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accounts, gets access to one of those takedown accounts and takes down the entire site.”

There was extensive abuse, says Dotcom. Links were removed in a casual way, with a scorched earth approach to file management catching other users’ material.

“They wrote little scripts and put words in there, like ‘Cinderella,’ and then they would spider the web for everything that contained the term Cinderella. You wouldn’t believe how many Cinderella weddings there are or Cinderella birthdays. And then they would just blanket everything that tool could find that was a Megaupload link.”

It was never as simple as taking down every link notified as infringing. Links were reported to the company, and removed, which were more about guerilla action aimed at third party websites than any infringing content. Competition between popular forums cut a swathe through links held on Megaupload. For example, the popular car-racing movies linked off Megaupload caused some internet forums featuring the videos to soar in popularity. Competing forums would use the takedown tool to attack their competition. “They got aggressive and took down links, legitimate links of their competing forums.”

It was again guerilla action which stripped websites of content on which they relied. There were times, says Dotcom when “entire forums were wiped out”. Users would say to the company: “We’re never going to use you guys again.”

“Takedown has always been abused, either by people who want to take things down to hurt their competition or by the studios which didn’t really make an effort to take down the stuff that only belongs to them.”

In hindsight, the contact between the copyright industry — mainly in the form of corporate entertainment interests — and Megaupload could be seen as a series of skirmishes which were a prelude to a war.

While Hollywood executives railed against the company in public, they were privately finding ways to engage with the business. There were emails from studios, looking for ways to work with Megaupload that would see their content hosted on the website.

“Disney proposed to us a contract of co-operation where there were some conditions in there we simply couldn’t accept. They wanted to use us as a distribution platform (but) they just had completely bizarre ideas of how that would work. They would basically take control of the whole process.”

Ideas from the studios included allowing old or little-known new content to find its own life on Megaupload. The old content could be linked to new content which would be paid for, while new artists with low public profile would be able to build a fan base through viral appeal. “For us it was bizarre, on the one hand, they were like wanting

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