Mr. Dotcom and his "Guilty" Mercedes. (buzzfeed.com)

First he came for the U.S. government, but now it looks like the entertainment industry is next on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's revenge list. The notorious copyright outlaw took a break from lounging in bubble baths today to leak some compelling details of his U.S. indictment, a few of which shed a damning light on some entertainment industry bigwigs.

Mr. Dotcom shared five emails from companies like Disney, Warner Brothers and Fox with TorrentFreak. The emails reveal that just weeks before a federal investigation into Megaupload was launched, entertainment industry officials were interested in partnering with the company.

The emails indicate that the entertainment industry sought advertising and hosting opportunities on Megaupload. One email from a counsel at Walt Disney shows that, while the company wanted to work to distribute content via Megaupload, they were "uncomfortable with a couple of the provisions of your Terms of Use that we feel may jeopardize our rights in our content."

These new details, along with the claims that U.S. government officials were big Mega fans, muddy an already bizarre case. Mr. Dotcom is still on house arrest awaiting potential extradition from his sprawling Auckland mansion. The New Zealand courts are forcing poor Mr. Dotcom to live on less than $9,000 a week, like some kind of quarantined mid-century pauper.

Mr. Dotcom also claims he is being indicted for hosting a 50 Cent song on Megaupload, which is pretty much the exact kind of music we picture him listening to while lowriding in a Mercedes with a "Guilty" license plate. Get rich or die tryin', indeed.

Ouhhhhhh, burn. People in SOPA-supporting Hollywood giants should stop throwing stones. Using a new site called You Have Downloaded, a Russian-based service that says it tracks about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads, the fine folks at TorrentFreak took a look at IP addresses at entertainment conglomerates likes Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal to see "whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others."

As you might expect, that's a giant negative.

Using the IP ranges of those studios, TorrentFreak found evidence of music, movies, and TV shows downloaded via BitTorrent—and that's just the visible 20 percent.

And then there are the fine upstanding people at Fox Entertainment checking out the work of a competing studio. Perhaps downloading ‘Super 8′ can be branded as “market research,” but in this instance actually paying for the DVD might be more appropriate.

After all, when Fox notices that one of their own movies has leaked online they quickly contact the FBI to get the offender jailed. Ouch.

Yesterday, a Dutch blog called Geenstijl performed a similar stunt on Buma/Stemra, a local music royalty collecting agency that downloaded the video game Battlefied 3 and episodes of "Entourage." Buma/Stemra quickly claimed their IP addresses were spoofed. TorrentFreak calls bullshit, but welcomes the scam, writing, "After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders."

Betabeat is more concerned with why anyone would risk making their employer look like a big fat internet-destroying hypocrite (which, they are) for the 2011 version of "Conan the Barbarian." It was in 3D, for chrissakes!

Hmmm...where can I find me shows?

A week after Fox made users wait to watch new shows on Hulu for free, tech site TorrentFreak says they've seen a drastic rise in the volume of illegal downloads of Fox shows.

TorrentFreak reported that over the first five days of Fox's service change, Hell's Kitchen saw an over 100 percent rise in illegal downloads compared with three previous episodes, and that MasterChef saw a rise of over 189 percent for the same comparison.

Fox instituted the delay to mollify the cable companies, who pay them the lions share of their revenue in re-trans rights. A week of exclusivity makes these incumbents feel better about the pretty penny they are shelling out for content.

For consumers of course, waiting over a week for a new episode (or making personal schedule changes to catch it in primetime) is far from an ideal or realistic expectation, especially for audiences members who have grown accustomed to on-demand viewing.

TorrentFreak also pointed out that Hulu.com and other legal online content venues had decreased illegal download traffic, proving that a lot of viewers want to watch legally if they can, even sitting through multiple ads online.

Now customers who used to watch their favorite shows on Hulu.com the day after they aired have three options: they can wait eight days for the show to appear for free as usual, they can pay for the content, or they can pirate it online. And after having their content provided for free for years, the majority of the slighted viewer base probably isn't going to line Fox's coffers to have it back.

NBC and the other wait-and-see networks are likely watching very closely as Fox tests the waters of the pay wall. But the real question, as bids come in today from the giants of the tech world who are interested in leveraging Hulu for their burgeoning web TV empires, is whether this will take even more of the sheen off an already-battered brand.

Birds of a feather...

Hulu users who don't pay for the site's premium version won't be enjoying any content from Fox the morning after. Starting today, all Fox shows will be kept off the web for eight days, unless users subscribe to Hulu Plus or prove they pay for Dish Network. Peter Kafka reports that Disney's ABC will be the next major network to put this kind of delay in place.

As Disney chief Bob Iger explained on a recent conference call, most of the network's revenue still comes from the cable companies, and keeping them happy means giving them exclusives the web doesn't have. Here's a transcript of Mr. Iger from Seeking Alpha:

The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it.

Our overall approach of late has been to make deals that increase revenue, while at the same time, protect and respect basically the multichannel or the channel distribution value that we see today. So, we’re looking at deals that are largely library in nature, meaning very little if any content that would be in season, mostly prior season. But also, trying to build into at least some of these deals, some form of authentication, [that] … will allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window, if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.

You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.

Betabeat is of the opinion that the networks that opt to sacrifice some of the revenue from the incumbent cable players now, in exchange for establishing themselves as the fastest, most social, most viral presence on the web, will be the dominant players in five to ten years time. But maybe that's why we run a tech blog, and not a public company.

"Sorry if my beard tickles a little."

Poor Hulu. Born to a conglomerate of traditional TV networks that finally admitted they needed to do something about this whole, "web video" world, the company was always caught in a kind of Cronos paradox: the parents might kill their own child rather than let it grow up to threaten their power.

Recently the networks decided they would be better off selling Hulu to somebody else, making it easier down the road to reap lucrative fees for licensing the content they currently put on Hulu for free. But now it seems Fox has decided it can't even wait for that sale to go down before basically cutting Hulu off at the knees.

The News Corp. network has announced that starting August 15th it will no longer put shows on Hulu the day after they air. No more logging in the next morning to catch an episode of Family Guy or Glee. While nothing is set in stone yet, the well-informed Peter Kafka expects the other big networks to follow suit.

The caveat is that Hulu Plus users and people who can prove they pay for cable will get next day access. The rational behind this move is that the networks want to protect the billions of dollars they make in "retransmission" rights from the big cable providers. Having to share with the web the next day devalues the product in the eyes of the big cable companies. And digital ad dollars are peanuts compared to what traditional TV is kicking back to the networks.

The networks might argue that users who really want access to these shows will pay up for them, but as Mr. Kafka points out, it is now ridiculously easy to find pirated copies of most network programming on sites like Sidereel.com. And Sceper.eu. No wonder Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is so pissed off.