In less than a day, Kim Dotcom claims that his new file-sharing site has already reached 500,000 registered users following a PR spectacle to mark the site’s launch in New Zealand.
The German-Finnish entrepreneur is the man behind Megaupload, a file-sharing site the US Department of Justice shut down last year on the grounds of online piracy and copyright infringement. Dotcom was subsequently arrested when his mansion in New Zealand was raided by armed police on 20 January 2012.
A year later, he’s back with Mega, a new file-sharing site that allegedly comes with military-grade encryption that will keep files shared there so private that even the site operators won’t know what they are. Dotcom believes this will clear Mega of liability in the face of claims of copyright infringement.
While Dotcom continues to fight extradition to the US, an overblown stage show at the launch of Mega depicted a raid on Dotcom’s mansion, marking the one-year anniversary. According to NDTV, Dotcom claims the site reached 500,000 users just 14 hours after the launch.
With Mega, users can now control access to their files, something they couldn’t do on Megaupload where anyone could search and download what was stored there.
Dotcom is confident Mega will operate within the confines of copyright law and on a legitimate basis, comparing it to popular cloud storage facilities such as Box and Dropbox. Mega will also comply with requests to remove infringing material discovered there.
