Big rarely means agile. Even so, there remains in New Zealand a fast-moving fat man who is causing an immense amount of trouble to anyone who ever troubled him.

Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom was stopped dead almost two years ago when the FBI had the New Zealand police haul him from his palatial country home north of Auckland. United States prosecutors claimed his filesharing Megaupload business enabled mass, criminal copyright violation. The website was destroyed, fortunes seized and Dotcom arrested, along with three colleagues, for extradition.

Broke but buoyed by the goodwill of others, Dotcom started to move against those who came after him and has only gained momentum since. His “Kimpire”, as he once vaingloriously called it, has been rebuilt through targeting the failures of the police, prosecutors and spies who so willingly helped the FBI.

Domestically, Dotcom has caused carnage. A government minister has resigned and is facing charges of not declaring political donations made by Dotcom. Prime minister John Key has had to apologise because an intelligence agency for which he was personally responsible was exposed as illegally spying on Dotcom. The police were embarrassed when it emerged their raid, using an anti-terrorist strike force, was carried out unlawfully. As the raid unfolded, police commanders rubbed elbows with senior FBI agents and high-ranking US department of justice cyber crime prosecutor Jay Prabhu.

The pain is set to continue next March. A NZ$6m damages case is scheduled to begin. Dotcom will attempt to put a price tag on the unlawful behaviour of the authorities. Information drawn out through the court process so far has been excruciating for the government. It promises to only get worse.

It is a nightmare for Key’s governing National party, made worse after Dotcom declared an intention to form his own political party. As a resident but not a citizen he cannot stand as a candidate himself, and his chances of having a candidate elected are slim. But creating a new political force, armed with information harmful to the government, will introduce a wildcard element into a knife-edge election. There's no doubt the government has wondered many times why it gave Dotcom residency, knowing of his prior convictions and being aware the FBI was after him.

And astonishingly, Dotcom once again has money. He launched Mega in January, offering consumers an online encrypted cloud storage service. Spurred on by the Five Eyes spying intrusion into his own life, it created an online data haven at the beginning of a year in which NSA leaker Edward Snowden emerged and destroyed everybody’s idea of privacy.

Mega’s fortunes have risen along with its Alexa internet site ranking, and risen faster since it began touting its encryption as the answer to NSA surveillance. When Megaupload was raided, the FBI cited its ability to identify and take down child porn and terrorism-related files as grounds for expecting copyrighted material should be removed. Dotcom built Mega so it was technically impossible for anyone, including the site’s operators, to know what content users had stored. It means one result of the FBI’s action is the creation of a rogue website which exists outside the intrusive surveillance technology exposed by Snowden – surely not the result the US expected when it brought Megaupload crashing down.

Dotcom fights battles on every front, and has shown there’s nothing as like to clog the gears of a well-oiled machine as a 175kg self-styled Internet visionary who feels put upon. His original foe, the music industry, is next. Dotcom will launch Baboom! next year – an online music service. It aims to directly reward artists by paying them when users listen to the songs for free. The price for downloading free music is that users install the "MegaKey", a piece of software which strips out embedded online advertisements in favour of those sold by Dotcom.

Plans of this sort suggest Dotcom remains irrevocably on a collision course with the copyright industry. He personifies the danger technology has posed to copyright law, ever since the Motion Picture Association of America complained Betamax video players would destroy Hollywood.

In September, former Longpigs band member Crispin Hunt told the British music industry it needed to take back ground from Dotcom. Hunt, now speaking for the Featured Artists Coalition, a grouping of musicians debating piracy, told the British music industry body, the BPI, it needed to “rebrand the music industry as the good guys who give us great music, rather than the bad guys who exploit young talent". Dotcom, he said, was a “chubby Che Guevara” whose “self-interest (was) masquerading as idealism”.

And yet the music industry refuses to move. It remains locked in an inflexible business model, pressing the US to strengthen its position around the world through trade deals which include tougher copyright laws.

Dotcom, meanwhile, dances around those embedded movie and music industries. Big doesn’t often mean agile, but when they are so determined not to move, it’s easy to appear nimble. If Megaupload was trouble, wait and see what happens next.