14 DAY TRIAL // So far so good, as far as Kim Dotcom is concerned. A week or so after Mega launched to a lot of fanfare and a lot of scrutiny, the site hasn't turned into a copyright infringement bonanza as some had warned (or maybe hoped).
The site is getting a lot of usage, in fact, Dotcom revealed that it now hosts some 50 million files.
Of those, he claims, only 0.001 percent have been taken down by copyright owners. The site is getting about 50 takedown requests per day.
True to its initial claims, Mega is removing all infringing content, it does in fact do more than what the law requires, which is, sadly, the case for most other websites that rely on user content these days.
That is not to say that only 0.001 percent of content on the site is infringing, it's likely much more than that. But Mega doesn't allow websites to index it so even public files can't be found unless you know the exact link.
So if pirates only share their files with the people they know or on obscure locations on the web, it's hard to find any of the infringing files, even if they're there. Which is a good thing for Mega and a good thing for copyright owners, though it remains to be seen whether they see it that way.
Keeping the site away from search engines is a good way of staying out of trouble, but it's not perfect. That's going to be even clearer once the Mega API launches and apps leveraging the storage platform start emerging.
Dotcom has always said that he has big plans for the API and that he sees Mega as a platform, so it's not a matter of if but of when. Still, Dropbox has a thriving API, so do Box or Google Drive, and they don't have a piracy problem. Granted, there are a few things that are different, but Mega may just be able to weather the rocky initial phase.