Megaupload Programmer Sentenced to One Year in Prison

We mostly hear news about Kim Dotcom in regards to Megaupload and the ongoing legal issues, but he isn’t the only one indicted by the United States in the case.

Andrus Nomm, a 36-year old programmer living in Netherlands, traveled to the US last week to plead guilty to the charges set up against him.

The Department of Justice announced that Nomm pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

While the authorities celebrate their first victory in this legal battle, it is far from a glamorous one. Just as most of this case has been up until now, this rather reminds one of a bully than a legal authority.

“Nomm was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the [Megaupload] websites, including copyright protected motion pictures and television programs, some of which contained the ‘FBI Anti-Piracy’ warning,” the DoJ statement reads. “Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites. Nomm continued to participate in the Mega Conspiracy.”

While the authorities celebrate this as the result of years of hard work, Megaupload’s founder as well as lawyers have another view on the issue.

Kim Dotcom went to his twitter account to slam the U.S legal system a bit, Megaupload layyer Rothken explained that they might have taken advantage of Nomm’s situation. As an Estonian citizen living in a foreign country, he was vulnerable and running out of funds to defend himself.

“The DOJ apparently used Andrus Nomm’s weak financial condition and inability to fight back to manufacture a Hollywood style publicity stunt in the form of a scripted guilty plea in court,” Rothken says.

“The facts mentioned in court, like a lack of cloud filtering of copyrighted works, are civil secondary copyright issues not criminal issues,”

“The DOJ apparently convinced Andrus Nomm to say the conclusory phrase that Kim Dotcom ‘did not care about protecting copyrights’ and such point shows off the weakness in the DOJ’s case as Megaupload, amongst many other ways of caring, had a robust copyright notice and takedown system which gave direct delete access to major content owners and from which millions of links were removed.”

It is clear that both Dotcom and his lawyers defend the former employee, but several law experts have also expressed concern over the conviction. There was only one example of possible copyright infringement in the indictment, and that referred to watching a copy of a pirated TV-show. For now it remains unclear what other evidence the authorities have.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing us with this information