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Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, aka, the guy who’s battling extradition to the US over copyright infringement charges relating to file-sharing giant MegaUpload, today put out a new demo to show off the front-end of his file-sharing blockchain platform, called K.im.
K.im is a “content monetisation platform” whereby the internet’s movers and shakers, like artists, and content creators can upload content, then sell it to other users for a nominal fee and get paid in Bitcoin—or a new native token, Kimcoin. Dotcom said, “It’s integrated with Bitcoin powered technologies that give all the security of Bitcoin, but faster and cheaper transactions using Lightning and Liquid.”
The demo shows three elements: the K.im Content Management Platform, which lets you manage and price up your content, and “Double Encrypted KED”—K.im Encrypted Data, the platform’s own encryption service that encrypts the file on third-party services, then again on its server—meaning that nobody can read it. Then there’s “K.im Payment”, the blockchain-based payment engine that makes the micropayment magic happen.
Dotcom himself is perhaps best known as the face of one of the internet’s biggest copyright infringement cases. As co-founder of MegaUpload, a file-hosting website with over 1 billion views, Dotcom was accused of involvement in a “Mega Conspiracy”, a global organization dedicated to copyright infringement and racketeering, by the New Zealand and American governments in the early 2010s. An armed police raid on Dotcom’s mansion saw the seizure of assets worth $17 million, including 18 luxury cars, artworks and giant screen TVs, while bank accounts holding $175m in assets were frozen.
According to its one-pager, the “K.im Platform will revolutionise the monetisation of the digital content distribution industry to create a fair market for content creators and consumers.” The idea is to shirk those crafty middlemen who deliver services like Spotify and Netflix, and once again return to a model of digital ownership: should Spotify, Netflix, Electronic Arts or any other streaming service choose to rescind its offering of a certain song, TV show, or videogame, consumers are left powerless. Of course, K.im itself functions as a middleman, taking a 4 percent cut of earnings on the platform.
K.im claims that its service has been designed in such a way that administrators have no visibility of user content, thanks to “enhanced privacy and confidentiality safeguards”. It also says that content stored on the platform is doubly encrypted, that the platform “does not know what content artists are selling,” and that it doesn’t know whether content is stored on decentralized or centralized servers. “Because of this safeguard it is not technically or factually possible for K.im to have any knowledge at all about file-sharing activities between users on the site, and whether or not these allegedly may infringe copyright claimed by some third party,” it adds.
K.im states that it, “will establish policies in its terms of use as to abuse of copyright, as K.im takes such matters seriously”. And K.im users have to comply with their chosen file-sharing platform’s terms of service.
If you’re uploading from Dropbox, for example, you have to comply with Dropbox’s storage policies, which request that users don’t copy, upload, download or share content unless they have the right to do so, that it may “review your conduct and content for compliance” with its terms, and that it isn’t responsible for the content people post and share.
But using K.im’s home-rolled encryption, “neither K.im nor any of the third-party storage providers where the file is uploaded can view its content or its metadata.” K.im users aren’t limited to conventional file-sharing services such as Dropbox, either; they can also upload content using peer-to-peer anonymous file-sharing services like Filecoin, or Bittorrent’s BTT.
K.im says that it will employ “systematic and heuristic measures to deter repetitive abuse,” and that the new platform will “allow people to report on the grounds of copyright infringement and malicious content,” a process that will be set out in the terms of use.
Dotcom is confident that, like his previous initiatives, K.im will go viral. “My previous products have attracted tens of millions of users and the support of Class A celebrities all over the world,” he told Decrypt. “K.im has an initial line up of influencers that have very large followings that are excited to use the product and Kim Dotcom has a track record of achieving viral marketing for previous products,” he added.