AUCKLAND, New Zealand — At 6:48 a.m. local time Sunday, the Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom opened his new file-storage website to the public — one year to the minute after the police raided the mansion he rents in New Zealand.
The raid was part of a coordinated operation with the FBI that also shut down Megaupload, the file-sharing business he had founded.
Dotcom faces US charges of pirating copyrighted material and money laundering and is awaiting an extradition hearing in New Zealand.
‘‘This should not be seen as the mocking of any government or Hollywood,’’ Dotcom, 39, said Sunday. ‘‘This is us being innovators and executing our right to run a business.’’
Dotcom, a German citizen and permanent resident of New Zealand who was born Kim Schmitz, was arrested Jan. 20, 2012. The allegation that Megaupload knew its users were illegally uploading copyrighted material is a crucial part of the US Justice Department’s indictment against the site and those who operated it.
Mega, Dotcom’s new website, is a file storage and sharing system that encrypts files on the user’s computer before they are uploaded to the site’s servers. This means that files on Mega’s servers cannot be read by anyone, including by the company itself, without the user’s decryption key.
