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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.
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
if there were justice, he would be able to sue the .nz officials(who failed to do their duty), the fbi officials(who failed to do their duty) and the RIAA posse who misinformed those officials.
and all customers should be able to too.
in case someone is wondering, apparently the .nz officials failed to serve the company mega upload with a notice - a notice that would have probably allowed their lawyers to fight. furthermore it seems the intent of the american officials was to sue the individuals who had assets in megaupload for conspiracy instead of suing megaupload(it seems copyright violation is 4 years max in .nz, which wouldn't qualify for extradition - though even more likely is that the original real plan was just that dotcom would do a plea bargain.. ).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The argument will always be that he merely offered a service that was in huge demand. What the users did with it cannot be blamed on the operator. At least, not when you stick to basic common sense and not U.S. protectionist copyright laws.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Wrong target. He needs to sue the New Zealand government since they were the ones that really allowed this to happen in the first place. If they'd been a little more circumspect about allowing the US to tell them what to do, or even told them to get stuffed and released Kim without charge as soon as the US started to blatently try to screw with due process, this farce wouldn't have got to the scale it has. While I personally think Kim is guilty as hell of the charges of willfully encouraging copyright infringement, if this leads to goverments being a little less willing to let the US extend its laws so far out of their jurisdiction in future then that's just great.
Well, probably just great, because any cooling in legal co-operation will probably apply to other matters as well. It's going to look really good if they manage to miss bagging some criminal or terror kingpin because some foreign governement was double checking the paperwork to avoid another Kim Dotcom style mess.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I don't feel sorry for him or his business
The US government very likely didn't follow procedure, as we see here. Do you not see how dangerous this is to allow them to do as they please? Whatever you think of Kim and Megaupload, think of yourself and others first. If they can do this to him, they can do this to anyone. They can ruin anyone's business. That's not good.
I don't feel sorry for anyone who uploaded their only copy of their files to Megaupload, either.
Sorry that everyone isn't as technologically minded as you are.
You know what's funny, though? While they may not have had an expectation that their data would stay there forever, I'm almost positive Megaupload would have informed them if they were going to legitimately shut down their website. That would give them time to get their files. But here, thanks to the US government, it was shut down instantly and without notice. Very nice.
This whole situation is just children, Brazilians and the mentally challenged just whining about not being able to get their warez
Uh... what about people with legitimate data hosted there? You even mentioned them in the above paragraph. I have a feeling they're "whining" about it, too. Probably whining that it's the US government's fault.
Nice generalizations, though.
They will extradite him
Yes, for copyright infringement. My heroes! The US, the world's police force, has saved us all from such a heinous criminal. Think of all the bits that they stopped from being copied! Totally worth all of this taxpayer money being wasted.
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?
Unlikely. Apparently, there were 15'000 premium accounts from the US army alone. Millions of legitimate users sounds quite reasonable. Also take into account that there is only so many movies and software that can be shared and music does not take a lot of space. Compare that with the size of the Megaupload storage and it sounds quite possible that the majority of data was actually legitimate. Of course, a major part of the Megaupload profits were from copyright infringement, but that is not the fault of the legitimate users.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Yet who was it that claimed that Megaupload's principle use was copyright infringement? Megaupload had large numbers of law-abiding users, including people within the Justice department and even more ironically, within the entertainment industry. You might as well claim that ISPs are built on "ill-gotten, pirated material" -- after all, practically all downloading activity takes place on the Internet.
An indictment is not a conviction, it is a preliminary accusation backed up with some amount of evidence. If indictments were conclusive, we would never need trials.
Palm trees and 8
He was knowingly running a warez hub
Which was also used by the United States government, the recording industry, and an enormous number of other law abiding people.
On top of that, he was running it as a for-profit warez distribution website
So why are ISP operators not behind bars as well? What, do you really think that broadband service is not targeted at people who upload and download copyrighted material without permission? Let's not get caught up in external marketing here.
This whole situation is just...
Palm trees and 8
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.
First rule of usenet! Mod parent down.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
You are really silly.
I had my whole photo album there (12GB or so of photos), uploaded over a very long period of time. Of course, it was not the only copy, but it was the copy which family/friends could always see.
It did not require me to give any 'identifiable' details when creating an account, it doesn't really know who I am, I haven't been getting spam to email address which I've used for registration, it was extremely fast for everyone, it was much faster than other services I've tried, blah, blah, blah. I still have backups of my photos, but do you realize how long I'll have to upload them, on 512Kbit uplink, to another service? That won't happen.
Can't you just accept that they were providing a good service? I'd rather pay them for premium account, than have it for free and have my data being sold to everyone who asks for it.
There is not such thing as a free lunch.
If you still don't understand what I am talking about, maybe this will help:
http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/demotivational-posters-facebook-you.jpg
And Steve Jobs used to build telephone hacking equipment. The government should seize apple and give everyone free iPads!
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.
This whole post is a huge straw man: the story here isn't about feelings of sorrow or otherwise. We hav a very clear (il)legal situation. Changing the topic in this fashion to raise tempers and mislead the attention of the readers - this is called trolling.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
But this is part of the point. They never did exist as an operating entity in the US in the first place.
What they want is the power to censor negative comment about themselves...
"Plus ca change, ..."
Even the Soviets couldn't do that, with threats of bullets in the back of heads. See what they couldn't stop no matter how hard they tried.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I've lived in both the US and the EU, although the US is bad and corrupt on the high level (the politicians), the EU is just as bad and the corruption is more spread out and gears towards the lower levels.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
And this should make me feel better how?
I should consider it a GOOD thing that justice *isn't* blind, and that if you're wealthy and well connected, the government will leave you alone - but if you're not, then evidence or not, you're screwed?
Man, funny me, I thought this was one of the prime cases for revolution in 1776 - that the King and his well connected friends got preferential treatment while his enemies got whacked by the huge power of the government.
I guess, you'd claim we shouldn't have bothered with that "revolution" thing - the system was working like it should all along.
Sheesh
-Greg