The FBI takedown of Megaupload one year ago was a PR fiasco, and quite possibly, a practical disaster for law enforcement and rights holders. The image of armed police storming a private function and holding a pregnant woman (Dotcom’s partner) at gunpoint – and preventing her calling for medical assistance – is not good press.
Arresting someone you cannot legally arrest (that bit is disputed by the FBI), and using a spy agency to illegally spy on someone (that bit is not disputed) have created legal difficulties. The big question right now is whether Dotcom plans to launch Megaupload 2 (the latest suggestion is that it will be January 19, 2013). If it goes ahead, it will undoubtedly be more difficult for law enforcement to curtail. Rumors are that it will be distributed across multiple servers in multiple jurisdictions to make police raids more difficult, and files will be encrypted with AES to make monitoring problematic.
A model already exists in The Pirate Bay, which has made itself raid-proof. “Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent”, The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.