- Andreas Bohnenstengel
- Kim Dotcom
On Saturday, exactly a year after a Justice Department raid shut down the file-locker service Megaupload (which had been megapopular with intellectual property scofflaws) the site’s flamboyant founder Kim Dotcom unveiled a new service simply called Mega that combines cloud-based file storage (not unlike what Megaupload offered) with the promise of a robust encryption scheme. The debut has had the tech media beside itself, which its typically outlandish launch party in New Zealand has only amplified, and presumably pirates who missed the good old days of being able to find an illicit Megaupload link to pretty much any album or film you could ever want were excited too.
So far the site’s been overloaded with users, but it remains to be seen if file traders are still going to be as enthusiastic once it’s running at full capacity. Mega might become a killer music- and movie-trading app like Megaupload had grown into before it was taken down, but there are indications that it’s not quite the pirate’s dream come true that it was shaped up to be.