By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
In July 2012, as the Megaupload case ground on, FishbowlLA highlighted a working filmmaker’s wry rebuttal to Kim Dotcom’s overtures to Hollywood.
Then
Kim Dotcom had published a conciliatory July 17 open letter in The Hollywood Reporter. Writer-director Bruce Leddy answered it, and FishbowlLA credited him with finding the funny in an otherwise unfunny subject.
Leddy said he was happy to take Dotcom up on his offer, with one proviso: tired of writing and directing for a decent wage while others ‘shared’ creative work online for profit, he proposed to start selling Dotcom’s own property on eBay — beginning with the luxury cars. One Mercedes alone, he wrote, would cover his children’s college tuition.
The joke had a point: Leddy was applying Dotcom’s logic about other people’s property to Dotcom’s own. Leddy’s directing credits included Cougar Town, Important Things with Demetri Martin and MADtv, and FishbowlLA noted Dotcom had answered the exchange with a piece of music of his own.
Now
The argument the satire dramatized — whether large-scale online ‘sharing’ of creative work is theft or disruption — ran for years through the Megaupload case. Dotcom fought extradition to the United States for more than a decade; New Zealand’s courts repeatedly ruled him eligible, and in 2024 a New Zealand minister signed an extradition order, which he continued to contest.
The piracy fights of the early 2010s were ultimately answered less by the courts than by the market: convenient, affordable legal streaming did more to curb casual piracy than any prosecution.
Leddy’s mock proposal holds up as the era’s sharpest one-paragraph rebuttal — a reminder that the property-rights question at the center of the Megaupload saga looked very different to the working writers and directors whose work was being shared.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.