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Kim Dotcom Loses Extradition Case (stuff.co.nz)
BitterOak writes: Kim Dotcom has lost his extradition case in New Zealand, and will now (probably) have to face trial in the U.S. on charges of money laundering, racketeering, and copyright violation. Three of Dotcom's associates face extradition as well. "Although the U.S. didn't need to prove the charge, counsel had to at least prove there was an answerable case overseas to fulfil extradition requirements. Lawyers for the four argued that the court didn't have jurisdiction to order extradition and that copyright law showed they weren't required or expected to filter every single piece of copyrighted material on Mega." Dotcom's lawyers say they plan to appeal, which would see the case reviewed by New Zealand's High Court. All four will remain free on bail in the meantime.
I am amused he is being charged with 3rd party piracy (piracy by by providing a service that allows others to pirate material) called now "criminal copyright infringement" Which isn't even defined in the US justice system and many, many other US companies are guilty of.. yet remain unprosecuted to this day. (mega even removed known pirated material once it was issued with takedown notices)
The other charges he/they could be guilty of, not enough information. But sadly if he is extradited I doubt he will get anything close to a fair trial, the servers as I understand it were not even located on US soil, yet the US is claiming jurisdiction for prosecution based on copyrighted material being produced in their country.. new ground indeed, a landmark case that when lost (as we all know it will be) means that people can be extradited to a country, based on a service they provided to others that "that" 3rd party abused.. why aren't the persons responsible for the infringement of the copyright being charged?
Captcha: Sorely
Soon he'll be off to the USA, to disappear within the US federal justice system on trumped up charges of breaking the law in a country he's never set foot inside of. A warning to the wise, just like it was with the British Empire, break our laws and we will find you no matter where on the globe you reside. USA Law is universal apparently.
Quoted from a comment on HN:
"Not accurate. Read the indictment.
- Bottom of page 11: thirty-nine infringing copies of copyright motion pictures were present on their leased servers at Carpathia Hosting... in the Eastern District of Virginia
- Page 18:The Mega Conspiracy leases approximately 25 petabytes of data storage from Carpathia to store content associated with The Mega Site.
- It also looks like they leased servers in the US from Cogent, Leaseweb. They paid Carpathia $13M US to host Mega files in the US.
- They also used a US-based Paypal account to receive funds and pay the different hosts in the US.
- They made "reward" payments to US residents who provided copyrighted material.
Mega was running an illegal business in the US."
So if he hadn't leased servers in the U.S. he would be in the clear? There might be a lesson for other foreign entrepreneurs to be learned here. It's no wonder so many IT jobs are being outsourced overseas.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Interestingly Kim Dotcom was creating his own much fairer music service/label before the seizure of the servers etc in January 2012.
Here is the best article I could find on google about it and the MegaUpload song takedown on YouTube.
There were questions about whether this was the real reason the takedown happened. For anyone who doesn't remember.
you have probably never heard a story from the other side. like my wife's former classmates (small time artists composing and recording classical music for use in semi-professional videos) whose original work ended up on megafiles. they spent months trying to get megafiles to delete their work. to absolutely NO AVAIL!!! links to their work spread around the internet and their income slowly dropped to almost zero. when, after 2 years and lots of money spent, they managed to push this scumbag company to drop the files, they reappeared almost immediately and links spread again. the new files had the same md5sum so i suggested they ask for deletion of all files with the same hash, but the people they dealt with just taunted them.