Internet entrepreneur and showman Kim Dotcom (originally Schmitz) launched his new file hosting service Mega on January 19, the one year anniversary of the demise of his previous network of storage and sharing sites, Megaupload. Megaupload was designed for easy uploading and accessing of files, but was also infamous for hosting many pirated movies and TV shows. While this caused a rift between content providers and Megaupload, their relationship started meeting courtrooms upon the release of “The Mega Song”, a three minute ode to the service, which was uploaded to YouTube on Dotcom’s channel in mid-December 2011, featuring celebrities including will.i.am, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye West, among others. Universal Music Group ordered its removal from Youtube, claiming that the artists never consented to their use in the video and, while it’s back up now, it set the stage for a massive legal battle to follow.
The United States Department of Justice charged Megaupload, Dotcom, and his fellow executives the following January with coordinating a “criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy,” while also arresting Dotcom and three executives in New Zealand and seizing assets and domain names. While the trail has been beset with delays due to issues of evidence and legality of the warrants used to raid Megaupload’s servers, Dotcom has been using this time to work on Mega.
Mega differs from Megaupload by using secure encryption keys for each file that only the user is provided. Essentially, Mega stores the locks and the contents of what is locked, while each user is given the only copy of the key. This protects the data from government raids and server hacks, since getting the data off Mega’s servers is pointless unless they have the key to go with it. The data is stored redundantly on servers in two countries, so that if one country seizes the servers, there is a backup somewhere else so the service is not completely crippled. Dotcom hopes that the service grows to have many servers around many countries, so that the system is far-reaching and harder to take down.
The purpose of hiding the encryption keys of all the files from themselves is also to allow Mega to protect itself in legal arguments, since it cannot state what has or has not been added to its servers due to lack of knowledge. They are also aiming to play more nicely with takedown requests to demonstrate their compliance with the law, and hope that by being more willing to remove infringing data, they can prove that their main goal is to allow secure, private cloud storage.
In this respect, Dotcom hopes to form a serious competitor to Dropbox that gives users more control over their data. Users with free accounts get 50 GB of complimentary storage. Paid users can get 500 GB storage with 1 TB bandwidth for €9.99/month, 2 TB storage with 4 TB bandwidth for €19.99/month and 4 TB storage with 8 TB bandwidth for €29.99/month. Their big selling feature as mentioned is privacy, which is clear from their prominent display of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on their website.
Past Mega’s file storage service, it’s evident from their website and announcements that their goal is to branch out into other services. The first of these to be directly teased from Dotcom himself is Megamovie, which from the teaser screenshot appears to be Mega’s take on Netflix and Pandora, allowing some sort of movie, TV show, and music viewing or recommendations. It’s currently unclear what kind of advantage it would have over current systems or whether the companies behind the content would be on board, but this looks like it could be an eerily similar revival of the former Megaupload service with some small changes here and there.
Dotcom’s extradition case, which could potentially send him to the United States, will be in March, but even if he is sent to the US along with any other Megaupload executives, Mega has partners who are not involved with the original case and could likely continue the legacy that Dotcom envisioned. In the first day of release, one million users had already registered and consequently the site began suffering slowdowns from all the new visitors. The site temporarily hit a rank of 141 in Alexa’s chart tracking site popularity, but has come down to 3354, likely due to slow site performance and unimplemented features. We have definitely not heard the end of Dotcom or his crazy theme songs, FBI-themed launch parties, and other strange yet entertaining events relating to Mega, for there is still much to come in his vision for a securely private Internet empire.
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