The world this podcast is about no longer exists. Wild Wild Web – The Kim Dotcom Story tells of the beginnings of digitization, when the internet was still a thing for specialists. And from the wild west years of the network, when it was linked to an unbroken promise of freedom and an insane free culture established itself.
At the center of this story is Kim Schmitz. A man, as Janne Knödler puts it, “whose life repeatedly intersects with the great moments of the Internet”. Knödler presents this podcast and researched it with Benedikt Dietsch, Simon Garschhammer and André Dér-Hörmeyer for Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Your main character, Schmitz, understood one thing very clearly very early on: A lot of money can be made at the beginning of the millennium by exchanging digital files for free, especially songs and films. A lot of money. Even if not necessarily in a legal way. Today, when many people are willing to pay for streaming services, the story of Kim Schmitz and his company Megaupload seems like an anachronism.
But this story doesn’t end there. Schmitz, born in Kiel in 1974, now lives in New Zealand and calls himself Kim Dotcom. At the beginning of 2012 his property was raided, the entrepreneur was arrested and his property was confiscated. Since then, Kim Dotcom, who is free on bail, has been fighting with varying degrees of success in New Zealand courts – to regain his property, but above all to prevent it from being extradited to the United States.
The film and music industries have a huge bill open to Kim Dotcom
The film and music industries there still have an open plan with him. Their representatives see in Megaupload an essential factor in the fact that they have escaped millions of dollars through illegal downloads and unlawful file sharing. Today this is no longer a major problem for the industry. In the – for the time being – final episode, Janne Knödler asks whether Kim Dotcom might be the last prisoner of war in a war that has long since ended.
Well, for one, dotcom is on the loose. On the other hand, the fact that it no longer works today does not play a role in the assessment of his dubious business model. But in places like this it becomes particularly clear how much effort is involved Wild Wild Web gives a balanced report. It would be easy to make fun of Kim Dotcom, of his many presumptions, his ridiculous self-portrayals, of the fact that as a teenager he was never the successful hacker he always portrayed himself to be.
But the question here is whether the entrepreneur actually acted illegally or only used legal gray areas for himself. Whether the damage he is blamed for is actually as great as his opponents claim. And whether the law is bent in the proceedings against him. At least there is a suspicion that Hollywood’s decision, after the Lord of the rings– also the Hobbit-Film trilogy to shoot in New Zealand was linked to an agreement with the local government to extradite Dotcom to the USA despite his residency status.
A sequel is not ruled out – should it actually come to the extradition and dotcom in the USA the process is started. Or he still agrees to tell the podcast team his version. Much is in motion in this ancient story.
Wild Wild Web – The Kim Dotcom Story, ARD audio library, also at Deezer and Podcast.de