The New Zealand High Court has given a green signal for Kim Dotcom, Founder of Mega and Megaupload, to be uploaded to the US. The ruling by the high court upholds an earlier one that decreed that Dotcom, along with his business associated, should be extradited to the United States to face charges there.
Mega and Megaupload were prominent file-storage and file-sharing services. The websites were taken down in 2012 over charges of copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit racketeering. Seven of the executives were charged and four of them were arrested in New Zealand. The folks arrested in New Zealand, among them founder Dotcom, have since been fighting a legal battle to keep from being extradited to the United States.
The website, which projected itself as a file hosting platform, was being used for racketeering and piracy of all sorts of content, including music and movies. Ridiculously enough, the website had Swizz Beats, the husband of singer Alicia Key as its acting CEO. Yeah! Apparently, Dotcom had gotten Beats as the acting CEO to grant legitimacy to his portal. Well, that didn’t work out but we did get a good laugh out of it.
Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann, and Bram van der Kolk were among those arrested in the country. They are now yet another step closer to being extradited and facing charges in the United States. Of course, they still have the option of filing an appeal in the New Zealand Supreme court and almost certainly will. However, the appeal is likely to only delay the inevitable.
