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Kim DotCom promises 50GB for free from Mega

The site replacing MegaUpload will give free users lots of storage space, but former premium users won't get their statuses back, yet.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
2 min read
Kim DotCom TVNZ

Kim DotCom plans to launch his new site in two days, and users will get 50GB of storage for free, the infamous entrepreneur tweeted today.

DotCom also tweeted that his lawyers are working on giving former premium users their premium statuses on the new site but that the site "can't at this time."

50GB is a huge amount of free storage right off the bat. DotCom's tweet comes a day after another cloud storage service, MediaFire, announced it would be offering 50GB of free storage. Other storage services may offer as much -- or more -- for free, but those accounts come with requirements.

DotCom's tweets also indicate that more goodies are coming with the new service. After the year he's had, he'll need those incentives to get going again.

DotCom has spent the last year battling the U.S. government over his site MegaUpload, the highest-profile service to be accused of criminal copyright violations. He was arrested on allegations of criminal copyright violation, conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud. U.S. federal officials accused DotCom of pocketing millions of dollars in illegal profits from criminal file-sharing and downloading that has reportedly cost the film industry more than $600 million in damages.

While still fighting the government in court, DotCom decided to start a new site from New Zealand, where he now resides. He claimed that he was entrapped by the U.S. government because he complied with a federal search warrant targeting five file-sharing services using MegaUpload's infrastructure in 2010, but the feds have called this claim "baseless."