Kim Dotcom, of German and Finnish descent and currently resides in New Zealand, is fighting extradition. History will remember Julian Assange kindly. Then he becomes Prime Minister of Australia and frees his homeland from the toxic influence of US Empire, cutting out one of the 5 eyes.
That would be a glorious ending. An automatic compilation of all DW content mentioning Kim Dotcom and his company can be found here. Moreover, he is recently highly active on his Twitter account regarding a police case that has been ongoing on December 12, Dotcom met Mona Verga in and married her on July 10, , describing her as his "soulmate" and "love of his life.
When Verga gave birth to twin girls in Auckland in March , a month after being freed on parole from Mt Eden prison, he became the father of his fourth and fifth children. On May 17, , Dotcom revealed that he had split from his wife Mona and was filed for divorce. Mona had resigned from her directorships at the Dotcom family's businesses four days prior. Who deserves to go to prison? Donnelly is 21 years older than Dotcom. Before moving to Queenstown in , they had been dating for two years.
Megaupload accounted for the great majority of his revenue. There were million registered users on the internet. He lived in complete comfort before coming to New Zealand. With the cruel and unjust treatment of Julian Assange the US and UK govt show their true character for the world to see. The self-declared human rights defenders and saviors of freedom and democracy are giving Dictators everywhere a blueprint on how to defend their abuses.
By , he had no more connection to the file storage service, although he continues to promote MEGA on his website, kim. Unlike Megaupload, which functioned entirely as a file-sharing site, MEGA is a fully fledged cloud storage service.
That means that while you can still use MEGA to share files, its primary focus is personal file storage, just like other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, pCloud or Sync. This includes the assertion that the company was forced into a hostile takeover by Chinese investors, and that the New Zealand government has since confiscated the shares from said investors, now exercising direct control over the service.
The claims get more outlandish from there, with perhaps the most eyebrow-raising one being that the service is run by a shadowy collection of Hollywood executives. MEGA itself has repeatedly denied these allegations, and Dotcom has been unable to provide any proof. As we mentioned briefly in the last section, Kim Dotcom is the notorious founder of Megaupload. His first arrest in was a bit less glamorous — he was arrested and held in custody for a month for selling stolen phone numbers.
Seemingly unfazed, Dotcom was arrested again in , this time for additional hacking charges and convicted on multiple counts of computer fraud and data espionage. In , he again ran into legal trouble when he purchased a large number of stocks in a company called LetsBuyIt.
Following his purchase, he announced that he planned to invest 50 million euros in the company, causing the stock price to soar and earning him a profit of 1. To avoid prosecution for market manipulation, Dotcom fled to Thailand but was nonetheless arrested there and handed over to the German embassy.
After being transported back to his home country, he pled guilty to embezzlement and spent five months in jail before receiving yet another suspended sentence. Probably fed up with the German authorities, he finally moved to Hong Kong in , where he incorporated various companies, including Megaupload. He eventually moved to New Zealand in , receiving residency status after investing 10 million New Zealand dollars in the economy.
While living in New Zealand, Dotcom got entangled in a political scandal revolving around his financial contributions to John Banks, the mayor of Auckland at the time. Banks was initially convicted for this, though he was later exonerated. Dotcom faced no legal consequences for his involvement in the scandal.
When the January indictment from U. Nevertheless, local law enforcement raided his residence two weeks later and arrested Dotcom and several of his associates — including Mathias Ortmann, CTO and co-founder of Megaupload — though a judge quickly released them on bail. Through all the legal twists and turns in the following decade, Kim Dotcom remained in New Zealand, making periodic public appearances and headlines, usually regarding his case or the successor to his file-sharing website, MEGA.
The charges brought against Kim Dotcom are varied, but the main thrust boils down to the allegation that Megaupload was fully aware that the website was used for copyright infringement and chose to do nothing about it. In fact, the charges claim that the website actively encouraged such behavior by incentivizing users with popular downloads while removing files that received little attention. The fact that the website was fully capable of policing the content it hosted is hard to dispute, seeing as it had systems in place to crack down on more nefarious file-sharing activities like child pornography.
The said provision protects websites that host copyrighted content so long as the websites either have no knowledge of it or act to remove the content once aware of it.
Aside from the general copyright infringement case, the U. Since Dotcom resides in New Zealand, but the warrant for his arrest is in the U. It took three years before this extradition request even made it in front of a judge. The next major update came from the New Zealand high court, which upheld the previous decision that Dotcom could be extradited but with a pretty significant caveat.
Since digital copyright infringement is not a crime in New Zealand, the judge concluded that this was not a basis for extradition. Dotcom and his legal team celebrated this decision, saying it was a step in the right direction for their case.
Fortunately for the U. As is generally the case with compromise decisions like this one, though, neither side was entirely satisfied, and both filed an appeal pretty much immediately. That brought both parties to the court of appeal, which made its decision in July However, it also gave him and the three other defendants the opportunity to appeal this decision yet again through a judicial review.
As mentioned, Dotcom now faces a judicial review, meaning he has the chance to appeal the decision on extradition. Your guess is as good as ours on when exactly this will go down.
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