Currently on house arrest in Auckland (New Zealand), Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom claims that he will overcome the prosecutors in the Internet piracy case against him, an event which led to his current sentence, including the sites that he owns being suspended.
In what was his first interview since his arrest in January, the German computer programmer (birth name Kim Schmitz), who’s (now shut-down) website (based in Hong Kong) offered file hosting and sharing to customers (including data, video, and music downloads, amongst others), claims that the prosecutors are ’political’, and that he fully expects to win what is being already billed as one of the biggest court cases related to copyright in history.
US authorities such as the FBI are amongst a number of similar law enforcement organisations in different countries (New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, England, Germany, and Holland) that want a piece of Dotcom for his involvement in the ‘Mega’ brand of websites (lead by Megaupload), with ’racketeering’ (illegal business) thought to be amongst the federal charges being put against him.
Agencies claim that Kim Dotcom, and numerous colleagues, claim that they have made up to $500m at ‘the expense of’ filmmakers and music artists, and that the money was made off of infringing copyrights and illegal downloads. Also noted was the fact that while downloads are free, Megaupload, like many similar sites, offer a subscription-based ‘fast-track’ service, meaning that he could easily make money indirectly from hosting the files in question.
Arrested on 20 January, he had been in a prison cell until last week, when he was released on bail, on the conditions that he cannot leave his house and has his Internet access cut off until he is due in court. He claims that he was mistreated throughout the case, and that American authorities chose the e-mails to review and present them as evidence in a ‘misleading and malicious’ manner, as well as ignoring pleas he made to illegal download sites that linked on his page to end their association.
He said in an interview to local newspaper New Zealand Herald: “For every email they have in the indictment, I have 100 others that disprove it. How do you cherry-pick in a way which is so misleading and so malicious? For me, sitting in my cell, I’m thinking, ‘Why are they doing this? They can’t win it’.”
Dotcom also said of what he thought of as unsatisfactory treatment in the Auckland Central Remand Prison: “The first night I didn’t have a blanket, soap, toothpaste or toilet paper. They didn’t provide us with the basic things. Every two hours, they would wake me up. I was deprived of sleep. I wrote a complaint. I said, ‘This is torture, this is sleep deprivation’.”
That experience may have made Dotcom more grateful for what he already has, but it is reported that last week he went to the court with pregnant wife Mona in order to ask for NZ$220,000 per month to cover their ‘living costs’, which included nannies and bodyguards.
It is possible that at this rate, he may also need emotional support to deal with the temporary loss of his valuable internet connection, as reports last month claimed that along with being a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, Kim Dotcom is also the player behind the Xbox 360 gamertag ‘MEGARACER’, that was on top of the online leaderboard of hit game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 until several days after his arrest, with a timelapse video on YouTube showing him playing the video game for 12 hours straight to reach 1st place on over 9 million points. The lack of connection at his house means, of course, that he can no longer play MW3 online until the case is cleared, meaning that he would have plenty of catching up to do to get anywhere near the head of the charts again.
His main priority for the forseeable future, though, will be the high court rather than high scores, as he added in a further interview with file-sharing news site TorrentFreak that the New Zealand Police had ‘put on a show for the FBI’ in the high-profile manner used in capturing him at his mansion, summarising by saying of his chances in the case overall: “We’re going for this and we’re confident we’re going to win. We feel that the action taken against us was political.”
With a potentially pivotal online piracy case looming, will Kim Dotcom, who has been adamant in stating that he is not the ’king of pirates’, be declared guilty, or could more download sites soon end up on the chopping block?
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