Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom celebrated the one-year anniversary of his site getting shut down with the birth of his brand new baby website yesterday. Dotcom launched file-sharing site Mega on Sunday, which besides sharing half of its predecessor’s name, he says is not at all like the site that’s been accused of pirating online content. 

Dotcom says in the first 12 hours of Mega’s existence, over 250,000 users have already signed up to join. While both Mega and Megaupload feature the ability to store and share large files, the key difference here that Dotcom seems to be betting on is a new privacy encryption system.

The users are the ones who hold decryption keys for uploaded files and not Mega, so if the company can’t see people sharing pirated content, it’s not legally responsible, or so the ostensible argument goes, notes the Associated Press.

“If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service,” said Dotcom during the unveiling, “you don’t shut down the post office.”

But anti-piracy groups are already gathering up steam to blast this new entity, reports TorrentFreak, with at least one group claiming Dotcom’s back to his old shenanigans, despite pledging never to do so again. StopFileLockers says Mega has “all the fundamental qualities” of an infringing file-locker and the group is campaigning to have payment processor accounts of the site terminated.

“Mega itself does not process payments because nobody would process payments for it. A couple of Mega resellers have PayPal and they are being terminated,” says one of the men behind StopFileLockers, noting that those resellers won’t be up to snuff.

“It has been widely reported that Paypal requires certain conditions to be met to become an approved file sharing merchant, on the face of it many of these conditions cannot be met by Mega,” he added.

Dotcom debuted his new company at a press conference in front of hundreds of guests with odd  touches like a dramatization of the day when New Zealand authorities raided his offices. All that is in the past and has no bearing on Mega, insists Dotcom.

“Sometimes good things come out of terrible events,” Dotcom said. “For example, if it wasn’t for a giant comet hitting earth, we would still be surrounded by angry dinosaurs — hungry, too. If it wasn’t for that iceberg, we wouldn’t have a great Titanic movie which makes me cry every time I see it. And if it wasn’t for the raid, we wouldn’t have Mega.”

It isn’t just anti-piracy advocates that are gearing up to go after Mega, the Motion Picture Association of America, which filed complaints about alleged copyright infringement by Megaupload issued a statement about the new company, saying:

“We are still reviewing how this new project will operate, but we do know that Kim Dotcom has built his career and his fortune on stealing creative works. We’ll reserve final judgment until we have a chance to take a closer look, but given Kim Dotcom’s history of damaging the consumer experience by pushing stolen, illegitimate content into the marketplace, count us as skeptical.”

Dotcom’s Mega: Anti-Piracy Group Moves To Cut Off Site’s Finances [TorrentFreak]
Indicted Megaupload founder opens new sharing site [Associated Press]

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