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Ortmann: “We’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates :)”

The section used in the indictment would be fiercely argued later — among the group first, for the phrase used, and then externally for the way the Megaupload team believed it was taken out of context. The term, said van der Kolk, was a reference to the film Pirates of Silicon Valley, a movie geek-fest which charted the rivalry in the founding days of the personal computer narrated by actors playing Apple founder Steve Wozniak and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. It came to typify the way in which the Megaupload team said the indictment had been rorted to make a case for destroying their business.

Intercepted emails were also used by the FBI to make the claim that Megaupload wasn’t serious about requests to remove copyrighted material. The DMCA required swift action when copyright holders raised concerns, but the FBI claimed two emails from Dotcom in April 2009 showed the company was resisting the law. The indictment quoted Dotcom as telling colleagues “not to delete links that are reported in batches of thousands from insignificant sources”. He said the company was losing “significant revenue” as a result, saying “mass deletions should be prevented and sources checked much more carefully”. He told the team not to delete “thousands of links” reported by one source “unless it comes from a major organisation in the US”. Concerns about content were clear in a complaint from Warner Bros in September 2009, captured in the FBI indictment. As mentioned earlier, the film studio complained that the “Direct Delete” Abuse Tool available for copyright holders was too limiting and it wanted an increase in the number of files it could remove, a request to which Dotcom had agreed.

The FBI email haul showed that as the company grew, so did interest in the way it operated. In a May 2009 email to a journalist, Dotcom explained how the website worked. “Whenever a user uploads a new file it is checked against our database and if we already have the exact same file the upload completes instantly. This way a complete system backup into the cloud only takes a fraction of the time it used to take. And the longer we exist, the more files we receive, the faster we get.”

The duplication was also raised by the FBI in reference to an earlier approach by authorities over copyrighted material. The case specified turned out to be the NinjaVideo case, although it was not explicitly named in the indictment which ’merely referred to a criminal search warrant issued in June 2010 that pointed to 39 infringing copies of copyrighted movies. Ortmann emailed Dotcom and three

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