📸

Ortmann had arrived in New Zealand on 17 January for five days. He had three days on holiday and 27 days in jail before he was bailed on February 16 to van der Kolk's home. Asia Agcaoíli was at court to support him, surprised to be collecting him after the successful bail hearing and ready to drive him home to his strange new existence.

The first adjustment was the oddity of life without the internet. The bail conditions, which included an internet ban, were isolating. The three men, rooming together, were unable to leave the property to obtain information which might assist their defence — and unable to receive it unless the information was literally carried through the front door.

There was also an element of online familiarity among the group which made the absence of an internet connection particularly tough. Ortmann says it was the first time in seven years he had been offline for longer than 12 hours. "That was a really difficult experience."

The isolation meant they were even divorced from news about the case — a problem for which they found an awkward solution. A friend of Asia's had lent her a car, which was parked along the street from the shared home. In it, she had a small computer and a 3G stick for connectivity. Asia's routine included vigils in the car, finding news reports and making screen shots, which were saved to a memory stick and taken back inside the house. Once there, the group gathered around a television which had a USB port and slowly, laboriously, worked their way through screen shots of news sites. Ortmann: "It was a very difficult time. Having no internet really crippled us."

WHEN THE Megaupload site was closed, the FBI's scorched earth approach, intended to inhibit copyright violation, also devastated the personal property of millions of people. The website was pulled down and replaced with a badge saying: "FBI anti-piracy warning." It declared the site as having been seized under US District Court order and listed the charges to be faced by those associated with it.

Regardless of any infringing content existing on the site, there was also all kinds of inarguably legitimate content which belonged to a vast range of users. The FBI had disconnected those users from their content with no clear way of recovering it. In fact, it was clear the FBI had decided their content would be destroyed, along with any infringing content, shortly after the raid.

The move was reminiscent of the Napster action more than a decade before. The peer-to-peer file-sharing system was a massively popular way for people to generate lists of their favourite music and share them

📸