Megaupload had lots of grey/dark patterns, namely people could upload whatever but downloading anything big, each Downloader had to buy credits.

Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software

> Did he get hundreds of millions in cash and dozens of luxury cars by pirating songs on the Internet?

Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.

Nah, he built a file sharing service and people paid for that.

MegaUpload was primarily funded by ads displayed on download pages, not the small number of people paying for storage.

Can you provide some source for the claim about the volume of sales MU had?

The original indictment put it at $25mm from ads and $150mm from subs, so my original statement is wrong.

But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.

Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.

I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?

Sounds exactly like a file sharing service. My Google documents are also downloaded much more than uploaded, very often by people who don't upload anything at all.

Why does it matter?