By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, July 2012
In late July 2012, FishbowlLA covered a satirical exchange in The Hollywood Reporter: TV writer-director Bruce Leddy had published a tongue-in-cheek response to Kim Dotcom’s open letter to Hollywood. The original framing noted that, video piracy being no laughing matter, Leddy had still managed to find the funny.
Then
Months after the January 2012 shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder, Kim Dotcom, Dotcom published an open letter to Hollywood in The Hollywood Reporter — a conciliatory, let’s-work-together pitch aimed at the entertainment industry that had pursued him.
Writer-director Bruce Leddy answered with a satirical open letter of his own in THR. Mock-accepting Dotcom’s offer of partnership, Leddy proposed turning Dotcom’s own file-sharing logic back on him — joking that he would start “sharing” Dotcom’s possessions, beginning with the founder’s well-publicized fleet of luxury cars. It was the copyright-and-piracy debate conducted as comedy. Leddy’s directing credits included Cougar Town, Important Things with Demetri Martin, and MADtv, along with the 2006 documentary Shut Up & Sing.
The piece was a characteristically light FishbowlLA item — tracking the moment the piracy wars briefly played out as a trade-press joke exchange.
Now
Kim Dotcom’s legal saga became one of the longest-running in internet-copyright history: the United States’ effort to extradite him from New Zealand dragged through that country’s courts for well over a decade. Megaupload’s shutdown was a landmark in the copyright-enforcement-versus-online-platforms fight — a fight that continued in new forms as torrenting declined and licensed streaming rose.
The deeper resolution of the piracy wars proved to be economic rather than legal: the wide availability of affordable licensed streaming did more to reduce casual piracy than any individual enforcement action. Bruce Leddy continued directing in television.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small, witty artifact of a specific moment — when the piracy debate was still being fought in open letters and trade-press satire, before the streaming economy quietly changed the underlying incentives.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.