February 2004: It was a normal (but very hot) Friday at the Kazaa office in Cremorne, New South Wales.

Until it wasn't.

Shortly after 9am a group of lawyers arrived and explained to us that they had a judge's order. We were not to make any calls. We were to do as asked. They were here to search the premises.

A text arrived on my phone to say that a similar group had arrived at my home in suburban Hornsby Heights, along with a a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. A number of other places were raided including other executives, 4 internet service providers and 3 universities.

This is the moment in the Kazaa story that the global entertainment industry brought the legal case to our doorstep. To Australia, and to us as individuals.

There was no "On/Off" button for Kazaa

The global case had not been going well for the other side. Kazaa has been validated by courts in the Netherlands and was taking a similar path in the Californian courts.

The software connected users directly. They used it for a bunch of things and one of those things was sharing their music collections and this was not something that Kazaa could control. Copyright, in the end, is all about control.

Australia provided a few extra tools for the media industry to come after us.

The Anton Piller order, available to Australian courts allowed to the media companies to search our premises without prior warning. And Australian copyright law allowed them to come after us as individuals as well as the companies.

It became visceral and frightening very quickly.

Kazaa was built on top of a very powerful peer to peer network which meant there was no central control point. More powerful computers on the network would automatically become 'super nodes' to route traffic and handle search queries.

At one stage at my home, the lawyers were delighted when they found my personal desktop computer. Hoping to find the "On/Off" switch for the entire Kazaa network, they found Microsoft Office and a web browser.

When I finally got home late at night, there was a record box on the dining room table

It was still hot when I got home that evening. My wife was putting the house back together and my young son had a cut on his head from the kerfuffle at the start of the raid.

There was a record box on the dining room table. On the box was scrawled "Operation Persephone".

After the madness of the day, in the calm before the next few horrible years, I sat there looking at this box. The box that contained the case against me.

And all I could think was: "Who came up with the name, and why Persephone?"