emily: he is tech's biggest outlaw, under house arrest after a raid by new zealand. kim dotcom is known for his outrageous personality as he has trotted the glow. now he is the target of the biggest copyright case in history, accused of trafficking pirated music's, movies, and tv shows as he awaits an extradition hearing to decide his fate. joining me on this special edition of "studio 1.0" from auckland, new zealand, megaupload founder and self-proclaimed ruler of the kimpire, kim dotcom.

kim, thanks for joining us kim: hello. emily: it has been a year since you have spoken publically. you have been under house arrest. what are the rules now? where can can you not go? kim: i am not allowed to leave the country. i have to report to the police twice a week that i am still here. emily: you had your freedom until the raid. take me back to the day of the raid. kim: 72 cops, heavily armed with assault rifles, storming the property. some of them arriving in helicopters, some of them arriving with attack dogs. completely bizarre scene. where my staff had to lie with their face the ground, guns pointed at them. my little kids crying because they were scared. my wife separated from the children. when they got to me, they beat me up. the rest is history. emily: there is a description

of you standing there with a sawed-off shotgun. kim: you know, the police officer that made that story up in the press conference, he had to admit later in court that he made it up. i was sitting there, calm, with my hands in the air. emily: unarmed? kim: completely unarmed. emily: what did they take? kim: thousands of servers, offline, that hosted the data of millions of users that have used our web services. emily: most of your assets are frozen. kim: they are saying everything they have seized here now belongs to the u.s. government. emily: i know you have said you are broke. would you call yourself broke now? kim: we recently had a judgment releasing $4.6 million for legal fees and living expenses. so at the moment, if that judgment is not appealed, financially, i am in a better position than i was a couple of weeks ago. emily: have you thought about moving to a cheaper place? kim: that would also mean -- it

is kind of my last stand, fighting for my castle, for my home. i am also trying to send a message to them and show them i am not going to fold over. that i am going to fight back. emily: you are wanted by the u.s. government in the biggest copyright case in history. the charges including racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud, copyright nfringement. you faced decades in prison. just how much time in prison are you facing? kim: 88 years. emily: 88 years. they say you owe $175 million. is that correct? kim: they say that is the profit that megaupload made, and all of that should belong to hollywood. emily: yet, in this particular case, you have yet to be found guilty of anything. kim: mm. emily: what is the myth of kim dotcom and what is the reality? kim: i am absolutely not legendary. i am who i am. i live my life the way i like.

i do not limit myself or my thinking. when i have an idea and i have a plan, then i see it through. emily: you were born kim schmitz in west germany. kim: that is right. emily: what kind of kid were you? kim: i was a naughty kid. my mother, i am so sorry. i was a bad kid. once i had my first computer, everything changed for me. i just started questioning everything. why go to school? this is the future. this is what i want to do . emily: how did you become a hacker? kim: when i was in my teens and i had my first modem, i was so excited to be able to chat with people halfway around the globe that shared the same interests, hacking. it was so exciting to go into computer systems and find out things that you are not supposed to see. it's a bit of an adventure.

emily: you said you hacked the pentagon, citibank, nasa. that you obtained top secret documents on saddam hussein, tracked down osama bin laden's bank accounts. kim: back in the day, after 9/11, which really affected me, i felt deeply unhappy about that. i was trying to do something, to be part of the effort to stop people from ever doing hat again. emily: you did all those things? all that is true? kim: i did not do myself. there were other things i did. emily: some people would say there is no proof. kim: well, there is no proof. emily: when and why did you change your name to kim dotcom? kim: i bought the domain, kim.com. i thought it would be great if my name was kim dotcom, so if anyone wants to know anything about me, i do not have to hand them a business card or anything.

they can just go to my website. it is all there. emily: take me back to the start of megaupload. kim: i was a street racer. and i was make great videos about that and share that in the street racing community, on the forums. the file sizes kept getting bigger and bigger, and you could not large files over e-mail. so i wanted to solve that problem by creating a server where you can upload a file, get a unique link and then e-mail the link to the people ou know. it was a convenient solution to a problem that is still elevant today. emily: how quickly did it grow? kim: instantly. it was massive. within weeks, we had to buy additional hardware, additional servers. no single penny was spent on advertising. the thing just got its own ife. emily: at its peak, 50 million daily users -- kim: yes. emily: billions of files. 48,000 file transfers a minute. is that about right? kim: yeah.

emily: 4% of internet traffic. kim: that's right. emily: in its prime, how much megaupload's content was legitimate and how much was pirated? kim: the vast majority of files on megaupload was completely legitimate. there is no difference between megaupload and services like dropbox or the new mega today. you can use it for good things and you can use it for bad hings. you can buy a knife and stab someone in the heart, or you can use it to slice your bread. you're not throwing the knife maker in jail because someone is murdering someone with a knife. emily: copyright holders say you robbed them of hundreds of millions of dollars. kim: how can i have done that if i, myself, have never ploaded a single copyright file onto megaupload and shared it? emily: did you try hard enough to stop it? kim: we follow the law. . when we got copyright notices, we took them down. in addition to that, we gave over 150 copyright holders direct access to our servers to

delete links they did not like, that were infringing on their copyright. emily: you also -- you had a rewards program. you paid users to upload content. they made more money, the more popular their content was. what is popular? movies that have not been released, music that is free. in that case, weren't you complicit? kim: i do not think so. because if you look at our rewards rules, which were right there on the front page, it said you cannot upload stuff that does not belong to you. we limited the rewards program to files smaller than 100 megabytes. the moment you upload some sort of rip of a movie, you do not make a penny. emily: do you believe in copyright, first of all? kim: i believe in copyright, but i do not believe in copyright extremism. extremism is if you are a hollywood studio, and you

release your content in one country first, in the united states, and roll it out over a couple of months in other countries around the world and expect the internet community in all of these different countries to wait for the release. they have just launched netflix here in new zealand. the catalog of content that you can download is roughly 10% of what they offer in the united tates. that is completely unfair. and because people do not get that access, they are looking for the stuff elsewhere. so it is a problem created by the content creators. i am not responsible for that. if they would have an offering that had all content globally available for a fair price on any device, piracy would shrink into insignificance. but they are not doing it. emily: but if it is illegal and you are not trying hard enough to take it down or you do not take it down, doesn't that mean

what you are doing is illegal too? kim: i have tried everything. we were just a small company based in hong kong. we did not catch up with the latest technologies. we were not even given an opportunity to do that. emily: do you think the artist who makes the song, tv show, movie, the videogame creator -- do those people deserve to be aid? kim: absolutely. yes. emily: so if those people deserve to be paid yet people are accessing that content illegally, how do you find a balance? kim: where is the problem? i do not see artists starving. emily: so just because they are making money, does that make it fair that others should access their content illegally? kim: i do not think that is what i am trying to say. i just think everyone should look at it a bit more realistically. all of these these hollywood moguls are living in mansions bigger than mine. it is the greed that is

dominating this debate. it is not like anyone is starving. the movie industry makes more money year after year. society that wants to have access to the content, but hollywood does not make it available. i am just a tiny piece in the middle of that. i am not responsible for that. emily: you think the government is trying to make an example out of you? kim: absolutely. emily: president obama, in saying that piracy is a matter of national importance, is saying the innovation and creativity and stuff the american people create is our biggest asset. so why should we allow it to be stolen? kim: that argument does not include the question, why don't we make this great product available to everyone in an easy format? actually, if hollywood had some smart people working for them, they would probably have the biggest internet company on the planet. emily: so explain to me how this great internet company out of hollywood would work.

kim: it is quite simple. if you have a content platform that is, say, owned by all these different studios ombined, and they would make their product available, their entire catalog, everything, at a fixed monthly fee for everyone to access around the world, they would have the biggest internet success in history. i can understand the dilemma, but to make me responsible for that is outrageous. emily: what is your message for president obama? kim: what is my message, well, it would have been nice if he delivered the change. it would have been nice if he did not spy on the world population. i'm disappointed in his presidency, and i am disappointed in the u.s. government for the way they are behaving around the world now. this case is a small example of how arrogant the u.s. government has become around the world.

emily: tell me about your relationship with edward snowden. ♪

emily: you were arrested for the first time when you were 18. kim: yeah. emily: you were convicted of insider trading, later. why should we trust you? many people think you are the world's biggest tyrant. a white-collar criminal. kim: i am an easy target. when i was a young man, i made some mistakes. i was a hacker. i never hurt anyone. i hacked into systems, because i was an adventurer. i wanted to find out if aliens really exist. but i have grown. i am a family man. i have five kids. i am not a criminal. i am different. emily: tell me about mega. what is this new business you are working on? kim: after the raid, i spent a lot of time thinking about the intrusion of privacy. in my own case, they have used the nsa to spy on me. the prime minister of new zealand has apologize for that, because they have done that

illegally. i created a cloud storage website where people who upload their files can be 100% sure their data is fully encrypted, that no government can access it. that we, as a service provider, cannot access private data. emily: so even you cannot see what is in the files? kim: that is correct. emily: so the nsa could not get it. kim: they would get a lot of garbage. emily: what is to stop this from becoming a bank for criminals? kim: it is your right to privacy. i think that right overrules everything else. emily: is there anything you would have done differently? kim: absolutely. if anyone from the u.s. government had reached out to us and said, well, we have a problem here. we never got any warning like that. emily: tell me about your relationship with edward snowden. kim: i think he is a hero. i admire him for his courage. he will be remembered in history as one of the great people of our time.

emily: what is he up to? kim: he is happy, he is fine. he is in russia. i think he is pleased that the debate has been triggered, based on the good things he has one. especially to americans. emily: when it comes to china, iran, islamic terrorists, the united states government, what are you most worried about when it comes to spying, hacking? kim: i am worried about the situation in ukraine. i think putin is someone i would be very careful with. i think that obama has done a good thing in negotiating with iran and trying to find a resolution to the nuclear standoff. emily: what about some of the other countries? north korea and sony? should we be concerned about north korea? kim: you do not really believe that north korea hacked sony.

i do not believe that for a minute. emily: who did, then? kim: some sophisticated group that has an interest in what hollywood is doing around the world. emily: you do not think it is a group with ties to north korea? kim: i do not think so. i do not think north korea has the capability. it is a beautiful story for the u.s. government to put this onto north korea. it is more likely that it was some insider at sony that was disgruntled. emily: i know you are particularly worried about microsoft. kim: obviously, windows software is the most interesting target for the u.s. government, because everyone is sing it. if you can just use windows update to install a backdoor on some target, you know, then that is the most convenient way to get access to everything that happens on an individual's computer or on government computers or bank computers.

and it is just the logical extension of what they have already done. emily: you say julian assange is going to be hillary's worst nightmare? ♪

emily: what about julian assange? what is your relationship with him? kim: what julian assange is doing, he is putting a spotlight on all the secrets. emily: how often do you talk to him? kim: why is that important to you? emily: i am curious. kim: i like these guys. i look up to them. i think they are very brave. they are going through a hard time. they chose to do that for the betterment of all of us. so, yeah, i love to talk to them. emily: you said you would bring the internet party to the u.s. in 2016. why? what is your goal? kim: because i think there is a big group of people out there that disagree with what is going on, you know? they want to have their privacy

back. they want to have internet freedom. emily: you tweeted that you were going to be hillary's worst nightmare in 2016. how so? kim: i have to say it is probably more julian. but i am aware of some of the things that are going to be oadblocks for her. so, if i can provide some transparency with these people and make them part of what the internet party stands for, then i will be happy to do that. emily: you are saying julian assange will be hillary's worst nightmare in 2016. kim: i think so. emily: how so? kim: he has access to information. emily: what information? kim: i do not know the specifics. emily: why hillary in particular? kim: well hillary hates julian. she is just an adversary of internet freedom, i think. emily: she signed your extradition request. kim: yes. emily: so you have a bone to pick. kim: you know the crazy thing

is -- i actually like hillary. i like obama. it is so crazy that all of this happened. emily: so the internet party has not worked out in new zealand. as i understand it, it was kind of a flop. how do you resurrect that? kim: a lot of times, when i created something new, it was a bit ahead of its time. i think a political party is something that grows over time. emily: if you are not extradited, what is next? for you? kim: i think this case is going to go on for a very long time. i have prepared myself for hat, mentally. this will be a fight for a very long time. emily: what do you want your legacy to be? kim: i am working on something new that i am really excited about. it is called meganet. it is an alternative internet. i want to create a new internet that gives of the people power

over the network rather than governments and corporations. emily: people have the power rather than companies? kim: the way meganet works, it turns every mobile device into a router-server and allows devices to communicate with each other to create a network that still utilizes the internet as a pipe, but fully encrypted. it is an internet that is completely run by the people, for the people, with all the capacity on your mobile devices arrying the network. emily: how do you want to be remembered? kim: at the end, i want my children to look back at whatever there is to learn about me and be proud of e. emily: do you think they will be? kim: yes. emily: kim dotcom, thank you for joining us. it has been a fascinating conversation. kim: thank you. emily: thank you.

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emily: he got his start as an improv comedian. performing on one of the most famous stages in chicago. but one comedy could not pay the bills, he dusted off an old skill -- coding. he added three companies before he moved to silicon valley. then he took a chance on a fast starting startup getting an unusual amount of attention. that startup invented the tweet. once mocked as a way to describe your breakfast in 140 characters, it is now a $30 billion public company. the darling of celebrities and presidents worldwide, yet