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The Courts United States

US Judge Say Kim Dotcom May Never Be Tried or Extradited 345

Posted by timothy from the but-thanks-for-playing dept.
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."
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US Judge Say Kim Dotcom May Never Be Tried or Extradited More

US Judge Say Kim Dotcom May Never Be Tried or Extradited

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  • Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:21PM (#39756435)

    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.

    • Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BenJCarter ( 902199 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:27PM (#39756461)
      Remember who was in charge when this happened and vote accordingly next election.

    • Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:29PM (#39756485)

      Exactly. The *AA and their government goons have never cared about process. Same when you get arrested under false pretenses, the establishment gets off with a 'sorry' while in the mean time you lost your job, lost relationships and regardless of conviction you have a record that keeps influencing whether or not you'll get hired in the future and whether or not you keep getting re-arrested and strip searched for simply existing.

      These days, the 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.

      • Exactly. The *AA and their government goons have never cared about process. Same when you get arrested under false pretenses, the establishment gets off with a 'sorry' while in the mean time you lost your job, lost relationships and regardless of conviction you have a record that keeps influencing whether or not you'll get hired in the future and whether or not you keep getting re-arrested and strip searched for simply existing.

        I vehemently disagree!

        They almost never say "sorry".

      • "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."

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cpghost ( 719344 )

      His punishment has already been served, without trial and without due process.

      But... but... without the trillions dollars of statutory damages from copyright infringement, the Entertainment Cartel will certainly go bankrupt. Would anybody please think of the MAFIAA executives' children?

    • Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @02:18PM (#39757213) Homepage Journal

      Welcome to the new 'justice' system. Isn't it grand?

    • Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Interesting)

      by acidrain ( 35064 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @02:48PM (#39757443)

      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.

      Except this whole thing was orchestrated to prove to legislators that the current law cannot be used to stop the bad guys and that America needs those tougher laws that the lobbyists cannot get though.

      "Ok, they won't give us the powers we need to make it impossible to send movies to your friends... How about we try and do everything possible we can to take down someone we can paint as the bad guy (fat douche looking hacker with an attitude, nice!) and when it backfires we can say it isn't cause we are not trying hard enough. It is because we need bigger legal guns."

      Kim will get his stuff back. He will put Megaupload back online, even without everyone's data, because Kim will want to make a point, and the point will be exactly the point the RIAA and MPAA want him to make. "Look we even had the bad guys raided by a swat team... And they went right back to selling bandwidth to pirates."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        And that's why the people need to send the message that the problem is a DOJ that can't find it's collective ass with both hands and a map attacking innocent people at the request of coke sniffing crooks in Hollywood.

        Just one good drug raid on a Hollywood party would probably bag more evidence than the perfectly legal marijuana dispensaries they keep harassing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DaneM ( 810927 )

      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.

      This pretty aptly sums up the whole situation. Please continue to mod-up parent.

    • Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mister Whirly ( 964219 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @05:42PM (#39758469) Homepage
      Not only his punishment, but look at how all the other file sharing sites changed their policies overnight, not under court order, but voluntarily out of terror of being the next victim. This I believe was the intended outcome, and all without even needing to go to court...

  • Shit Like This... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darthdavid ( 835069 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:27PM (#39756465) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • I'll be voting Socialist come November

      That'll show them.

      Voting is necessary but not sufficient. The vote comes too late: If the incumbent wins, he thinks he's got a mandate to keep doing what he's been doing. If the incumbent loses, the new guy thinks he's got a mandate to do whatever he wants. In no event does voting send the right message, unless your vote actually changes the outcome of the election -- and good luck with that.

      You need to make sure they understand what you need them to do before the election, that way they can actually do it.

  • Be thankful, Kim. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:29PM (#39756483)

    "...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.

  • Ah well, no harm done!

    I wonder if he will be able to sue the US government for the millions/billions lost in buisiness.

    • Re:Whoops! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @12:50PM (#39756643) Homepage Journal

      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.. ).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kotoku ( 1531373 )
      Not without appearing in U.S. court which I HIGHLY doubt he wants to do! Its a catch 22 that allows his business to be wrecked without recourse.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      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 in
  • 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.

  • 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.

    • Re:millions? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Saturday April 21, 2012 @02:56PM (#39757497)

      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 [wordpress.com]

  • Hopefully those "choice words" are only the beginning, and turn into an expensive lawsuit against the U.S. Government.

  • Millions/Billions of $ lost, tens of thousands dead, all for the profit of the mega corporations that control the whores on Capitol Hill!

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