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Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Business Software Association (now called The Software Alliance).

With the chill of fear removed from the internet, the DMCA paved the way for an internet explosion. “Just look at how much money the US government has made because of the DMCA. ISPs took off and search engines like Google were possible,” says Dotcom. Google and co. paid more tax than Hollywood. “The entire tech sector wouldn’t be the way it is today if it wasn’t for the DMCA. The DMCA has done a great job for the American economy, for the US government.”

YouTube, said Dotcom, would not exist without the DMCA. “(YouTube) is going to replace TV completely,” says Dotcom of the future. “It has changed the way people consume content.”

As America headed into the 2008 presidential election, the online industry hoped for great legislative leaps. The DMCA came in under Clinton, a Democratic president, and had the support of the copyright industry. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama seemed to understand the hopes of the technologically adept generations. The US technology sector believed in, and the campaign appeared to promise, an internet that existed for its users, free of corporate constraints. Obama said: “The internet is the most open network in history. We have to keep it that way. I will prevent network providers from discriminating in ways that limit the freedom of expression on the Internet.”

IT DIDN’T QUITE work out that way. A brief look at US copyright law will show that the United States and Kim Dotcom were always destined to collide.

Technology was creating the promise of great advances in creative and cultural fields, so “Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?” asked Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading legal experts on and proponents of copyright reform. He asked the question in his 2008 book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

But it had always been that way, as Lessig had shown in his earlier book Free Culture. The first US copyright law, in 1790, granted the author control of the work for 14 years with a 14-year right of renewal. Without renewing his or her right to the book, it would pass into the public domain. After 28 years, it would do so anyway.

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