By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, May 2012
In early May 2012, The Hollywood Reporter ran a cover story on Kim Dotcom — the Megaupload founder whose January 2012 New Zealand arrest had triggered one of the most-cited copyright-and-platform legal cases of the era. Daniel Miller and Matthew Belloni co-bylined the piece.
Then
The Megaupload prosecution had been one of the most ambitious post-2010 American copyright-enforcement actions. The U.S. Department of Justice’s January 2012 indictment had charged Dotcom and six other executives with copyright infringement, racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud.
Kim Dotcom — born Kim Schmitz in Germany — had built Megaupload into one of the largest file-hosting platforms of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Daniel Miller and Matthew Belloni were two of THR’s leading reporters at the time. Belloni would become THR’s editorial director the following year.
Now
The Megaupload prosecution has continued through more than a decade of legal proceedings. Kim Dotcom has remained in New Zealand fighting extradition through multiple court-of-appeal cycles. As of 2025, the extradition proceedings had continued without producing a final U.S. trial.
The broader file-hosting-and-piracy legal framework has substantially evolved across the post-2012 period. The streaming-platform consolidation has substantively reduced the addressable market for pirated content.
Matthew Belloni left The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 to launch What I’m Hearing — his Puck News-affiliated entertainment-industry newsletter franchise. Daniel Miller has continued in entertainment-industry trade-press reporting at multiple subsequent outlets.
The 2012 piece reads now as a documented moment of substantive trade-press access journalism — captured at a peak Janice Min-era HR moment.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.