Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web Page #5

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That's how it started.

[camera shutter clicks]

At the time Megaupload

really took off,

we were a relatively small team

of developers.

There are not many people

that I know

that I can call

a genius, but Mathias is.

He was the brains

behind the code.

He is really a genius.

[camera shutter clicks]

[Finn] Bram was kind of

a fan of Kim

because of his Gumball racing,

and I think that way they met

because he said, "You know,

I can... I'm a coder too."

Can I do something for you?"

I was not part of

the founding members.

I met him at a club in Munich.

[camera shutter clicks]

Kim got in touch with me

because Megaupload grew,

and there was a need for

marketing and advertising.

So because we knew each

other, and he trusted me.

[Aram] There was this boom in

remote storage locker services

that people were using

for both infringing

and non-infringing purposes

to store information in

what we now call the cloud.

I guess you could really say

that Megaupload was

among the innovators

of consumer cloud services.

Certainly the interface design

was dead simple.

[Julie]

As we talk about Megaupload,

we're gonna be talking

a lot about music and films,

but it's not just that.

Academic research, data sets...

This is the promise of

the Internet, right?

That across the globe we can share

access to all of this stuff,

and build upon it and share it,

and that's really,

really amazing.

And that's

the underlying technology

of cloud computing

that Megaupload used

that's really so exciting.

[Finn] There was a high demand.

We had crazy rates of growth.

Say you have a million

visitors on your website,

and every user

that came to our website

is potentially

advertising income.

[Dotcom] It doubled in size

almost every month,

and we needed to

get new servers,

more bandwidth, new servers,

more bandwidth.

I was surprised.

I was so surprised

that something simple

would grow into

such proportions,

but I also immediately

understood its potential.

Now, whether Dotcom ever envisioned

what it was gonna turn into,

I don't know, but users did.

Once users could see

the latest Hollywood movies

on Megaupload,

the use of the site exploded.

[Jonathan] They would Google

a movie they wanted to see

or a song they wanted to hear.

It would be one of the top hits.

They'd click on the link,

and, oh yeah, I guess

I'm at Megaupload,

and by the way, if you want

it to go faster, pay here.

Then they would pay there,

and get a premium account

and have it go faster.

So it actually,

it was very well designed

to attract people who

weren't even thinking

one way or the other

about legal, illegal.

They just wanted

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