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Kim Dotcom's Lawyer Plays Down Megaupload Worker's Guilty Plea
mrspoonsi writes with the latest from Kim Dotcom. "Kim Dotcom's US lawyer has denied that a guilty plea by one of the Megaupload's former employees has major implications for his client's case. Andrus Nomm was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement while working for the now defunct file-sharing site. The US is currently trying to extradite Mr Dotcom, who founded Megaupload, from New Zealand to stand trial. Mr Dotcom denies wrongdoing. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has alleged that Megaupload's staff had "operated websites that wilfully reproduced and distributed infringing copies of copyrighted works" over a period of five years, causing more than $400m (£260m) of harm to copyright owners. Nomm — a 36-year-old Estonian citizen — agreed to this damages estimate as part of his plea, according to a press release from the DoJ. He had been living in the Netherlands before he travelled to Virginia to make the deal with the US authorities. The DoJ added that Nomm had acknowledged that through his work as a computer programmer for Megaupload, he had become aware of copyright-infringing material being stored on its sites, including films and TV shows that had contained FBI anti-piracy warnings. It said he had also admitted to having downloaded copyright-infringing files himself. "This conviction is a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history," said assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell."
The US kangaroo courts operate on a principal of coerced false confession. The oppressive multitude of petty laws is used to heavily over-charge defendants. They are then offered the choice of "confessing" or spending the rest of their life in the hellish sensory deprivation torture chambers of the American gulag.
Consider that "of the 82,092 defendants terminated during Fiscal Year 2013, 75,718, or 92 percent, either pled guilty or were found guilty" and "during Fiscal Year 2013, a total of 73,397, or 97 percent,of all convicted defendants pled guilty prior to or during trial." Source: United States Attorneys' Statistical Report 2013 Only 3% of federal prisoners were convicted by an actual trial!
That someone plead guilty at an American trial is no more damming than if they had farted.
Here's the deal. I will charge you with rape, murder, child molestation, bank robbery, and having a bad attitude. The minimum sentence will be 40 years, but I'm going for the max. the trial will take about a year. The cost will put your wife and children on the street and leave you with the world's most overworked public defender, so you better believe I'll get that conviction.
OR...you could plead guilty to aggravated littering and with time served we can have you home by Friday.