3 and megaupload

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. What do you think of the wild tale of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload? Do you have a clearer image of what exactly has gone down over the years, or are you just as confused as before? Let us know in the comments below, and as always, thank you for reading. Dotcom is just a chancer. He knew exactly what he was doing and sited his business in places he considered save.

Wave FreshBooks vs. Xero FreshBooks vs. QuickBooks Online Xero vs. Kim Dotcom continues to have opinions about the tech industry, which he shares with his Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Your email address will not be published.

Aleksander Hougen. Many such websites have to do with providing users to download content that violates major Copyright laws. Where the line becomes blurred is when websites that have downloading functions are shut down that have a possible interference with the rights of free speech.

One such website that was under a great deal of debate about whether the government was too involved in interfering with free speech was MegaUpload. That said, the entirety of the content on their site is not in violation of Copyright legislation despite the allegations by the United States. Where MegaUpload. Due to this attractive database of information and ability to upload very large files to a centralized place, MegaUpload.

Due to the movement to crush piracy by Hollywood in order to increase revenues from Copyright legislation, Hollywood actively tries to inhibit sites such as MegaUpload.

The part that is controversial about MegaUpload. Kim Dotcom is far from an anonymous programmer. In fact, he is quite famous for his luxurious lifestyle that is derived from his many investors on MegaUpload. Previously, he was charged by the FBI for accusations of piracy that he allowed on his site of Copyrighted works. What the United States government was alleging is that by Kim Dotcom and his employees at MegaUpload knowing about the illegal activity, that they were complicit and legally responsible for being punished for the violations that exist on their website.