Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom on Thursday questioned his accusers’ motives while speaking to The Guardian. “I’m no piracy king,” Dotcom told the paper. “I offered online storage and bandwidth to users and that’s it.” Dotcom was arrested in his New Zealand mansion on January 20th after his notorious Megaupload service was shuttered earlier that week as part of a multi-agency sting across several countries. He was released on bail and it currently awaiting trial, having been accused of money laundering, violating piracy laws and a number of other crimes. “It’s kind of like weapon of mass destructions in Iraq, you know?” Dotcom said during an interview with The Guardian. “If you want to go after someone and you have a political goal you will say whatever it takes.” Read on for more.
“Where does piracy come from? Piracy comes from, you know, people, let’s say, in Europe who do not have access to movies at the same time that they are released in the US,” Dotcom said. “If the business model would be one where everyone has access to this content at the same time, you know, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. So it’s really, in my opinion, the government of the United States protecting an outdated monopolistic business model that doesn’t work in the age of the internet and that’s what it all boils down to.”
The 38-year-old German millionaire says that hundreds of other services similar to Megaupload exist and continue to operate while he is being “insanely” singled out and made an example of. Megaupload was estimated to be responsible for as much as 80% of all file-sharing traffic, or between 2% and 3% of all global Internet traffic, before it was shuttered last month. A recent study suggests that the service’s closure did nothing to slow piracy, however, as people have simply looked to other services in place of Megaupload to share pirated movies and music.
