I love driving fast. I grew up in Germany; we have the Autobahn here, where we can drive without a speed limit. And throughout my 20s, I always had fast cars, and I always went to the maximum. Like, my average cruising speed was 250 km/hr.
I'm a fun-loving guy. I enjoy my life. I have a big kid inside me.
Always upbeat, always happy, always putting you in a good mood. That's what I want to achieve with my music.
I'm not a pirate. I'm an innovator.
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views.
I might be one of the most flamboyant characters New Zealand has ever seen, but my intentions are good, and I would like to see New Zealand flourish.
The Internet is this whole new world that allows everyone to communicate and exchange information and be a perfect marketplace and just accelerate everybody's lives. So, for me, the Internet was the greatest invention of mankind so far.
Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don't shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don't go to the car manufacturer and say, 'Hey, we're shutting you down.'
The U.S. obviously has all the evidence they need to prosecute bankers. They just need to search their own spy database and then there you go - 1,000 bankers in jail, a trillion dollars in fines. But it doesn't happen. Instead, the spy network is being used to fight a copyright case. They used Prism to spy on me.
My idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.
I get 100 e-mails a day from Americans who say, 'What you're doing is cool - can we work for you?' From Germans, I also get 100 e-mails a day, saying, 'You fat pig!' or 'You're a liar and a criminal!' I'm trying to change this.
It's things like Wikipedia that help us to advance as a society and help us to accelerate our evolution. If you're a researcher and you need some answer to something, and in today's world you can find it this quickly, it allows you to develop whatever you are doing much faster.
I was an online service provider. It's not my job to police what people are uploading. It's the job of the content owners, and the law is very clear. If you create content, and you want to protect your copyrights, you have to do the work.
I always thought of myself as more American than Americans when I was living in Germany, because I always had this attitude of can-do, and if you're successful, you can show it, which is a very un-German thing, you know.
I prefer being able to choose who I want to help or what I want to improve in the world by making a lot of money myself rather than just going out there and talking about things. If you have money to do things, it's much better than just talking about them.
I would love nothing more than me and my family getting green cards, going to L.A. for a year, sitting down with the big Hollywood studios and coming up with the most advanced and awesome Internet distribution platform for movies. It would make Hollywood more money than cinemas, DVDs, and everything else combined.
The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined.
If you look at history, and if you look at all these different things that have threatened the movie industry - from Betamax tape to DVDs to the Internet - in the end, it has always turned out right, because ultimately people want to see that stuff.
The Internet is by the people, for the people.
It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.
