Nearly half of the internet users surveyed incorrectly said they thought it was legal to upload commercially produced media to a file-sharing website

Internet users unaware of illegal downloading

Internet users are unwittingly turning into online pirates over confusion about what constitutes illegal downloading.

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.

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."

he internet has changed the world so much that current legislation is not adequate, said Wales. "

" If, for example, someone uploads a video of their child's birthday party and then finds it has been deleted because a copyrighted song is playing in the background, "that's not piracy. That's how we use our music these days," says Wales. "A lot of what people want to do now is not legal but should be legal. We can say that and still be against full-scale piracy."

I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music. People can now speak directly to their audiences,"

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

rejected an international treaty to crack down on digital piracy, a vote that Internet freedom groups hailed as a victory for democracy but that media companies lamented as a setback for the creative industries.

European legislators

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which has been signed by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and a number of individual E.U. members.

Five-year-old runs up £1,700 iPad bill in ten minutes

"Danny was pestering us to let him have a go on the iPad. He kept saying it was a free game so my husband put in the passcode and handed it to him.

"He was crying, as the rest of the children were telling him we could have bought a house with the amount he had spent.

After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared

If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like

ou're not paying for your presence on the web, then you're

just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you

When you use a free web service you're the underclass. At best you're a guest. At worst you're a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It's a cliché but worth repeating: if you're not paying for it, you're aren't the customer, you're the product.

y 2016, the internet is forecast to grow to 12.4% in the UK, contributing some £225bn to the overall UK economy.

Certainly the past 15 years have seen London, in particular, generate some incredible homegrown successes including ASOS, JustEat, King.com, Mimecast, Moshi, Net-a-Porter, Playfish and Skype. It is the US giants Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google and Facebook, which currently generate more than £15bn of annual UK revenues combined.

Understanding the internet's role in our economy and society is so fundamental now that we cannot afford to operate blindly. If we are in a global economic war for talent, resources and income, perhaps we need to establish the internet age-equivalent of Winston Churchill's 1941 creation of the Central Statistical Office (the precursor to the Office for National Statistics), and build a transparent central statistics body for relevant economic internet related data.Government can and does have an enormous impact on the economy.