In the court cases, there was communication between Dotcom and van der Kolk that essentially said (paraphrasing here) 'hey, downloads are going down, we should

In the court cases, there was communication between Dotcom and van der Kolk that essentially said (paraphrasing here) 'hey, downloads are going down, we should add movie x or album y somehow, people search for those a lot'. There was a lot of evidence (in the form of emails and chat logs) that showed that their 'file sharing' angle was just a front to their actual business which was distributing copyrighted material.