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was notified as infringing. But speed was the key to it and speed was something Dotcom understood: “If you are a criminal conspiracy, right, and you want to make sure you get the most use out of the piracy traffic, you don’t do that — the law says 24 hours.”

Through 2008, MegaVideo told copyright holders it was “one of the few online video communities that made it impossible to fraudulently host full-length feature movies due to a human-assisted automatic detection/deletion mechanism.”

Dotcom said the demands kept coming, so he decided to open Megaupload’s system to the copyright holders. “Let’s give them a tool. Let’s give them something so they don’t have to experience any delay in their takedowns.” Copyright holders were told the company’s “abuse tool” allowed them “direct deletion rights, which will completely bypass our abuse team” to remove links to the content.

From Dotcom’s perspective, it was a good solution. “When you report something, what is important is that there is no delay.” Now there would be no delay, because the copyright holders had the ability to control content.

Emails later seized by the FBI, and published in its indictment, show the extent of the traffic. In September 2009, Warner Bros sought an increase in the number of links it could delete. Ortmann wrote to Dotcom:

“They are currently removing 2500 files per day — a cursory check indicates that it’s legit takedowns of content that they own appearing in public forums. We should comply with their request — we can afford to be co-operative at current growth levels.”

Dotcom responded, initially saying Warner Bros could have its direct delete limit increased to 5000 per day but “not unlimited”. The limitation on removal numbers using the Abuse Tool was for fear the copyright holders would engage in some form of guerilla action, removing links on which they had no claim. The suspicion proved valid, according to a Megaupload analysis which found more than 20 per cent of 5000 takedowns were invalid. “We accepted this as collateral damage but we also early on introduced takedowns limitations with the direct delete feature.” It created a two-tier system which allowed unlimited takedown notices to be sent but capped direct delete takedowns.

“Never with the other takedowns — they could always still email us, they could always still use the form — and it would all be taken down from the site. With the direct delete tool we needed to make sure there was some limitation. We were worried that someone hacks one of those

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