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automatically download files, which would fake popularity rankings. Dotcom says the peek offered was one skewed to build a case designed to destroy Megaupload.

The focus on the reward payments was important for the FBI case. It listed a series of payments made inside the US judicial district of East Virginia, the jurisdiction inside which the charges had been laid. As would be later revealed, of all payments to users around the world, these would bind Megaupload as closely as possible to the court where the charges were laid. The connections inside the state of East Virginia — including it serving as the location of about 1000 of the company's servers — was necessary to prosecutors trying to claim jurisdiction.

Questions about copyrighted material on Megaupload were surfacing early in the company's existence, the indictment claimed. It pointed to Google Adsense's decision to cut ties in May 2007 when the company wrote to Dotcom to say it would “no longer be able to work with you”. The FBI pointed to Megaupload continuing to operate, and make profits, despite having received the notice. There were also concerns raised (11 December 2007) from a credit card processing company. Third parties upset with Megaupload had complained to the card processor, with one specifically pointing to the off-shoot website Megarotic. The card processor was told the company had pulled “65 full videos from Megarotic”. “That's $200k in content we paid for,” the complainant said. The credit card processor told Megaupload “you are not allowed to sell or financially benefit from the content that is infringing in copyrights on your site”. Megaupload was also told it shouldn't be accepting content from users which had previously uploaded content which infringed copyright. Dotcom rejected the claim directly.

Dotcom: “The DMCA quotes you sent me are not relevant. We are a hosting company and all we do is sell bandwidth and storage. Not content. All of the content on our site is available for ‘free download’.”

The FBI pointed to other intercepted internal emails as revealing, they claimed, what was really going on inside Megaupload. In the aftermath of the raid, which also saw the public release of the indictment, one became one of the most commonly quoted segments. Van der Kolk had saved a chat log between himself and Ortmann and sent a copy of it to a third party, capturing it on the email system for the FBI to find.

Van der Kolk: “We have a funny business … modern days pirates :)”

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