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US Judge Say Kim Dotcom May Never Be Tried or Extradited
vik writes "As Megaupload's Kim Dotcom's megafarce trial continues, the New Zealand Herald reports that his alleged offense not only falls below the threshold for extradition, but also that the warrant may not be properly served. 'My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,' says Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken. Not surprisingly, Kim Dotcom has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."
He was put out of business and lost tens of millions of dollars from the raid. His punishment has already been served, without trial, and without due process.
If their goal was to shutdown his site and put him out of business, they seem to have succeeded.
This problem will not be corrected. Too many people neither understand nor care, and too many wealthy and powerful people are keenly interested in retaining this ability to eliminate competition though abuse of the legal system.
makes me embarrassed to be an American. I'll be voting Socialist come November and encouraging everyone I know to vote third party, not that it will make a difference. The unwashed masses will continue voting keep voting for Ds and Rs because "anything else is a wasted vote...", and the Ds and Rs will keep sucking corporate cock at every opportunity because they know where their bread is buttered.
"...having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."
Kim, you should be thankful that this attempt to bring democracy to your country ended with so few casualties. The United States is generally far more aggressive regarding its use of military forces to support economic (corporate) policies. You could have been picked up by a bounty hunter, or kidnapped by operatives. I wish I could say I was joking here -- several federal legislators and officials have stated that they consider filesharing and copyright infringement to be supporting terrorism.
On the upside, your sacrifice may bring additional business to New Zealand, as well as prompt a review of disaster recovery with an emphasis on protection against foreign governments. Again, I wish it was a joke -- ten years ago, disaster recovery plans centered around the damage backhoes and hurricanes could do. Today, those risks can be cheaply mitigated thanks to cloud architecture and data centers in almost every major city worldwide. The biggest threat which cannot be managed by a business anymore is the threat posed by a rogue foreign government such as the United States. Though I am hardly singling them out -- the UK, China, Iran, North Korea, India, Iraq, France, Germany and Egypt join them on the list of foreign governments who have attempted to destroy businesses extrajudicially.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Ah well, no harm done!
I wonder if he will be able to sue the US government for the millions/billions lost in buisiness.
"These days, the US legal system simply has so much cruft, overbearing laws and process hindrances that simply the threat of getting arrested is enough to make you think about complying with whatever they want, getting arrested will give you perpetual problems in your life and getting convicted even if overturned later will make you an outcast."
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
> "has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost"
While the legality of the move raises questions, I have to admit, there seems something poetic about someone who earned a fortune on ill-gotten, pirated material complaining about having his business trashed and jobs lost.
They will extradite him, he will be prosecuted in the USA, anyone who thinks otherwise should read the indictment it's damning.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
Fake take down notices, fake accounts to keep copyright material posted, instructions to ignore copyright takedowns not politically connected, money laundering. It's pretty damning stuff, so you can say "Megaupload wasn't given notice of server seizure" etc. but that won't stop a judge reading the indictment and extraditing him. 220 jobs lost? I'm wondering how many of those 220 will also end up behind bars after reading the indictment.
I don't feel sorry for him or his business. He was knowingly running a warez hub. On top of that, he was running it as a for-profit warez distribution website. What his external marketing showed is meaningless compared to what actually occurred behind the scenes.
I don't feel sorry for anyone who uploaded their only copy of their files to Megaupload, either. It's no one's issue but the uploader's if he was dumb enough to not have multiple physical backups of files that he definitely couldn't lose. Anyone dumb enough to also pay money to share their files on a site that is filled with ads also gets what's coming to him. There are at least 10 sites out there that provide you with a clean, easy to use and efficient service - even for free - for sharing files without any ads.
This whole situation is just children, Brazilians and the mentally challenged just whining about not being able to get their warez, or losing a couple of dollars to a company that shut down and didn't give them a refund. I didn't see any cries from the people who lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars when Etology scammed every advertiser and publisher, last summer.
Really? Millions of users who used megaupload for backups, or for distributing their own material and nothing else, _and_ who have no other copy of the data? Might the submitter be just slightly exaggerating?
The IP Nazis know that fighting a battle against the entire internet is difficult, costly and unpopular (not that they care the least bit about that last point). So they resort to a much cheaper, age-old, yet highly effective scare-tactic instead: Making "examples" of people. They try to identify high-profile Super-Nodes amongst the filesharers - like the guy who ran MegaUpload dot com. They then put into effect a "America will fuck you up bad regardless of where you may be in the World, pirate-boy" tactic. The message it sends to ordinary people is clear: "We don't care who you are. We don't care where you are. If you pirate our corporate IPs, we will land some law enforcement muscle in your location, and fuck you in the ass with an electrified baton". --------- This is one - probably illegal - way to fight against piracy. Unfortunately, it will eventually backfire on the MAFIAA's asses, and with it also on America. Everybody who watches movies or plays games these days is pretty aware that the quality of said products is going in one direction with each year that passes - down, down, and down more. Everybody knows that the people who produce this stuff don't give a shit about anything but profit, and that they are crooked enough to buy good reviews for bad produce. So eventually, sales of the latter will collapse not because people were pirating so much of it, but rather because people don't want to spend their hard-earned money on it anymore. Its time for functional alternatives to Hollywood and GameWood to arise. I personally believe that will actually happen eventually, when people discover that there are viable alternatives to U.S. made movies and games. As for Kim Dotcom... even if he's not extradited and sentenced to hard prison, people who run operations similar to his are scared of becoming "the next Kim Dotcom". ------- But scare strategies rarely work sattisfactorily in the long run. In the long run, the Movie and game industries will have to try to create a better product sold at a fair price (not the case currently). Or they will eventually face the same fate as MegaUpload - here and thriving today, gone and bankrupt(ed) tomorrow.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Heroes of the fight against control of information on the www.
Legislators will use any excuse to put in place the mechanism of web censorship. Kiddie porn, terrorism, copyright theft; they are all excuses.
What they want is the power to censor negative comment about themselves...
I really doubt that millions of people were more than slightly inconvenienced. Smart people didn't put their only copy of any data they thought was important there. A service like that is for backups and exchange with other users. Unless either you were stupid or list your original due to a crash, you can just re-upload to another service.
Otherwise only Megaupload itself and Carpathian are really up a creek.
Nobody said that a Republican would do better, only that a Democrat did bad. Yes, they're both totally corrupt..
Copyright infringement would be if he'd violated copyright. Read the indictment, he went so much further.
completely cut off the flow of money to the entertainment industry
There's no need to cut off the flow completely - just reduce it sufficiently.
Doing that is simple. Here's the plan: It's not as tough as you believe.
Even if he is a criminal, those "crimes" are all against bullshit laws created by a corrupt government fully paid for by a endemically corrupting film and entertainment industry.
Compare the ill effects caused by one versus the other and MegaUpload is a saint. They don't give hundreds of thousands of our youngsters criminal records when all they want to do is share their culture.
He's certainly profiting from it all, but when it comes to good versus bad and fighting against the Luddites in power, he's on the side of good.
It may or may not. I don't know, and I can't tell because it hasn't gone to trial.
What has happened is that someone's had their business disrupted, and their customers have had their personal data stolen from them, all without due process of the law.
There has been a crime here, and even copyright infringers deserve a fair trial. Those trying to deny it to them need prosecuting.
They only paid cash to people to upload files if they couldn't prove those files were copyright infringing; that's why they had all those spreadsheets identifying what the members of their revenue sharing scheme were uploading. This saved them quite a bit of money.
What has happened is that someone's had their business disrupted, and their customers have had their personal data stolen from them, all without due process of the law.
I think the best lesson to learn from this is not to keep only one copy of your data. What is the storage provider had lost power or the systems failed? Or a hacker wiped the data?
I wonder how many businesses are still running without backups..wherever their data is stored.
But you have no requirement that they actually do prove it? the allegation is sufficient for you? you're ok with the mere allegation of a crime being enough to ruin someone's entire life?
Due process exists for a reason. If you don't care about it in one specific case, then you are willing to dismiss it in ALL cases, including ones you might find yourself in in the future.
When you're the subject of a raid like this, it doesn't matter if you have backups. They take those too.
If the above is the lesson learned, then anyone backing up their data needs to do it onto a server in a country which has no legal reciprocity with the US. In those cases, the US just uses the military instead of the judiciary.
Hopefully those "choice words" are only the beginning, and turn into an expensive lawsuit against the U.S. Government.
Liberty in your lifetime
In actual money terms. I'm sure it's done quite a bit to harm both theirs and the US' reputation. I can't believe they would attempt to do something that they should already know they legally can't do. At least the lawsuits that will likely result from this should be a little interesting.
I really wish the government was able to kick out incompetence before things got to the 'scandal' level. It always seems like they're reacting to the latest disaster instead of preventing it from happening.
Millions/Billions of $ lost, tens of thousands dead, all for the profit of the mega corporations that control the whores on Capitol Hill!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
They do not have proof, they just made claims and lies to sweeten the charges.
There is and has never been any proof other than false allegations and bullshit lies from the government to try and help sweeten the charges. RIAA has already been proven many many many times to falsify and even make up evidence to help their cause.
> We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States
Kiwi is located in the range of the US NAVY and that is the only thing that matters. How many battalioons NZ has? Kindly remind everyone that NZ no longer has an air force, since it's late 1990s leftish gov't decided to spend the F-16 acquisition earmarked money on welfare. NZ is sitting duck to the brave eagle!
Judges speak too much and cite paragraphs and behave like they, mere appointed ones, are above popular vote elected officials. Luckily that matters none, because of realpolitik. USA can effectively sell NZ to the chinese any minute, who would simply love to have such a backdoor unsinkable aircraft carrier in the soft belly of their arch-enemy Australia. (PRC wants all the minerals in aussie ground.)
NZ better behave and abide whatever Uncle Sam asks. Chinese communists would simply give that mega-baby Kim Schmitz a shot in the back of the head, not a even a trial. Uncle Sam is merciful, he will only get 144 years in Florence.
If you were to look at how much of the modding community used either megaupload, rapidshare, or a few other major 'piracy' file sharing sites, you might be surprised. While I have no doubt there was a lot of pirated material on megaupload, I will almost guarantee you due to deduplication that it was 100:1 links to illegal files and 1:1000 illegal links to legitimate files. Why? Because there are thousands of one off files out there that nobody can afford to host, but that which didn't fit on another site due to licensing (example being most mods can't go up on github/sourceforge/etc because very few people license their art assets CC. Some because they're sloppy and made them derivative of the game they're modding, some because they DID pilfer them from a DIFFERENT game, and some just because they think their artwork is 'special'.) Point being, a lot of those types of files didn't really have anywhere else to go for a number of years. Nowadays you can post them on skydrive, or dropbox or a dozen other places, but when MU first popped up most of the old methods of putting files up were going away (mostly due to lack of revenue and cost of bandwidth.)
Because your backups are always kept with the servers, right?
You're suppose to keep a set of backups locally, in case they need to be restored on the spot. Those would have been seized.
You're suppose to keep another set of backups off-site, somewhere safe. If that's with a 3rd party business (like Iron Mountain); a safety deposit box at a nearby bank; or even a safe in a secure warehouse, it doesn't really matter as long as it isn't close by. You have to keep it far enough away so if a catastrophic local event happens, you don't lose everything.
If I remember right, he lost control of the servers, and his bank accounts were frozen. He also had thousands of servers, and hundreds of people employed. So, he couldn't use his servers. He couldn't buy or lease new servers. He couldn't even pay the staff. I'm sure there were a few die-hard individuals who would have stayed to help, to ensure their future employment with him. The hard part is getting new servers setup and racked. That's far from an overnight proposition, and impossible with no funds.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Use your time to work on something meaningful, not whining about your tragic lost warez website.
I'd never heard of Megaupload before this brouhaha blew out into the open. Nor am I a "pirate" (I advocate boycotting **AA crap), nor do I think I actually like K. Dotcom. Regardless, even I can see lots of stink in this mess, and most of that's on the prosecution's side, not MU's.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I feel sorry for the crowd here when someone as sleazy as Kim gets lauded as a hero. The guy is a known crook, despised by everyone with a clue, and he is absolutely not the kind of sleazebag you want to root for. Don't fall into that trap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you ever wonder if the US government could wage a war on porn, this is enough proof that they could make a large dent. Given that some right wingers and their candidates would be OK with that, it is a little scary. I'm shocked that Obama did this illegal act by directing a foreign police force to go after someone who hasn't killed any Americans.
Anyways, at first, they will just make you opt-in to the full Internet, then they will make that list public, and then raid businesses and server farms, and then go after individuals...
Maybe the feds should think a little more carefully the next time the MPAA lawyers and investigators try to seduce them with a new case?
Because your backups are always kept with the servers, right?
In the case of evidentiary seizure, it is irrelevant where they're kept unless they're in a jurisdiction untouchable by the US judiciary. There aren't many of those, and using one to store backups is probably just this side of impossible to accomplish realistically with the scale of data we're talking about.
"That's why we Americans have the second amendment."
Like you're gonna take up a gun and kill the executive management of RIAA and MPAA?
You can't even find your way out of your parents' basement.
I understand the US Feds won't allow themselves to be sued (Tort Claims Act notwithstanding). How does this work with respect to international courts? Can K Dotcom sue in those venues?
Unfortunate to hear. I'm looking to emigrate from the US, largely due to the accelerating erosion of civil rights here. I have the money to go anywhere that has preferential treatment for rich people, as does NZ. NZ was near the top of my list, and I think I need to re-evaluate.
in almost 39 years on this planet, I'm ashamed to be a New Zealander.
The fundamental problem with American politics is you can't get elected without big bags of money. Without the corporate payoff you can't play. You solve that problem and you eliminate big business buying off your government (because politicians won't take orders from anyone if they can avoid it).
Whoops
Just as then, Jews are now increasingly being blamed for all the ills caused by the political leaders of their own political parties & nations
Mel Gibson? Anyone who goes down that road quickly gets (rightfully) lambasted by the media. Now if you wanted to talk about Arabs instead of Jews, you might have a point about increased persecution and segregation.
Well, the "untouchable" portion is really up to how much he divulged.
In this case, I don't think they're goin gto try too hard to track down every backup that may be stored anywhere.
With the bandwidth that I'm sure he was using he could have used a system such as disk to disk over the Internet first, then disk to tape at each facility.
He was bringing in enough money to be able to afford all kinds of neat features, like redundant datacenters, and paying a guy to go collect the tapes from the jukebox once a week. Having a site in the US, Canada, Germany, Argentina, and China (random places off the top of my head), would have provided for the ability to get the site back up, regardless of what may be seized in any single country. Unless there was a massive coordinated effort for the shutdown, someone's going to walk away with the data, even if it's kept in some friend's garage in a box marked "1976 tax papers"
The difference between you, I, and him is that he was making a boatload of money at it, so it's a pretty good idea to pay for good precautions. I have to assume that he had at least one person mention "disaster recovery" to him...
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I would be willing to bet a million vs a doughnut he is going to sue the us justice dept and WIN HUGE. That's what we get for letting corporate america drive our law enforcement divisions to do stupid stuff and then we people have to pay for it. I say whoever the group is that made the claim and forced the issue should have to pay for it. Once again if corporate america thinks someone is stealing from them via copyright infringement then LET THEM INVESTIGATE, GATHER EVIDENCE AND THEN SUE for their money, DO NOT INVOLVE MY TAX DOLLARS for your BUL***T. Oh yeah and what about all of the legitimate business and customers that had legally stored data for their business and personal affairs, YES They are gonna sue as well. The EVIL AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM SHUT THEM DOWN WITHOUT DUE JUSTICE OR PROCESS.
We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States
That's rather strange coming from a US judge since this type of silly "jurisdiction" thing has not stopped the US before.
Ron Paul's policies are straight out of the 1880s and they were a failure then. That's why we have the Progressiveness.
Ever hear of something called "due process"? Even the Nazis got trials, and they were accused of things which few if any would dispute should actually *be* considered crimes.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Don' worry, you're shut down now, dickhead.