14 DAY TRIAL // Kim Dotcom's extradition hearing is revealing new details on how the site's owners were fully aware of their wrongdoings, and some even expected to get in trouble over it.
In a New Zealand courtroom, lawyers representing the US are requesting Kim Dotcom's extradition for his involvement in running the Megaupload (sometimes illegal) file sharing website. Besides Dotcom, the lawsuit also names Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk, as co-defendants.
Presenting their evidence to the judge, the US lawyers revealed that between 2006 and 2011, Megaupload paid over $3 million / €2.67 million in rewards to users who uploaded files to the site, despite knowing that 90% of the content was infringing copyright laws.
US lawyers presented the case of a user whose identity they kept anonymous, presenting him under the name TH, to whom Megaupload dished out over $50,000 / €44,500 in rewards, even if the respective user received over 1,200 copyright takedown notices.
In an email sent by Ortmann to Dotcom, he wrote, "So far TH has provided us 18 million download pageviews [and] US$112,257 premium sales to users who have downloaded at least 15 of his files."
The Megaupload staff was well aware of what they were doing
This email was sent in 2007, so it's pretty obvious that they had no problems with TH receiving takedown notices. In fact, in another email, Ortmann said, "What if we modulate our tolerance according to sales triggered?"
In the end, Megaupload did stop its rewards program in June 2011, but at that point, the site was massive, and the company did not need a rewards program to keep users coming back to it.
This did not stop Dotcom from becoming a hypocrite, though, as shortly after that Megaupload ceased its rewards program, and Dotcom accused its competitors of running a similar program that was based on copyright infringing files.
In an email to PayPal, Kim Dotcom wrote the following about his competition: "They pay everyone no matter if the files are pirated or not and they have NO repeat infringer policy, and they are using Paypal to pay infringers."
He was clearly trying to sabotage his competition by cutting their financing line to PayPal. That, or he suddenly caught a bad case of amnesia.
In the extradition hearing, only the US side has presented evidence until now. Dotcom and the other co-defendants are scheduled to provide their side of the story in the next three weeks.