Kim Dotcom’s battle with the New Zealand High Court is renowned worldwide, and while the case has been dragging on for quite a few years now, it looks like Kim himself has just suffered a major setback that could put him on a flight to the United States soon. To be more specific, Justice Murray Gilbert has found Dotcom and his co-accused eligible for extradition to the United States due to various copyright offences, and this news will undoubtedly make the United States Government happy, as they have been trying to extradite Dotcom, Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato, and Mathias Ortmann since 2012.
That’s the same year when the US Department of Justice and the FBI managed to shut down Megaupload, thus raiding Dotcom’s mansion and seizing $42 million in assets. However, since Kim was a New Zealand resident, he was able to evade the US’s grasp, until now, when the New Zealand High Court cleared the four to face charges on US soil. Still, the group did manage to score a somewhat significant victory since Justice Gilbert ruled that “making copyright works available to members of the public via the internet” is not criminalized under the New Zealand Copyright Act. However, the same issue registered as an offense under the Crimes Act, while conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which one of the four is accused of, “amounts to a conspiracy to defraud,” hence the extradition.
Regarding this decision, Kim Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield issued the following statement:
“To win the major plank of the case but to get that outcome is extremely disappointing. It is hard to accept the logic that, if the conduct that all accept at its heart relates to assertions of breach of copyright… how it can nonetheless be massaged into a general fraud offense.”
