Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web Page #2

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and hit me many times

and was just evil

when he was drinking.

He's the reason why

I've never drank any alcohol

'cause I saw firsthand

what that stuff can do to you.

[ship horn blowing]

[fishing cord whirring]

[Dotcom] After the divorce, my

mum, even though times were tough,

she tried to find ways

to get me my first computer.

Once I had my computer,

for me, school was

a waste of time.

I wanna learn about computers.

I wanna learn about the future.

[Fisher] LetsBuylt.com is

an online marketplace,

very early version of

Amazon, if you will.

Dotcom had talked of his plans

to invest a large amount

of money into LetsBuylt.

When he said

he was going to do that,

the share price took off.

It was ramped massively,

and then he sold his shares.

[indistinct voice over PA]

[Dotcom] I was in Thailand

because I was on a holiday...

[camera shutter clicks]

And it didn't take long

for some people

that didn't like my attitude,

my lifestyle,

to make allegations that

there's something fishy here,

and then the government started an

investigation around insider trading.

And they arrested me,

and they took me

to a Thai prison,

the worst living conditions that I

have ever experienced in my life.

And the embassy people arrive,

"and they say," Look,

if you want to leave,

we can give you

a travel document.

"You can fly back to Germany."

[indistinct murmuring]

And of course I agreed.

[murmuring]

[camera shutters clicking]

[Fisher] The way that

German authorities recast it,

they had to go to

Thailand to drag him back.

Dotcom would have it that

he came back willingly

to face the charges.

[murmuring]

[Dotcom] In the end,

I agreed to a plea bargain.

[people speaking German]

[Dotcom] I simply didn't want

to deal with it anymore.

I wanted to leave Germany behind

and start a new life

somewhere else.

[Sean] If there is any

place in the world

that is left as sort of

the edge of business,

of finance, of legality...

It's a wild west sort of town.

Hong Kong is

all about capitalism.

Companies start there daily

and disappear the next day.

It was both at

the center of the world

and on its edge.

He felt it was

really easy to restart

what he was trying to do in Germany,

there, without much oversight.

[robotic voice]

Welcome to the Kimpire.

Using a PC to download music

is one of the hottest of

today's computer trends,

and that has the recording

companies up in arms

and heading to court.

Members of

the entertainment industry

are fighting new websites

like Napster

which allow you

to download music

off of the Internet

free of charge.

[man]

It's a surprisingly simple idea

known as file-sharing.

Napster is providing

a service that give people

the opportunity to

steal our music.

[Greg] It started

with the music industry.

They were no longer in charge

of how they

distributed their wares

because we had Napster.

If it was digitized,

then you could copy it and

send it across the globe.

Any one person could do that.

When I wanted something

special, a certain song,

I couldn't find it. I couldn't

buy it in a record store,

and I couldn't order it.

I just went online

and got it from Napster

or from some other dark

corner in the Internet.

It was a little en vogue.

It was a little radical.

Everybody did this in

this transition times

when the legal market,

legal online market,

started to establish.

In that time,

everybody did this.

[Moby] Every aspect of

music has changed,

how it's consumed,

how it's disseminated,

how it's marketed.

It's this shifting climate,

and the old guard's

trying to hold on

and penalize anyone who impedes

their revenue streams.

So they had these crazy lawsuits

against suburban housewives

who had downloaded

illegally 20 songs,

you know, trying to like sue

them for millions of dollars.

Well, I don't think this

is about record companies.

I think this is about

whether or not people

who create music,

and invest in music,

have a right to get paid.

The record companies

never gave a damn

about the artist anyway.

95% of them have problems

retrieving their money

from the major corporations

anyway.

Four major corporations,

four of them,

and Hilary is fighting

to protect them.

[man] Ms. Rosen, isn't this strictly

about your profits and your money?

[Hilary] Well, it's about

everybody's profits and money.

[siren ringing]

[Lawrence] Originally the

film industry was quite naive

in believing that

they were immune

because they thought, you know,

we've got two gigabyte,

three gigabyte files,

and if you're sharing those,

you know, on dial-up modems,

it would take days to download.

But, of course,

in the current state,

it's trivial to download

that kind of content.

And so that industry

is threatened as well,

and the business model

of that industry

is very different from music.

You know,

when you get access to music,

you want a song

that if you like it,

you're gonna listen to it

a thousand times.

If you watch a movie,

it's not likely you're gonna

watch it two or three times.

So they had a stronger

reason to be anxious

that people not get access

to their movie

and to bleed

the potential revenue.

You can copy on a digital

format 10,000 copies,

and the ten thousandth copy

is as pure and pristine

as the original.

If you allow that,

you don't have copyright

to protect you on the Internet,

we're dead.

[Greg]

They had no understanding.

The music industry

had been decimated.

The film industry

had the same problem.

They didn't understand

what was coming

until things had already

gotten out of hand.

[yelling]

As you can see, 250,

this is the Gumball speed,

ladies and gentlemen.

[car engines running]

[Fisher] Gumball Rally is where

the richest car nuts in the world

get together to cover thousands

of miles across Europe.

Dotcom treated it

like it was a race

because he likes

to win everything.

This is the winner.

This is the winner.

I've been a hacker

in my early years,

and then I started...

[Dotcom voiceover] You know,

always when I was there,

there were videos made about it,

and I wanted to share them

with my friends.

And I could not because

the files were too big

to send via email.

And I was like, well,

let's create a site

where you can upload a file,

and then instead of

emailing the file,

you just email the link.

And no matter

how large the file is,

people can download it,

and problem solved.

That's how it started.

[camera shutter clicks]

At the time Megaupload

really took off,

we were a relatively small team

of developers.

There are not many people

that I know

that I can call

a genius, but Mathias is.

He was the brains

behind the code.

He is really a genius.

[camera shutter clicks]

[Finn] Bram was kind of

a fan of Kim

because of his Gumball racing,

and I think that way they met

because he said, "You know,

I can... I'm a coder too."

Can I do something for you?"

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