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There is one example, says Dotcom, where an advertiser was sent a link pulled at random off Google to show off how the website appeared to visitors. The linking sites were important to Megaupload, they said, because they “provide the Conspiracy direct financial benefits through advertising revenue and opportunities for new premium subscriptions”.

The FBI alleged there was fraud even in the “Abuse Tool” devised by Megaupload which allowed major copyright holders to remove infringing links. The FBI said it “did not actually function as a DMCA compliance tool as the copyright owners were led to believe.” Instead, they said it was more sleight-of-hand, which allowed links to be deleted — but not the actual files containing the copyright material. Instead, the link was removed but the “Abuse Tool . . . purposefully left the actual infringing copy of the copyrighted work on the Mega Conspiracy-controlled server and any other access links completely intact”.

The FBI also took aim at what they believed was Megaupload’s failure to be properly vigilant. Megaupload, according to the FBI, was able to remove child pornography and terrorism-related material through the use of a computer algorithm. This reduced chunks of data to a 128-bit value which was, in turn, represented as a 32-digit long hexadecimal number. It meant every file could be reduced to a string of numbers, which they claimed could have allowed the company to build a library of numbers which represented child pornography and terrorism-related material.

It never did this with material which remained on the site, even though “the defendants and other members of the Mega Conspiracy knew that they did not have license, permission, authorisation, or other authority from owners of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works to reproduce and distribute those works, including making them available over the Internet”. The FBI said it was significant that “the Conspiracy made no significant effort” to identify those who uploaded copyrighted material.

THE INDICTMENT READ like an adventure story with details that captured headlines around the world. The way it was written caught the attention of Los Angeles-based criminal defence attorney Ken White. White wrote on the freedom and legal issues blog Popehat that the inclusion of certain selected emails in the indictment was a deliberate technique by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He said it was a technique used “to frame (federal) indictments as recitations of the evidence in support of their case, detailing what happened and what

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