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Megaupload Ltd, which is headquartered in Hong Kong, allows account holders to upload and store files of various sizes, depending on whether the user has a free or fee-based “premium” account. Megaupload.com has become a popular service for the storage of infringing copies of copyrighted movies and television shows.

For all the detail in the description, there was nothing in the search warrant which raised questions about the way Megaupload operated. Rather, Engel sought an exception to the court order keeping the search warrant secret so that Megaupload could see the document. “Carpathia has indicated that in the event it is not able to locate the content identified . . . it will work with its customer, Megaupload, to access the content to provide in response to the search warrant,” he wrote. The files were secured — and kept. When the search warrant for the 2012 raid was made public, it stated as a reason for seeking it the existence of “39 infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures . . . present on their leased servers”. The files were the same ones the US had asked the company to preserve in 2010.

During the course of 2010, Obama marked out and extended intellectual property territory the US considered its own. He made increasingly hard-line and strident comments even as IP czar Victoria Espinel issued the White House position paper. In the wake of Espinel’s inaugural report, it went specifically in October 2010 to prominent members of the copyright industry to call for submissions on the world’s most “notorious markets”.

The MPAA responded, with then-president A. Robert Pisano warning that film and television “faces relentless challenges to the integrity of its product, challenges extracting an increasingly unbearable cost”. Pisano warned the risk it posed to international distribution, with 46 per cent of Hollywood’s revenue coming from outside the US: “It is critical that our trading partners protect and enforce intellectual property rights.”

The MPAA submission listed dozens of sources of illegal content around the globe, including listing Megaupload as a cyberlocker and warning against sites which linked to illegal content. It described Megaupload and sister site Megavideo as storing “a massive amount of data” which by his own calcuation was estimated at nearly 26 petabytes, “including including hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works”.

The submission was being made as Dotcom applied for residency in New Zealand under the investor category.

The immigration process meant the New Zealand bureaucracy was

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