Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder and hard-partying face of early 2010s on-line piracy, is lastly headed to the US. Reuters studies that New Zealand’s justice minister signed an extradition order on Thursday to finish the entrepreneur’s practically 13-year authorized battle, paving the best way for the German-born Dotcom to face expenses from the US authorities.
“I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial,” Goldsmith stated in an announcement. The choice got here greater than six years after a New Zealand court docket dominated Dotcom may very well be extradited to the US, paving the best way for appeals that culminated in immediately’s choice.
As soon as the thirteenth most visited website on-line, the file-hosting hub Megaupload was a hotbed for pirated content material. In early 2012, American authorities charged Dotcom and 6 others with racketeering, copyright infringement, cash laundering and copyright distribution. The US indictment claimed Megaupload price copyright holders $500 million in damages whereas making $175 million from advertisements and premium subscriptions.
The raid on Dotcom’s Auckland mansion was dramatic fare amongst 2012’s comparatively tame headlines. The New York Instances reported on the time that when he noticed the police, Dotcom barricaded himself inside, activated a number of digital locks and waited in a protected room. When officers minimize their means inside, they noticed Dotcom standing close to “a firearm that they said looked like a sawed-off shotgun.”
Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) had a number of brushes with the regulation earlier than that. He no less than claimed to have spent three months in a Munich jail in 1994 for “breaking into Pentagon computers and observing real-time satellite photos of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.” Quickly after, he acquired a suspended two-year sentence for a rip-off involving stolen cellphone card numbers.
In 2001, he was accused within the largest insider-trading case in German historical past. He reportedly fled Germany to flee these expenses, was captured in Thailand, extradited (this week isn’t his first go-round) and convicted in 2002. Sooner or later after that, he moved to New Zealand, holing up in an expensive mansion.
You may see that mansion — and a style of his larger-than-life persona — in his music video “Good Life.”
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Thursday and adopted customary apply in giving Dotcom “a short period of time to consider and take advice” on his choice.
Dotcom, by no means one to mince phrases, posted a message on X that “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload.”