Regardless of whether his legal troubles conclude any time soon, “bad boy” internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom enjoys fair treatment from Annie Goldson’s probing, which is extensive, though not exhaustive. In the fully documented film, Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web, Dotcom comes off as an unrepentant opportunist, in addition to being the victim of what can only be described as excessive, intrusive, often illiberal persecution from New Zealand police to the White House. This film captures the lavish lifestyle, spending, and self-imposed controversies of the reigning celebrity of content piracy, politics, and fame.
In the expansive contours of New Zealand’s mass surveillance, he becomes as much of a voyeuristic subject the same way a well-known Australian documentarian would have created a film around Edward Snowden as a journalist. Instead, one suggests that societal surveillance takes the forefront. A more important figure is exposed in the shape of Kim Dotcom. His complete self-indulgence projects are out there for the world to observe which leaves the audience shocked and revolted at the same time.
Now known as Kim Dotcom, he was born Kim Schmitz in 1974 in Germany, where he dropped out of middle school at a young age. During his teenage years, he began earning attention due to his bold claims of hacking government agencies and large corporations from various countries. At the young age of 20, his recklessness caught up with him and he was prosecuted for a myriad of charges, including trafficking stolen phone cards. Surprisingly, a lenient judge assumed it was a bright intelligent fooling around and only gave him a suspended sentence. Little did they know, he was only getting started.
Misdemeanor charges turned into felony charges, where he got even more deeply entrenched in illegal insider trading and embezzlement schemes. Schmitz literally had to relocate to steamed Hong Kong due to his housing heavy regulations in Europe, and in the process, legally changed his name. He married a beautiful Filipina named Mona and had several children. With a new family, the now Kim Dotcom moved to a jaw-dropping estate in Auckland, which happens to be the largest home in all of New Zealand in ‘09.
His life came with a price tag and involved everything from luxury cars and yachts to parties with celebrity selfies, but was financed through dubious practices thanks to Megaupload, a service he launched in 2005. While Megaupload allowed varying sorts of content, what was guaranteed to be a traffic, as well as profit magnet, was the attention garnered from illegal uploads like pop albums and astounding Hollywood blockbusters. After all, it’s not as if filmmakers and musicians were losing sleep over their work being monetarily exploited without their consent.
This set of events led to the assumption that these industries began pressuring the Obama administration, which then in turn pressured New Zealand authorities. In January 2012, these authorities staged an absurdly extensive armed raid on Dotcom’s house with two helicopters. There is no denying that many elements of this action were unlawful, and it revealed both New Zealander and American officials in a disturbing intergovernmental espionage light. At some point, this excess of control made Dotcom a folk hero of sorts which encouraged him to start his “Internet Party” to challenge embedded corruption within his new home’s politics.
Feeling empathetic as Goldson is up to a point, “Caught in the Web” cannot disguise that for all Dotcom’s righteous indignation, his political causes, as always, inevitably further reinforce his already extra large economic (and legal) interests. He strikes poses defending artists while Megauploading his way into wealth by exploiting their labors without paying a royalty or other recompense. (His announced good intentions on moving from exploitation to cooperation on that front do not appear to have ever developed past PR.) He is a boastful sham who, to the extent that he has suffered defeat at the hands of the collusive powers of commerce and government (at least in the sporadic long run), fancies himself Christ-on-the-bloody-cross. A competitive video game player seems to be the best summation of his societal contributions at the moment.
An incredibly diverse dump of archival and interview materials woven together into an impressive, yet disorganized two-hour package, “Caught” offers an extreme example of the intersection of fame, greed, copyright and technology in the Dot-com era. Many of the Dotcom’s big offense in this defense of idiocy is that the world does not change fast enough, and so he is not to blame for capitalizing on those not quite at the forefront.
Still, he would take the blame. Not every individual who recognizes a weakness in a system wishes to exploit it while simultaneously lamenting the fallout.
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