Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie. I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in 'Star Wars.'
— Kim Dotcom
My idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.
The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The government is killing innovation.
I'm a fun-loving guy. I enjoy my life. I have a big kid inside me.
If you create something, you don't want someone else to go and profit from it; you have your right to make a living and everything. So I respect copyright. What I don't respect is copyright extremism. And I what I don't respect is a business model that encourages piracy.
I think copyright has its right to exist, absolutely, and I think that it's up to copyright creators to come up with new solutions that deal with the reality of the world we're living in today.
I have a huge ego - I know that. Do I worry about it? No, I think it's cool. I have a lot of fun.
I love driving fast. I grew up in Germany; we have the Autobahn here, where we can drive without a speed limit. And throughout my 20s, I always had fast cars, and I always went to the maximum. Like, my average cruising speed was 250 km/hr.
I'm a businessman, and I think there's nothing wrong with being a businessman provided you have the right headspace and do good things with the money you make.
Because of my flamboyant lifestyle, because of me being German, the way I am, I am the easiest person to sell as a villain. I'm the perfect target.
The Internet is by the people, for the people.
Providing 'freemium' cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?
I get 100 e-mails a day from Americans who say, 'What you're doing is cool - can we work for you?' From Germans, I also get 100 e-mails a day, saying, 'You fat pig!' or 'You're a liar and a criminal!' I'm trying to change this.
I used to respect the United States and the American dream. Now I consider the United States the biggest threat to Internet freedom and peace in the world.
It's things like Wikipedia that help us to advance as a society and help us to accelerate our evolution. If you're a researcher and you need some answer to something, and in today's world you can find it this quickly, it allows you to develop whatever you are doing much faster.
Hollywood is in control of politics and has imported their action-filled movie scripts into the real world.
The Internet is this whole new world that allows everyone to communicate and exchange information and be a perfect marketplace and just accelerate everybody's lives. So, for me, the Internet was the greatest invention of mankind so far.
Megaupload is not responsible for the piracy problem. It's the old business model of Hollywood that is responsible for it, and they want to keep that model alive at any cost.
When you create something that is popular, when you create a solution, you're an innovator, and you solve problems for people and they like what you have to offer, of course you automatically make money.
The U.S. government is saying that my website enabled piracy when the entire Internet is enabling piracy. Every ISP that connects people to the Internet is enabling piracy - Google is, YouTube is, everybody is.
I'm not a pirate. I'm an innovator.
If you look at history, and if you look at all these different things that have threatened the movie industry - from Betamax tape to DVDs to the Internet - in the end, it has always turned out right, because ultimately people want to see that stuff.
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views.
Always upbeat, always happy, always putting you in a good mood. That's what I want to achieve with my music.
Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don't shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don't go to the car manufacturer and say, 'Hey, we're shutting you down.'
I always thought of myself as more American than Americans when I was living in Germany, because I always had this attitude of can-do, and if you're successful, you can show it, which is a very un-German thing, you know.
I was an online service provider. It's not my job to police what people are uploading. It's the job of the content owners, and the law is very clear. If you create content, and you want to protect your copyrights, you have to do the work.
I might be one of the most flamboyant characters New Zealand has ever seen, but my intentions are good, and I would like to see New Zealand flourish.
I would love nothing more than me and my family getting green cards, going to L.A. for a year, sitting down with the big Hollywood studios and coming up with the most advanced and awesome Internet distribution platform for movies. It would make Hollywood more money than cinemas, DVDs, and everything else combined.
I prefer being able to choose who I want to help or what I want to improve in the world by making a lot of money myself rather than just going out there and talking about things. If you have money to do things, it's much better than just talking about them.
The U.S. obviously has all the evidence they need to prosecute bankers. They just need to search their own spy database and then there you go - 1,000 bankers in jail, a trillion dollars in fines. But it doesn't happen. Instead, the spy network is being used to fight a copyright case. They used Prism to spy on me.
It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.
The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined.
