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'Our Internet is under attack by governments,' warns Megaupload's Dotcom


Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom held court on Sunday (April 13) in the swimming pool of his sprawling New Zealand mansion, fist bumping and chatting with some of the 700 guests gathered to celebrate the political party he founded this month to promote Internet freedom.

His latest ultra-encrypted file storage site, Mega, will soon go public after a deal that values it at NZ$210 million ($182 million), and Baboom, an online streaming music service designed to bypass the record companies, is nearing its hard launch.

But Dotcom is also fighting extradition from his adopted country to the United States, where the hulking 40-year-old stands accused of massive copyright infringement related to the Megaupload file sharing site he founded in 2005.
 


Dotcom, born Kim Schmitz, said these lawsuits were about making him a scape-goat and example.

"This is a war about a technology and innovations that they don't like, and I'm being made an example," he told Reuters.

Last week, Hollywood studios filed their own lawsuit against Megaupload and Dotcom, and a few days later four major music labels followed suit, cranking up the pressure on the father of five who faces an extradition hearing in July.

Dotcom says he refuses to face charges in the United States where he doesn't except a fair reception.

"The biggest problem I'm going to have in the U.S. is that almost 90 percent of the media is controlled by the same parties that are suing me, that want to destroy me. So they are going to make sure that their message is the one being heard and not mine. And I think they are going to manipulate the media in order to make sure that I will be portrayed as a villain, and as a criminal," he said.

But he said that search engines and content-sharing sites like Google and YouTube, which could also be directly impacted by the outcome of the case, were likely to support him.

"If I lose, they all lose, and they all know that. But this is a much bigger play than me. After they are done with me, in their dream world they are going to go after Google, YouTube, Dropbox and all these other sites and force them to change their models," he said.

Dotcom's $20 million rented country estate set in rolling hills outside Auckland was raided in January 2012 by dozens of New Zealand police in a dramatic dawn swoop carried out at the request of the FBI.

He was cut out of a safe room in the mansion and locked up, and had millions of dollars of assets in property, cash, luxury cars and art seized. He has been released on bail with access to some funds, while his movements are restricted.

His anger over the injustice he says he faced during and after the dramatic raid, which was swiftly followed by the closure of Megaupload, was what prompted him to set up a political movement called the Internet Party.

"Our internet is under attack. It's under attack by governments that want to have citizen control, and it's under attack by corporations that want to put that colonisation sticks into parts of the internet to control whatever revenue they can get out of it," Dotcom told his followers at his mansion.

The launch of the Internet Party, whose policy platform will be crowd sourced and whose leader would be selected in a process reminiscent of an audition for TV talent show "The X Factor", comes ahead of general elections to be held in September.

Dotcom cannot contest a seat, because he is not a New Zealand citizen, and his political career could be cut short anyway if the U.S. Department of Justice succeeds in extraditing him at a July hearing that follows numerous delays.

Dotcom, whose large frame matches a larger-than-life character, is cast variously as a commercial visionary, digital martyr, online freedom campaigner, swindler and thief.

But his followers say it is about his ideas not his character.

"It's not his personality that's important. It's not the Mr. Dotcom personality that is important. It's the ideas he's driving," said Anatoly Kern, an IT worker and Internet Party member attending the party.

Love him or hate him, people are interested in what he has to say -- at least in New Zealand, where he boasted the most Twitter followers of anyone there until he was dethroned by pop singer Lorde last year.

Set up in 2005, Megaupload boasted more than 1 billion visitors and accounted for around 4 percent of total traffic on the Internet in its heyday as users stored and shared files containing everything from wedding videos to Hollywood films.

U.S. prosecutors charge that a significant amount of the site's activity was driven by the latter, releasing evidence in December that movies were downloaded from the site up to 500,000 times over a six-month period.

The FBI alleged Megaupload defrauded copyright holders of $500 million and generated over $175 million in proceeds from subscriptions and advertising - some $42 million for Dotcom personally in 2010 alone. — Reuters
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