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Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.

The site would not use US-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by US authorities, Dotcom said.

Megaupload was shut down in January 2012 when New Zealand police helicopters swooped into Dotcom's mansion outside Auckland to seize computers and other evidence at the request of US authorities.

A Year After the Closing of Megaupload, a File-Sharing Tycoon Opens a New Site

Kim Dotcom opened his new file-storage Web site to the public — one year to the minute after the police raided the mansion he rents in New Zealand.

Megaupload

On how Mega differs from MegauploadThere are quite a few innovations that Megaupload didn't have. For example, we have built in upload-download acceleration in the browser, which is technology that only became available nine months ago. We have on-the-fly encryption to protect our users' privacy – because of my own experience having been spied on, and also throughout the proceedings, the US government looking into the files of users, without a warrant …

I think privacy is a very important topic, and more important today for users than ever, because you read about all these privacy violations, and reaching out from companies like Facebook and Instagram, and expanding their rights on what should be yours. We want to create a service that gives you fully automated, real-time, one-click, on-the-fly privacy.

I see myself in a role now of someone who has been put in this impossible situation, and I'm not only fighting just for myself but for the rights of everybody.

We want to show the world that we are innovators. We want to show the world that cloud storage has a right to exist. And, of course, when you launch something like this, you can expect some controversy. The content industry is going to react really emotionally about this. The US government will probably try and destroy the new business … you've got to stand up against that, and fight that, and I'm doing that … I will not allow them to chill me."

Megaupload was created initially as a service that allows you to send large files because email attachments had limitations … and that's still the case today. The popularity and initial growth was all around that. This was never set up with the intent to be some kind of piracy haven. If the US government says that we are a mega-conspiracy, a mafia that has created this kind of thing to be a criminal network of pirates, they're completely wrong … for them it was about shutting it down and dealing with it later on the fly. They are hacking the legal system."