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with their friends. The recording industry sued and Napster found itself in court, making the compelling argument that it had found a way through technology developments to reduce the amount of infringing material to less than one per cent. It wasn't good enough — it had to be zero, the court ruled. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, in Free Culture, said it, meant the war wasn't on copyright infringement but on the technology which underpinned the file-sharing system. There was no way to assure 100 per cent of video record-ers or photocopying machines were used in compliance with the law — or 100 per cent of handguns.

IF THE Megaupload case spawned any truly unlikely heroes, then Kyle Goodwin would be first among their number. Goodwin runs OhioSportsNet — a company which films high school sporting events in that state. In a way similar to Dotcom's initial Megaupload concept, Goodwin used the website to distribute files of sports games to enthusiasts, while also carefully backing the files up on a hard drive. Days before the raid, the hard drive crashed. With Megaupload shut down, Goodwin was separated from his business.

Dotcom was similarly separated from Megaupload — the servers on which the files were stored were under government control. The bulk of them were based at Carpathia Hosting, where 1103 servers held 25 petabytes (25 million gigabytes) of data — an amount of data equivalent to 330 years of HD television playing constantly. On 27 January, prosecutors MacBride and Prabhu wrote to Dotcom saying they had copied what they wanted from the "Mega Servers" but had now "completed execution of its search warrants". For this reason, "the United States has no continuing right to access the Mega Servers". The US told Carpathia it was free to delete the information held on the Megaupload servers — an action which would have destroyed any infringing data along with that belonging to innocent users. "It is our understanding that the hosting companies may begin deleting the contents of the servers as early as February 2, 2012," MacBride and Prabhu wrote. Having seized the data belonging to millions, they stepped back and washed their hands of it. Dotcom, they said, could deal with Carpathia if he wanted access to the servers.

The letter and the intent caught the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a lobby and rights group founded in 1990. It bills itself as "the first line of defence . . . when our freedoms in the networked world come under attack".

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