A year to the day after his Megaupload sites were shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice for copyright infringement, Kim Dotcom will launch a new file-sharing site offering 50GB of free space to members.

Dotcom posted the announcement on Twitter this week, saying that he also hopes to transfer all data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new site, Mega. Mega will be listed under the New Zealand-based domain Mega.co.nz

In his initial tweets, Dotcom wrote that it will have "very generous limits for free users. For example you get 50GB storage for free ;-)."

Dotcom plans to launch Mega on Jan. 20 during a news conference.

Dotcom posted screenshots of the new service on Twitter, showing a file tree-style user interface.

Mega screenshot

The free storage being offered by Mega far exceeds that offered by other current online consumer cloud storage and file-sharing sites such as Dropbox, Carbonite, Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive, which offer from 2GB to 7GB of free capacity on signup.

Additionally, Dotcom tweeted that he is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in court in the hopes of being able to migrate data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new Mega site.

Mega screenshot

Mega was initially announced in October 2012. At that time, the DOJ filed an opposing motion, and indicated that a new file-sharing site might violate the terms of Dotcom's bail, meaning he could face new criminal charges.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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