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BORN AGAIN

Kim Dotcom sits at home and wonders, sometimes, if he will die that day.

“I’ve had a great life. And if it ended tomorrow I would pass with a smile,” he says.

But he’d rather not.

First he needs to win. He always needs to win. He was winning with his file storage business, Megaupload — until it was torn apart by the United States of America, driven on and encouraged by an angry and vengeful Hollywood.

Dotcom now needs to win the fight for the truth.

He says the truth is one of a struggle to innovate — for the future of the internet and for technology to break free of outdated laws that uphold a corrupt political system. This system, he says, is how Hollywood compelled the White House to kill Megaupload. If it gets away with it, the United States will control the internet. They are murdering freedom, he says.

The United States has a different view. It says Kim Dotcom is a copyright thief whose criminal conspiracy threatened the country’s economic stability. In the year it began investigating Dotcom, the White House declared that copyright was an issue of “national security”. The Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped on Megaupload and squashed it. It stepped on Dotcom and three of his colleagues, seizing their money and getting their friends in New Zealand to throw them in jail before they were shipped to the United States for prosecution. At least, that was the plan.

Since the military-style raid in 2012 on Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion, the only people found to have broken any laws are the ones who were trying to put him in jail. The tycoon has yet to be found guilty of anything, but if he is he faces decades in prison, as do his co-

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