eastern Virginia.

Megaupload was alleged to have infringed upon $500 million of entertainment studio income. In addition, just prior to the shutdown, the website was the 13th most frequently visited website on the Internet, boasting a registered user base of more than 180 million, according to the indictment.

Mega’s recent growth spurt will allow cash-strapped college students to catch their favorite shows for free, but some are split on whether illegal streaming or downloading is worth the risk.

“It is illegal and I don’t want to break the rules,” said Morgan Montgomery, a sophomore management major. “It’s true that not everyone who downloads videos gets caught, but it’s still wrong.”

Published on January 29, 2013 at 12:05 am

Contact Jared: jmrose03@syr.edu