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before anything went wrong — to make sure nothing did go wrong. “I was extremely cautious. We spent millions on legal advice over the years. I went out of my way to make sure I stayed out of trouble.”

The need was made clearer by the growing cries of outrage from Hollywood. “All of a sudden people from Hollywood would get up on stage at conferences and throw word bombs at file-hosting sites and label them 'cyber lockers', 'pirates'.”

The design of the business, its systems and the laws it brushed up against were studied exhaustively by a well-funded team of lawyers in Hong Kong and around the world. The design of Megaupload was predicated on legal advice for which Dotcom and the company had paid millions of dollars.

But America’s law was not the world’s law. There were countries where it was legal to keep copies of copyrighted material. It meant there were perfrectly legitimate reasons to have copies of copyrighted material on Megaupload. However, there were still those who would upload infringing content and then populate the itnernet with links to that material.

Much of the legal advice received was built around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a buffer relied on by the company. The DMCA created a model by which copyright owners could raise alleged examples of infringing use with website owners, and allow the owners time to remove the infringing content.

When complaints of infringing content on Megaupload came in from Hollywood, they were acted on. Much of the argument which followed was around exactly what was removed.

The website used a technology which allowed it to recognise matching files. If, for example, doting parents of a child each uploaded the identical recording taken at a birthday party, then the website would store just one copy. Without viewing the file, it had rendered its contents by size and shape to their raw materials and recognised the duplication. The result was that only one of those files was stored by Megaupload. However, as each parent with their own personal Megaupload account uploaded the file, each would be given their own personal link — even though it led to the same content. Megaupload did this with all its content. When child porn or terrorism-linked files were reported, Ortmann used the MD5 signatures — unique indentifiers for computer files — to search for and remove all links pointing to the offensive content.

But when it came to copyrighted content, Hollywood cried foul. It complained users would populate the internet with multiple links which connected to the same single infringing content. They wanted the root file deleted — even if it was uploaded by someone with a genuine claim to the data. Hollywood argued the multiplying number

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