Awesome video…well worth checking out.
I have to say, I kind of like the guy.
Hrm. I’m not wholly sure I’ve got to the bottom of the whole Dotcom story, but it certainly does seem like (a) he got the first tranche of his money in a deeply suspect way and (b) is being massively disingenuous about megaupload – I’m fairly OK with him saying “no no it wasn’t just for stolen stuff” when clearly it at least partially was, but emails have surfaced with them laughing about how it was for stolen stuff, so denying that sort of thing in trial is a bit naughty. On the other hand, now that he’s got the money he does seem to have done a bunch of pretty decent stuff with it (as well as buying yachts and cars and parties and a big house, but one can hardly begrudge him that). Complicated sorta thing. I’m not sure what I think, tbh.
I agree…what surprised me is that he isn’t the dickhead I was quite expecting him to be. He seems to be a pretty legit guy who set up a service and washed his hands of how people misuse the service…he isn’t the first person to do that…Julian Assange can be arguably presented in the same light, and he is hailed as being a hero by many.
I am not condoning Kim DotCom, but I just thought he was more than I was expecting…but admittidly, I had pretty low expectations. 
Certainly he was aware his service was being used for privacy. At least under the DMCA, Title II provides for a safe harbor for service operators like Megaupload or Youtube to not be liable for their users’ copyright violations given that they make every attempt to remove infringing content.
Ya, it does indeed. However, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/us-unveils-the-case-against-kim-dotcom-revealing-e-mails-and-financial-data/ and similar articles suggest that they deliberately didn’t “make every attempt to remove infringing content”, and acknowledged internally that they were not the dumb pipe that they claimed to be. Now, revealing internal emails seems a bit morally iffy to me, and Dotcom has indeed done some decent things with the money, and Megaupload did have plenty of non-infringing uses, but I think that Megaupload claiming that they fall into the safe harbour provisions is pretty disingenuous. As I say, I’m not sure what to think here.