Mr Dotcom is in police custody in New Zealand
Who Is Mr Dotcom. MegaUpload.com
Who Is Mr Dotcom. MegaUpload.com
Mr Dotcom is in police custody in New Zealand on suspicion of leading of a global criminal conspiracy to pirate films, music and television shows via his website Megaupload.com. A dual German-Finnish citizen, he has been refused bail as a flight risk and if extradited and found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in a United States federal penitentiary.
This week is not the first he has spent in a cell, however. In 1998 he was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence for a string of hacking offences stretching back four years. After the conviction, Mr Dotcom set up a legitimate computer security firm and sold it at the height of the dotcom boom to become a millionaire. The firm went bust in the crash, but he had already begun a jet set lifestyle.
Further convictions and jail time for insider trading and embezzlement followed, as well as a strange, publicity-seeking effort to find Osama bin Laden, before he set up Megaupload.com in Hong Kong.
It began in 2005 as a simple “cyber locker”, offering users a way to store and share large files online. It was one of dozens of similar operations that sprung up to advantage of the tumbling price of computer storage and internet bandwidth.
In a bizarre email in 2010 to new neighbours concerned by his criminal past, Mr Dotcom claimed he was a “good boy” and that his firm employed more than 100 people. He suggested they either “call Interpol, the CIA and the Queen of England, and try to get me on the next plane out” or “give me a chance to do good for New Zealand”.
Megaupload.com was certainly a success and had spawned spin-off service including Megaporn.com and Megavideo.com, a video streaming website that allowed users to upload whole films and television episodes for others to watch for free within their browser. The websites were free to access and carried advertising, but for a monthly subscription of at least $9.99 per month user could get faster downloads, or unlimited streaming.
According to American authorities, the operation generated more than $175m in "illegal profits" by infringing copyright on a "massive scale". They also allege that in contrast to comparable services such as YouTube, which is run by Google, Kim Dotcom and six of his associates deliberately ignored requests from copyright holders to take down pirated material.
“The conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users,” the Department of Justice said.
Megaupload.com nevertheless enjoyed support from major recording artists such as Kanye West, and its lawyers have claimed the website was “just like YouTube”. It was shut down by court order at the same time as four of its operators were arrested on Friday.
Their leader, Mr Dotcom, was detained with a sawn-off shotgun after authorities arrived by helicopter and cut into a “panic room” at his mansion.
This week is not the first he has spent in a cell, however. In 1998 he was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence for a string of hacking offences stretching back four years. After the conviction, Mr Dotcom set up a legitimate computer security firm and sold it at the height of the dotcom boom to become a millionaire. The firm went bust in the crash, but he had already begun a jet set lifestyle.
Further convictions and jail time for insider trading and embezzlement followed, as well as a strange, publicity-seeking effort to find Osama bin Laden, before he set up Megaupload.com in Hong Kong.
It began in 2005 as a simple “cyber locker”, offering users a way to store and share large files online. It was one of dozens of similar operations that sprung up to advantage of the tumbling price of computer storage and internet bandwidth.
In a bizarre email in 2010 to new neighbours concerned by his criminal past, Mr Dotcom claimed he was a “good boy” and that his firm employed more than 100 people. He suggested they either “call Interpol, the CIA and the Queen of England, and try to get me on the next plane out” or “give me a chance to do good for New Zealand”.
Megaupload.com was certainly a success and had spawned spin-off service including Megaporn.com and Megavideo.com, a video streaming website that allowed users to upload whole films and television episodes for others to watch for free within their browser. The websites were free to access and carried advertising, but for a monthly subscription of at least $9.99 per month user could get faster downloads, or unlimited streaming.
According to American authorities, the operation generated more than $175m in "illegal profits" by infringing copyright on a "massive scale". They also allege that in contrast to comparable services such as YouTube, which is run by Google, Kim Dotcom and six of his associates deliberately ignored requests from copyright holders to take down pirated material.
“The conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users,” the Department of Justice said.
Megaupload.com nevertheless enjoyed support from major recording artists such as Kanye West, and its lawyers have claimed the website was “just like YouTube”. It was shut down by court order at the same time as four of its operators were arrested on Friday.
Their leader, Mr Dotcom, was detained with a sawn-off shotgun after authorities arrived by helicopter and cut into a “panic room” at his mansion.
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