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to do something with us and being nice and thanking us for all the co-operation. You would never think they would go and try and start criminal action against us.”

Dotcom said he struggled to understand why Hollywood and the Record Industry Association of America spent so much effort on attack when there were easier ways to manage the evolution of copyright on the internet. An outlay of up to $2 million would fund the development of a call centre — he suggested India or the Philippines. “You employ say 50 to 100 people, and you train them to look for infringing links all over the internet.” The centre would develop search skills ranging from the ubiquitous Google to sites dedicated to infringing content. He said with the funding of “a relatively small investment” and the use of available tools like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act “they could have sorted this piracy problem out”.

The business entered 2011 having made bumper profits the year before and the overtures continued — but “on the other hand they go out and lobby against us and go on conferences and talk about us as the devil”.

Dotcom says the attacks led to a decision to cancel the reward system for Megaupload users uploading popular content. The system had been governed by strict rules, and only paid out to people who followed the rules. The first of these banned the uploading of copyrighted material. There were no payments made where there were breaches of copyright. It also banned rewards for the uploading of files larger than 100MB. Those who broke the rules, leading to links being deleted, were punished by having rewards points taken away.

But the programme had been cast as a loyalty scheme that encouraged illegal content. “Even though our rewards program has nothing to do with inducing piracy, we’ll just take it down. We don’t want to have this kind of issue and this label that they always put on us.”

Dotcom had no expectation the situation would continue without some form of confrontation. “We were expecting to have some kind of civil action from the MPAA or from a studio at some point, so we wanted to make sure we gave them as little as possible to attack us. So we took down our awards program.

“Because we did all these things that went far beyond the requirements of the DMCA I felt relatively safe even with a civil suit. I thought, no way, they have no chance.”

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