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A copy of the statement was sent to executives at a hosting company. One responded warning against the reference stating the “vast majority is legitimate.” It has the effect of “an admission that there are ‘bad’ things on your site”, he wrote. “I would get rid of that so it simply reads that it is legitimate,” Dotcom was told.

Among the emails seized by the FBI were some from customers, presumably included to show the market demand and pressure. In August 2011, Dotcom sent on an email from a customer which said:

“I miss being (able) to view TV shows on you(r) service.
My most favorite was True Blood and Battlestar Galactica.
I would be happy to continue to pay for the service but
something would need to change. I don’t mind your services
be bogged down from time to time. I don’t mind paying, but
I need to get something for the service I pay for.”

The indictment captured ongoing action around copyright with one website folding because it could not guarantee to have removed all infringing material. The Dutch News-Service.com, which employed seven people, served as an access point to the online community Usenet, a forerunner of the modern Internet. A Dutch court ordered it to remove all links to infringing copyrighted material or face high daily fines. News-Service.com pointed to the impossibility of trawling content on Usenet for copyrighted material. An article on the TorrentFreak news site was sent from a hosting company to Ortmann.

Hosting company: Do you have any concerns this sort of thing could find its way to you?
Ortmann: (The sites) provide a search index covering their entire content base, including the infringing material.

Megaupload, it had to be remembered, had no search engine. There was no way for users to visit the website and deliberately search for content.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

To prove the point, the FBI carried out an “undercover” operation to download copyrighted material from Megaupload. The exercise was carried out by FBI staff and the experts they worked with at the multi-agency National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center in Arlington, Virginia. The indictment said the success of the operation was further evidence of a criminal conspiracy. Agents downloaded more than 10 copies of “one or more” copyrighted works, with a value

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