Kimdotcom’s new free storage upload service has grabbed a lot of attention since its launch earlier this year, but, according to the man himself, more Mega Premium Account holders come from France than anywhere else. This weekend Kimdotcom tweeted the top 5 countries in terms of premium accounts: France, Spain, Belgium, US, Germany. Wow. That’s a lot of Europe, and no one was more surprised than I to see the French as early adopters – not that they don’t adopt technology early (they do), just that they’re paying for Mega’s premium account – the cheapest premium account offers 500GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth for just $99/year.
According to Numerama, the early adoption is largely due to the Hadopi law, a copyright three strikes law that has cracked down on online piracy. The article purports that fear of France’s strict copyright policy is leading people to look for more legal solutions, an attribute Mega has not been subtle in displaying at its forefront.
#Mega Top 5 premium membership countries: 1. France 2. Spain 3. Belgium 4. United States 5. Germany – Thanks a lot for buying!
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) February 16, 2013
Mega has been so obedient to DMCA copyright take-down requests that it shut down Mega Search, a search engine for files uploaded to Mega made in France, because it was not taking down search results linking to files that had been taken down due to copyright infringement. Luckily though, Mega Search has been brought back online after being sabotaged by Kimdotcom himself, now that it has reworked its engine’s framework to play nice with Mega’s files which come and go.
The very fact that a search engine, which is populated by Mega users and not by crawling the site, has been built in France is a sign of France’s relationship with Mega, and likely its forefather Megaupload, which I personally only discovered when I arrived in France. “It’s TV,” my French friend’s told me.