Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom spent the first few weeks after his arrest in prison, with the US government arguing that he posed a flight risk. But he was finally released from prison last month, and his wife recently gave birth to twin daughters.

Dotcom is now speaking out about his case as he continues to fight extradition to the United States. On Monday, TorrentFreak posted one of the most in-depth interviews Dotcom has done since his arrest. Dotcom told TorrentFreak he can "refute pretty much each and every claim in the indictment."

He provides some specific examples of important details the government ignored in its indictment. He points out that thousands of military members had Megaupload accounts. And he reveals that between 2008 and 2010, multiple Hollywood studios expressed interest in working directly with Megaupload.

Personal uploads and unanswered questions

While Hollywood's antipathy to Megaupload is focused on widespread infringement by Megaupload users, the government's indictment devotes significant attention to direct infringement by senior Megaupload officials themselves. Several senior Megaupload employees, including Dotcom himself, are alleged to have uploaded copyrighted songs to the site. The government likely focused on these allegations because the legal issues seem clear-cut. Distributing entire copyrighted works without permission is almost always illegal, and the DMCA's safe harbor doesn't apply.

But Dotcom argues the story isn't as simple. He admits to uploading a 50 Cent song to Megaupload in 2006, but Dotcom says he ripped the track from a legally purchased CD and that it was a "private link" never distributed to the public. Rather, he says he chose the track from his hard drive at random and only sent the link to Megaupload's CTO to test the site's functionality. Dotcom argues that even if his 2006 upload broke the law, the statute of limitations has expired. Dotcom says a similar point applies to the upload of a Louis Armstrong song mentioned in the indictment.

Dotcom may say he can refute nearly everything in the indictment, but some of the most damning charges against Megaupload were not addressed in TorrentFreak's published interview. For example, the government has alleged Megaupload scraped content from YouTube and posted it on Megaupload servers "with utter indifference to what people wanted or whether it was infringing." Dotcom did not address those allegations.

The government also alleges Megaupload "made payments to uploaders who were known to have uploaded infringing copies of copyrighted works." For example, one internal e-mail by a Megaupload employee said, "Our old famous number one on MU, still some illegal files but I think he deserves a payment." New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann told Ars in January that the government has "a pretty slam-dunk case on inducement." TorrentFreak's interview does not discuss payments Megaupload allegedly made to infringing uploaders.

Megaupload's broad reach

Dotcom also gave TorrentFreak new evidence of the breadth of Megaupload's user base. Addresses like fbi.gov, djs. gove, and senate.gov accounted for 1058 user accounts, of which 344 were paid premium accounts. And Megaupload had 15,634 registered users from .mil addresses. More than 10,000 of these shelled out for a premium account. The military users uploaded 340,000 files, accounting for almost 100 TB of data.

Dotcom speculated many of these users were using their Megaupload accounts to engage in non-infringing uses, such as deployed soldiers sharing personal video with family and friends back home. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is fighting to get legitimate Megaupload users access to their files.

Most strikingly, Dotcom revealed that Megaupload received friendly overtures from several major Hollywood studios. E-mails supplied to TorrentFreak show employees at Disney, Warner Brothers, Turner Broadcasting, and Fox all e-mailed Megaupload between 2008 and 2010 seeking assistance.

For example, a Disney executive e-mailed Megaupload in 2008. He said he was interested in having Megaupload host Disney content, but said he would need Megaupload to tweak its terms of service to make it clear Disney retained ownership of files uploaded to the site. He sent Megaupload a proposed alternative to the standard Megaupload TOS.

In 2009, Fox e-mailed seeking "third party partners" for Fox's recently launched ad network. "Please let me know if you have some time to chat this week about how we can work together to better monetize your inventory," the Fox employee wrote.

In 2010, a Warner Brothers executive e-mailed Megaupload seeking to expedite the process of uploading Warner content to Megaupload. "I would like to know if your site can take a Media RSS feed for our syndications," he wrote. "We would like to upload our content all at once instead of one video at a time."

Of course, the fact that some people used Megaupload for legitimate purposes doesn't disprove the allegations in the government's indictment. But the breadth of Megaupload's user base, and the fact that multiple Hollywood studios apparently viewed the site as a potential business partner as recently as 2010, suggests that branding Megaupload as a criminal conspiracy was probably overkill. A court is currently considering whether Hotfile, one of Megaupload's competitors, is liable for its users' copyright infringement after Hollywood studios filed a civil lawsuit. The government could have encouraged Hollywood to take the same approach with Megaupload.

Instead, Megaupload was subjected to what Dotcom characterizes, not implausibly, as a "death penalty without a trial." Even if Megaupload is ultimately acquitted of the charges against it, the months-long shutdown will have done irreparable damage to Megaupload's business. We would have liked to see Dotcom get his day in court before his site was shuttered and his assets seized.