“You have companies like Dropbox and Google with Drive with materially similar technologies, and they are in business and they’re thriving—and Mega adds encryption,” he says.

The legal talent on the case is certainly impressive:

The Mega business plan has been vetted by more than 20 lawyers across the US and New Zealand, Dotcom says—including those at Rothken's firm, and New Zealand law firms Simpson Grierson (one of the largest corporate law firms in NZ) and Lowndes Jordan (an intellectual property specialist). Also on Team Mega are two independent lawyers capable of handling the most difficult work: Queen’s Counsel Paul Davison (often cited as the most expensive lawyer in New Zealand) and Guyon Foley—a criminal lawyer who made his mark prosecuting cases for the police before "switching sides," so to speak.

What's unique about the new Mega? In an interview with the Wall St. Journal, Dotcom says:

Mr. Dotcom: I would say the biggest new development is on-the-fly encryption. Without having to install any kind of application—it happens in your browser in the background—it encrypts giving you privacy. This means when you transfer data anyone sitting on that line will get nothing as it is all scrambled and impossible to decrypt without your key. This is going to take encryption to the mainstream.

We have some servers in New Zealand, we have some servers in Europe and we have invited hosting partners to sign up to join us. Basically anyone can connect a server in their hosting facility, hook it up to Internet, give us access and we can make it a Megaserver. Every file that is being uploaded to Mega is not just on one server, meaning if one hosting company goes bankrupt then those files will be on least two servers in the world and in two different jurisdictions.

The new site will comply with takedown requests if told of infringing material. As to Hollywood, Dotcom says the solution lies with the studios, not internet users. It's a matter of fair pricing. He offers this suggestion:

You could do this either through having a search engine or having a really nice iTunes-styled website where you could find anything and you can click on it for a buck or you register for a flat fee per month. The moment you do that—even though your price lowers significantly—all of sudden you monetized all of these people who are currently downloading for free.

From what I can tell, it is like a more sophisticated Dropbox. There's no search, so you can't search for copies of a certain movie or video. But when you get an account, it comes with a "contacts" feature where you can add people by their e-mail address. Contacts can share their content with other contacts. I wonder if the U.S. will respond with a new crime of "unlawful friending resulting in copyright infringement."

Update: The copyright notice on the new Mega site:

Copyright warning: MEGA respects the copyrights of others and requires that users of the MEGA cloud service comply with the laws of copyright. You are strictly prohibited from using the MEGA cloud service to infringe copyrights. You may not upload, download, store, share, display, stream, distribute, e-mail, link to, transmit or otherwise make available any files, data, or content that infringes any copyright or other proprietary rights of any person or entity.