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The raddest dude in the democratic party.
http://kucinich.house.gov/

(He's the 4-foot tall guy with the 6-foot tall redhead for a wife)

Interesting but unimportant. The company can still develop Megabox. Shutting down their file sharing servers wouldn't stop the company from starting up the new service.

Isn't the government filing criminal charges against the people who ran Megaupload?

"sooooo why did we "need" SOPA/PIPA legislation to combat piracy?"

SOPA/PIPA was bought by the entertainment industry, it gave ridiculous amounts of power to companies while needing very little if any proof. The Megaupload shutdown followed quite a lot of work (by the government) collecting evidence and requiring warrants. It also targeted a file sharing site that was doing nothing to enforce copyright laws, whereas SOPA would allow a single artist to shut down Youtube/Facebook/Anything they wanted for a single infraction.

I work for a hosting company. The process, so far as I can tell from reading up about our abuse-report department, is that a copyright holder makes a complaint to the relevant party (for anything hosted through our system, that would be us), the relevant party investigates, and if the material in the complaint violates trademark or copyright, we block it or get the offending party to take it down. According to the few articles I've read, Megaupload cooperated in this process and removed offending materials when they were found. I'm not sure how that makes or breaks the government's case against them, but it seems that if the company were in compliance with all requests, there would be little reason to go forward with arrests/prosecutions.

Because a small proportion of users pay for storage, the business is dependent upon advertising. Adverts are primarily viewed when files are downloaded and the business model is therefore not based upon storage but upon maximising downloads. (items 7 -

...

An incentivising program was adopted encouraging the upload of "popular" files in return for payments to successful uploaders. (item 69e et al)

In Megaupload's case, the indictment asserts DMCA provisions were used for the appearance of legitimacy – the actual material was not removed, only some links to it were, takedowns agreement was approved based on business growth rather than infringement, and the parties themselves openly discussed their infringing activities. The indictment states that Megaupload executives:
"... are willfully infringing copyrights themselves on these systems; have actual knowledge that the materials on their systems are infringing (or alternatively know facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent); receive a financial benefit directly attributable to copyright-infringing activity where the provider can control that activity; and have not removed, or disabled access to, known copyright infringing material from servers they control."[48]

I'm going to assume that the government has solid evidence if they managed to get the cooperation of New Zealand in the arrests.