The timing of the mega upload servers take down was interesting but had nothing to do with SOPA. It was clearly political, the administration has a lot of friends who help him the creation content arena. They are not very happy with his recent SOPA position so the Mega-Upload take down should appease them. Mega Upload take down had nothing to do with SOPA, it was much more to do with the DMCA (since the servers and domain names where under US locations). It comes down to the simple fact that the government believes that mega upload breached the safe harbor provision by encouraging illegal uploads with financial incentives to pirates. Also that they were not swift enough/limited on take downs. This is up to a jury who probably don't have any understanding of technology. Getting 12 people to buy into this is going to be hard.
How different youtube was in its early days to megaupload today is an interesting question. Since this is a criminal prosecution not a civil, the level of guilt they need to prove is a lot higher. They may even not even win extradition from New Zealand given how weak their case seems. But Mega upload will be down for several years given the extradition and then the time for a criminal trial. This is decades in internet terms, meaning Mega Upload is history in any true sense of the word. Expect a NewMegaUpload to be online in less than a month by a proxy third party. Thus does not stop the multitude of other virtual hard drive sites. Given how easy it is to create and share a virtual hard drive on a multitude of current servers.
Aka the government just dropped a 500 lb bomb on mega upload but the pirates have already moved on to another site and legitimate users of Megaupload lost their files. So the only people who are happy about this are the content creators and the administration. Mega uploads fate will not be decided until after the election in the fall.
So a political win, but in the actual war on piracy it effect will be negligible.
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