In the past, the Anonymous collective has occasionally used its powers for good. Users helped track down the girl who threw those puppies in the river and they’ve aided in shutting down child pornography sites. But the group may now be harnessing their powers in an unworthy mission.

A couple weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI shut down the popular file-sharing site Megaupload, claiming the website violated copyright laws. A judge in New Zealand denied bail to Kim Dotcom, the website’s founder, about a week ago. And recently it was announced that as early as a couple weeks from now, 50 million users could have their uploaded content permanently deleted.

Shutting down Megaupload happened to take place the day after websites such as Google and Wikipedia blacked out in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

So naturally, Anonymous “hacktivists” and large parts of the Internet community went nuts over it.

Calm down. The cops most likely won’t burst into your house tomorrow, see the music you downloaded illegally and throw you in jail without due process.

First, taking down Megaupload wasn’t the government’s reaction to the blackout protests, as it could not have been a single-day operation. The U.S. Justice Department reported (without extensive media coverage) that the indictment was filed on January 5, weeks before the anti-SOPA blackouts.

Second, Megaupload had it coming.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects file-sharing sites as long as they remove copyrighted material once someone flags it. YouTube, for example, has programs and staff  in place that almost immediately take down material flagged as copyrighted. (I’m not saying you should try this, but if you upload a video with “Toxic” by Britney Spears playing in the background, in a short while you’ll get an email from YouTube telling you they’ve removed your content.)

According to Reuters, prosecutors said Megaupload did not always remove flagged copyrighted material.

University associate professor Reza Rejaie helped publish a study that looks closely at who uploads content onto file-sharing websites. He does not think these sites had low regulations by accident.

“The person who established the website, on the one hand, is not to blame. But think about it, how do they make money? What is interesting content? Copyrighted content,” Rejaie said. “I think they have an incentive not to remove that material.”

Government officials said Megaupload cost owners of copyrighted material over $500 million while making themselves over $175 million. This money came partly from advertising but mostly from subscription fees.

These accusations don’t include the claim that Megaupload executives were also involved in money laundering. Several Megaupload officials have been personally charged with racketeering.

So if Megaupload was involved in all this, why did the Internet community react so strongly against the government taking it down? Because the website wasn’t all bad.

You may have seen the (poorly edited and super awkward) video featuring various celebrities outwardly supporting Megaupload. These celebrities (Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Lil Jon and others) possibly spoke in favor of Megaupload partly because they were paid to. Let’s be real, Dotcom probably has so much money he’d be able to pay off my student loans with one check. But also, artists get a pretty bad cut from record companies. If they are able to switch over to a file-sharing site, they can cut out many of the middle men and profit more per song. And honestly, which great band ever wrote a song about how much they loved the music industry?

Additionally, much of the material hosted on the site was legitimate.

Michael Beardsworth, a computer and information science major at the University, believes the government is fighting a losing battle against these file-sharing sites.

“Information wants to be free, and censorship to protect copyright is ultimately a failing strategy,” he said.

Similarly, University student Oliver Bochsler has confidence that although the U.S. Justice Department shut down one large file-sharing site, it can’t prevent sites like it from hosting illegal material.

“It’s good that they took the site down, but it’s a lot of effort to shut down something that’s going to have a similar replica back up and running soon,” Bochsler said.

For those in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, maybe this shutdown was a good thing. The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI have now shown to Congress they don’t need to pass a poorly worded bill into law to take down websites that host copyrighted material.

As we wait for the Megaupload game to play out, pay attention to the protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that are happening all over Europe. The agreement was passed into the United States in October of 2011 — without Senate approval — and is awfully similar to the SOPA and PIPA bills the community fought so hard to push out of Congress a couple weeks ago.